The Mech Touch

When Ves decided to pull off a radical trick that he had only fantasized about in his mind, he did not know whether he could succeed.

The consequences of failure were extremely dire. His body could explode. His body could merge into a transphasic stone wall. Not all of his body might be able to make it to the other side!

Yet Ves had multiple reasons to go through with this measure.

First, the existence of Veronica meant that anything he did would not end his life right away. A mistake that could prove fatal to others was not a one-way ticket to death.

Second, being proactive was better than sitting around doing nothing. Ves did not want to leave the initiative to his abductors. Who knew what the other party would do if more time passed by. Since he had the power to leave, why not try and see if he could improve his own situation?

Third, the phasewater survey conducted by the Phase King revealed that this ancient alien complex that was apparently built inside a pocket space was not completely empty and barren. There might be relics or treasures that the original occupants had left behind.

This alone was enough to stimulate his greed!

When Ves learned from the Larkinsons on the other side that Davute had called in the MTA to crack open the pocket space that apparently no one knew about, his urgency grew greater.

Having suffered multiple incidents where the mechers arrived with a big capital ship before proceeding to steal his hard-earned loot, Ves was determined not to give the damned Association a chance to claim the treasures of this mysterious place once again!

Although it was impossible for him to take away anything big and cumbersome, he was no longer as helpless as before when it came to taking away smaller goods!

When he thought about what kind of relics or treasures he could find during an exploration of this facility, he no longer had many scruples left.

Ves had always been able to progress by leaps and bounds by taking chances and grasping unique opportunities!

As such, he did not hesitate to work together with the Phase King to see if he could teleport out of this cell.

The process was difficult and cumbersome. He not only had to channel the Phase King and have him descend into his mind a lot more than usual, but he also had to endure the strain of supporting the design spirit's actions as the fish-whale king attempted to pull off a teleportation technique!

Nobody in the cell noticed anything wrong, but Ves' body had come under a lot of strain as the phasewater in his bloodstream had begun to fluctuate!

This was an indicator that the Phase King had somehow activated the phasewater that had become a part of Ves' physical form!

Of course, it was not just his body that the ancient entity tapped with his formidable phasewater manipulation ability. The Phase King also activated the phasewater integrated in the Unending Regalia, thereby attempting to make sure that Ves would not end up naked and completely unprotected if he managed to reach the other side!

"Ngh… this is definitely one of my stupider idea…"

As Ves could feel the Phase King getting close to completing an unprecedented teleportation technique, it seemed as if his body was truly beginning to tear apart!

Despite all of the augmentations and despite its considerable strengthening, the power of phasewater was on a different level.

Even a 0.01 percent concentration of phasewater in his bloodstream was close to tearing his body apart if the volatile substance ever went out of control!

The reason why he experienced so much body-tearing pain was because a weak 'phase lord' like himself who barely took a single step onto this ascension path should never be able to pull off a teleportation technique at his current level of strength!

He needed to under understand the deeper properties of phasewater, be able to exert a high degree of fine control over it, become proficient with tapping all of the spare power that could be drawn from the substance and shape all of that raw power into a refined and complicated technique by calculating a huge amount of variables to ensure it would bring him to his intended destination in one piece!

Ves understood a bit better now why his emergency teleporter did not allow ordinary people to control its mechanisms at all. There were way too many variables that could go wrong!

Even though Ves himself couldn't even satisfy a fraction of those cumbersome requirements, the advantage that he possessed was that he did not have to do all of the hard work himself!

He just needed to make his body and energies available to the Phase King!

Right now, Ves had the strangest illusion that he had become a mech.

More specifically, his resemblance to the Everchanger was uncanny.

Both of them possessed the ability to load different design spirits into their being, though the expert mech was able to do this a lot easier as he was designed to operate like this from the start.

At most, Ves imitated the Everchanger's function because they were both attributed to life.

One of the distinctive properties of a life domain was that it got along remarkably well with other attributes and entities!

This meant that if the Everchanger could channel different design spirits and even use this connection to borrow their power in order to perform a few minor techniques, Ves should theoretically be able to do the same at a smaller scale!

Right now, it felt as if Ves had voluntarily surrendered control of his body to the Phase King, just as how the Everchanger freely allowed Venerable Joshua to control his enormous mechanical frame.

Ves even gained a couple of subtle insights about what life was like for a living mech.

Each time they interfaced with a mech pilot, the living mech had to extend a lot of trust and control to a human. This was a delicate process and one that could do a lot of harm to mechs that did not earn a lot of respect from their users.

