The Mech Touch

It turned out that the best craftsman working under the roof of the so-called Enlightened Church of Vulcan originated from the dwarven state that Ves had created and destroyed at his own hand.

There was a profound sense of irony in this confluence of events.

Ves thought that his meeting with the Iron Emperor was the last time he ever dealt with the radicalized and misguided members of the only true dwarven state to have existed in human space up to this point.

Of course, the legacy of the Vulcan Empire still haunted him to a degree.

He had most certainly caught the news about the ambitious dwarven ruler's attempt to gather the dwarven diaspora.

Vulcan even played a key role in furthering Rion Aaden's great ambition towards dwarvenkind.

Ves did not think that a strong-willed and visionary dwarf would go through all of this effort just to increase the voice of heavy gravity variant humans!

However, even if the Iron Emperor rejected the status quo and tried to implement a master plan that would most certainly shake the rest of human society, what did it have to do with Ves?

As soon as he completed the commission to make a fancy crown for the driven dwarf, Ves shed all responsibility for what happened next!

Human space was immense. The chances of encountering each other was next to nil unless either of them deliberately sought each other out, which shouldn't happen.

Ves had no desire to reunite with the Iron Emperor, while the former ruler of the Vulcan Empire sounded like he was having a good time hobnobbing with first-class dwarves.

Yet by making this assumption, Ves had made a huge oversight.

He treated the Iron Emperor as the only significant survivor to have made it out of the Vulcan Empire after its collapse.

That was a gross oversimplification as millions if not billions of citizens of that doomed state managed to hop into a ship and evacuate from the Smiling Samual Star Sector.

Most of the Vulcanites should have probably dispersed. Even if they had any desire to reunite with each other, they should have answered the call of the Iron Emperor and flocked to one of his dwarven refuges.

What was a Vulcanite like Master Blacksmith Rogha Dunnerhold doing in Davute and in the headquarters of the Creation Association no less?!

"The man toured our facility before we converted it to a church and insisted on being inducted in our organization." Director Samandra Avikon softly said to Ves as they both watched the craftsman at work. "He made this decision as soon as he studied the totems we put on display."

"Did he tell you why he wanted to be here so badly?" Ves whispered back.

"The man declined to offer too much clarification. He only shared that he was a Vulcanite and that he had always adhered to the traditional Vulcan Faith in the decades he was alive. After working with us for a longer time, we gradually learned more details about him. You can be assured that he does not pose a threat to you and us. His faith in Vulcan is as strong as ever, though he is confused how Vulcan and you tie together. One of the urges that drove him to come all of the way here was to seek clarification about the relationship between you and the god he has always worshiped. He will immediately question you as soon as he completes his current work session."

Ves wanted to groan. "Great. This could go quite badly, do you know that? If I don't satisfy this dwarf, we may potentially lose a fantastic master blacksmith and one who appears to be the closest to replicating effective totems for the Creation Association."

"I have faith that you will be able to navigate your fateful talk with Dunnerholm with great skill and benevolence.."

"Thank you for your completely useless vote of confidence."

It looked as if it would take a while for the dwarven artisan to complete his work for this session. He transmitted a message to his wife to inform her that he might take a bit of time before he returned. If the kids got bored of the church, Gloriana might as well take them out and explore the other venues in the bustling Commercial District.

After he had taken this step, he settled in for a lengthy wait.

Though he specialized in mechs, Ves appreciated all forms of sincere craftsmanship.

Master blacksmiths distinguished themselves from ordinary ones by their great skill, experience, creativity and philosophy.

Although these highly skilled and renowned creators might not employ any spiritual shenanigans to create works that transcended the average, that made them more impressive in his eyes.

It showed that individuals did not need to be Master Mech Designers or anything similar to it in order to create masterworks.

For all that mech designers transformed the industrial landscape of human civilization, their increasingly more transhuman traits also caused much of humanity's technological innovation to go askew.

The ability of high-ranking mech designers to create works that bent or distorted the laws of reality could not easily be explained through pure science, and that turned them into troublesome engineers.

One of the biggest foundations of human science was that their theories could be tested and that their inventions could be reproduced!

If either of these actions couldn't be performed, then it was extremely difficult for mech designers to advance the state of human technology to a significant degree.

Only at the Master Mech Designer stage could mech designers gain the possibility to deconstruct the scientific principles behind their amazing work.

That didn't mean it happened all of the time. The more difficult and convoluted the innovation, the more a mech designer had to depend on ingenuity and hard work in order to turn their work into systemic improvements!

Mech designers and other craftsmen followed two different trajectories. The former may have been able to help human civilization advance its technology by considerable leaps, but the latter also served a vital role to human society.

The persisting encroachment of industrialization and automation constantly tried to make human artisans extinct entirely, but fortunately there were still enough people who appreciated traditional craftsmanship.

Aside from providing extremely wealthy clients with customized pieces of high-end artisanal works, craftsmen also played an important role in developing new products. They often did so by finding new ways to combine existing tech.

Right now, Ves had the sense that Master Blacksmith Dunnerholm was doing exactly that, but not with conventional technology, but rather spiritual engineering!

Oh, the dwarf was not remarkable from a spiritual perspective. The man had lived so long and spent much of that practicing his ability to work with metal, but none of that persistence translated into overcoming his spiritual deficiency.

The older dwarf was pretty much a norm as far as Ves was concerned. His children who had less than a tenth of the lifespan of Rogha Dunnerholm were countless times stronger in a spiritual sense!

Yet if he asked any of his children to create any work that could surpass the efforts of Dunnerholm, Ves doubted they could do so without resorting to extremely unusual tricks!

What Ves found puzzling at first was how Master Dunnerholm was able to work with design spirits without possessing any active spirituality.

It sounded as weird as trying to eat a bowl of soup without a spoon. How the hell was someone supposed to eat the soup without a utensil without picking up the bowl and drinking it directly?

"Shouldn't the answer be obvious, sir?" Director Samandra Avikon look at Ves with her disconcerting glowing reptilian orange eyes. "It is faith. I have always believed that humans as well as other forms of organic life possess far greater power than what is obvious from the surface. Life is a strange and powerful phenomenon to begin with. Think about what people can do when they devote their entire minds to a singular cause and purpose. Think about what happens when that cause happens to be a sentient, immortal and powerful existence. Does it not make sense that a small portion of power from that all-powerful existence flows down to an earnest believer?"

Faith. It all came down to faith as far as the woman was concerned.

Though Ves did not like her answer in the slightest, he respected her enough to evaluate her theory by its merits.

When he looked back at Master Dunnerholm and tried to see whether any of this faith stuff was affecting him in a way, he could see hints of what she described!

He initially thought that the small bond that Master Dunnerholm formed with Vulcan was a one-way street.

What actually happened was that Dunnerholm's strong concentration and beliefs somehow generated a subtle form of resonance with Vulcan!

The consequences of this were many, but the most important one was that Dunnerholm became so close to his god that he was actually able to borrow a tiny portion of Vulcan's great power!

"This…"

Ves became shocked by this realization!

Here was a highly skilled but otherwise mundane master blacksmith who succeeded in finding a way to create a spiritual totem that could normally only be done by Ves or Vulcan!

"I think I get what is taking place here."

After studying the dwarf at work for a while now, Ves noted that Dunnerholm possessed an exceptionally high degree of concentration.

The dwarf could probably match or exceed Ves in this aspect, and this was a remarkable observation as he had never seen anyone else beat him in this aspect!

This intense concentration not only allowed the master blacksmith to stick to a single idea and vision throughout his work, but also helped him stick to some sort of frequency that allowed him to become receptive to Vulcan.

As long as Dunnerholm's concentrated mind came close to matching this frequency, a new and subtle form of resonance took place, causing the dwarf to borrow a small part of Vulcan's immensely broad and powerful craftsmanship ability!

"In other words, it is not just Dunnerholm working on this totem. Vulcan is involved to a small degree."

The implications of discovering this phenomenon was massive.

For the first time in his life, Ves witnessed a truly productive and benign product of faith.

Instead of driving believers into becoming violent or suicidal fanatics, the power of faith could enable a person to pull off transcendent feats despite the fact that he was still a mortal!

"Of course! Belief is not as useless and redundant as I thought. The answer was in front of me all this time. Our clan has been making use of the power of faith for a long time!"

He eventually connected the faith expressed by Master Dunnerholm with the strong and uniform faith expressed by the mech pilots who had been trained into pulling off battle formations.

In the latter case, mech pilots utilized their power of faith to not only align themselves with each other, but also do their best to resonate with a greater existence that was capable of feeding power back through this mystical connection!

The Penitent Sisters, the Glory Seekers and the Swordmaidens had launched so many battle formation attacks by now that Ves had grown a lot more familiar with the mechanisms and the properties of this phenomenon.

Yet just because mech pilots were the most prominent people to empower themselves with the power of resonance did not mean that it was exclusive to their profession!

Others could exhibit and gain strength from resonance as well!

In this case, a single master blacksmith was able to replicate the effect of a battle formation to a tiny degree in order to create a working spiritual totem that normal people could never make by themselves!

Ves suddenly became struck by a brilliant if radical idea!

"What if… there is a way to emulate the effect of a battle formation in a productive context rather than a combat situation?"

This couldn't be classified as a battle formation anymore for obvious reasons.

"It would instead be known as a ritual…"