Ves also ended up in a similar position. By giving up control to the Phase King, the latter could do a lot of harm if he wanted. Just botching the current technique would definitely produce untold damage to his body!

There was no particular need for concern, though.

Ves embodied the Phase King on a deeper level, allowing him to understand the design spirit's thoughts and intentions on a more direct level. The same also applied in the other direction.

If either of the two held any malicious intentions towards each other, then there was no way that Ves or the Phase King could hide their thoughts against each other!

The bond they shared with each other was roughly comparable to the man-machine connection facilitated by a neural interface.

Of course, even if Ves was a paranoid bastard by nature, he did not show much concern towards the Phase King. Both of them had established an unwritten contract a long time ago. They both knew what they wanted from each other and had many reasons to cooperate.

There was no design spirit who understood phasewater and how to manipulate it better than the Phase King.

In turn, there was no mech designer who could provide the alien spirit with channels that could supply a lot of spiritual feedback. Ves was also the only human that could produce brand-new spiritual fish-whales out or raw energy that could populate the design spirit's spiritual kingdom.

By relying on the power of mutual benefit, Ves trusted the Phase King to perform a teleportation technique in a manner that no 'human' had ever done before.

Ves bet that if the transhumanists could see him now, they would probably go wild with envy and desire!

Only Ves knew that the mechers probably wouldn't feel as enthusiastic once they truly knew what was taking place.

"C'mon! Hurry up! I can't hold it much longer!"

His mental state as well as his energy reserves were depleting at a rapid rate.

What the Phase King did with his body was comparable to a mech pilot overloading his mech in order to pull off a move that was beyond the capacity of the machine!

It didn't help that the two were far apart in many different ways. The Phase King used to be a much more powerful alien entity when he was alive, and he had grown even stronger on a spiritual level after he had let loose of his mortal coil.

Perhaps the Phase King could never compare to an authentic phase whale due to the limitations of his original biology, but his extremely lengthy lifespan had probably caused his understanding and control over phasewater to exceed that of many younger whales!

Right now, Ves could feel how horrible this represented as the Phase King worked through thousands of different formulas at a time!

The amount of variables that the Phase King had to process ran in the millions, and Ves could feel that this was hardly the spiritual entity's limit!

If Ves had to describe this disparity in terms of mechs, then Ves was like a third-class biomech that was trying to perform as if his ordinary processors and software suite had been replaced by first-class equivalents!

The difference in processing power and sophistication was far too much for a fragile third-class biomech to bear. Just the energy requirements alone was enough to drain the 'mech' in seconds!

Just when Ves thought he couldn't bear it, his awareness completely blanked out for an instant!

At the time where his armored form disappeared from the cell, it instantly appeared tens of meters away!

The Phase King succeeded in pulling off the teleportation technique!

Even though the cost was not only great due to the 'low specs' of Ves' body, also because of the necessity of needing to find the right frequency of the phasewater integrated in the abnormally hard walls of the prison, the end result was an astonishing success!

"Ah!"

If not for the fact that the Unending Regalia could stiffen itself so that it could remain upright, Ves would have collapsed on the barren stone floor of the corridor at this time!

"Damnit… that was a bit more painful than I thought…"

Ves could barely think about how amazing it was for him to successfully teleport his body as well as his combat armor without relying on a fancy high technology gizmo.

This was because his body felt as if it was a mech that had just gone through a backbreaking battle!

Even if the phasewater in his body did not shred his body apart completely, he was certain that it had gotten torn in a lot of places!

Fortunately, his Unending Regalia was a lot tougher than his body and essentially made it through intact. The diagnostics of his armor reported a few problems, but nothing critical had been damaged.

His suit's systems also detected the damaged state of his body and automatically injected a cocktail of drugs and medicine in different parts of his body.

This not only gave Ves a bit of relief, but also helped him accelerate the healing process of his own body.

As a transhuman phase lord, his control over his body was unparalleled. If he was able to control his hair follicles to the point where he could prevent himself from growing a beard, he could also control his body cells to mend the tears in his flesh and other organic parts!

It took over ten minutes for Ves to quickly patch himself back together.

He couldn't do much about the ache in his head or the energy that he had depleted in order to fuel the Phase King's technique, but he at least regained his ability to move and act in this new environment.

He stared out at the barren corridor which stretched on in opposite directions.

"Well, where do I go next?"