The Mech Touch



"Haha, the energy shields are no longer active. Phasewater, here I come!"

As soon as Ves returned to the storage hall that contained hundreds of alien phasewater barrels, he started to track down the containers that still contained traces of diluted phasewater.

He had already mapped them out during his first exploration, so he knew exactly where to go. He passed through the perimeter that used to be protected by an energy shield with ease and immediately sought to pry open the top of the long 'barrel' so that he could siphon away the phasewater.

Getting the phasewater out of the barrel was a bit awkward. Ves needed to fly into the barrel and maintain a careful distance above the stagnant pool before extending a pipe to suck the phasewater into a special storage container built into his armor.

Once he loaded up on the diluted substance, he entered the System Space and dumped his cargo into the so-called Vault of Eternity, which claimed to be able to hold anything at any quantity.

Ves repeated this process a few times until he encountered a new situation.

He couldn't enter the System Space anymore.

"What the hell? System! What's wrong!?"

[The user is currently exploiting an unintended interaction based on the Inventorization of his equipment. The Mech Designer System must bear an increasing burden to store the net inflow of additional material that is only tangentially related to your Inventorized item. 1 existing rule has been clarified and 1 new rule has been established. They are as follows:]

[Any Inventorized object can bring in additional material objects to the System Space provided that it does not exceed the volume of a standardized unit scaled to the Inventorized object. The Vault of Eternity will also only be able to accommodate objects up to the same standardized unit volume.]

[If the user wishes to acquire additional storage space in the Vault of Eternity, he must rent it from the Vault of Eternity at an escalating charge. 1 cubic meter can be rented for 10 Ascension Points, up to a limit of 10 cubic meters. Every cubic meter after that can be rented for 100 Ascension Points, up to a limit of 100 cubic meters. This pattern will repeat into infinity. The renting period is 1 standard year starting from the instant you have rented the spaces.]

Ves' expression grew incredibly ugly at this point.

Ever since the Mech Designer System completed its update and unveiled the System Space, Ves had entered it numerous times without noticing the full implications of what was happening.

Not only did he enter it with his full body, he also came with all of his clothes and all of the objects he carried on his person!

None of them had been Inventorized, but the System decided to pull them in anyway, which Ves was grateful for as it allowed him to keep his modesty.

However, this interaction also proved that it the System did not need to apply any special treatment to pull objects into its mysterious System Space. It could probably pull in anything provided that it wasn't anything exaggerated like an entire capital ship or a whole planet.

What really stopped Ves from bringing in anything substantial was the rules set by the System itself.

This was where his Unending Regalia came in. Ever since he used one of his tickets to Inventorize it and thereby bind it to the System, he noticed that he could pull it in even when he altered or upgraded its configuration.

This proved that any Inventorized object did not have to permanently remain stuck in its original form. It could be damaged, upgraded, downsized and even upsized and still be able to dematerialize and return to the Vault of Eternity as a whole!

What he did last time stood out as a particularly dramatic example of this interaction. Ves had stripped out the original Unending alloy exterior plating and put thin layers of transphasic first-class alloys in their place.

All of the plates remained attached to the Unending Regalia without any issue! 

Ves then came up with the theory that he could continue to bring in objects as long as they were attached to his combat armor in a somewhat plausible manner.

The System's mechanism for bringing in Inventorized objects would conduct an automatic test that determined whether anything attached to it was 'part' of the combat armor.

Using glue to attach additional objects that had nothing to do with the combat armor or his personal loadout seemed to be enough. That was how he was able to import almost an entire skeleton into his System Space which included the whole pelvis!

He had hoped the System would stay shut and allow him to proceed as he wished, but the damn System didn't play along.

It was alive and it could think. It could spot damn well that Ves was trying to pull the wool over its eyes.

Treating it as a regular dumb automated system was a serious mistake.

Fortunately, the System did not impose any penalties. It just clarified the situation and implicitly acquiesced to his behavior.

After Ves spent the following minutes on testing the new limitations, he found that the maximum volume of free storage space that he obtained roughly corresponded to the dimensions of a rectangular container that could hold his Unending Regalia in an unpacked form.

If Ves could create a box with straight sides and put his Unending Regalia inside, then he could pour in a lot of additional water up until it reached the upper edge.

This was how much additional stuff he could effectively bring into the System Space!

Anything after that required him to pay precious Ascension Points to free up more storage space in the Vault of Eternity.

What rankled him the most was that the cheapskate of a Mech Designer System did not sell those spaces outright, but rented them on a yearly basis!

If Ves did not choose to renew his rent by paying additional AP, then the System would ruthlessly dump the vault contents into normal space.

This would be incredibly disastrous for Ves if the expunged contents consisted of phasewater!

Diluted or not, the exotic could easily kill people on contact if it came into contact with their exposed bodies!

Ves could just imagine a scenario where he collaborated with Gloriana on a mech design project in the design lab like usual.

As he became incredibly engrossed by a passion project, he might ignore the System's warning message about renewing his expiring rent, thereby causing it to dump at least an entire cubic meter of phasewater immediately outside of his body!

All of that potent liquids would wash over his work console and splash directly against Gloriana's shield generator!

No matter whether it was a conventional device or a transphasic one, the sheer excess of phasewater spilling out of Ves would overload the energy shield or at the very least generate lethal spatial fluctuations at close range that might cause his wife's body to be ripped asunder!

What a tragedy!

Ves could not let that happen to the woman he loved and the mother of his children. He became understandably reluctant to rent any storage from the Vault of Eternity.

He had little choice, though. He was stuck alone in hostile territory as usual. He could not cart off all of this diluted phasewater to the vast vaults underneath the Cat Nest or the many cargo bays of his main fleet.

He painfully winced as he coughed up 2 AP to open up 2 cubic meters of storage space in the Vault of Eternity.

At least Ves did not need to worry about building special containers to hold the diluted phasewater, as the Vault already promised to store any items deposited inside it under optimal circumstances. None of the phasewater would decay over time and they wouldn't damage anything stored in the vicinity either.

By the time Ves completed his long and exhausting harvesting run, he managed to harvest 1402 kilograms of diluted phasewater.

Of that amount, Ves had figured out that 13 percent of it consisted of real phasewater on average. The rest was mostly water intermingled with stabilizing substances that helped suppress any spatial activity.

That meant he harvested around 182 kilograms of phasewater in total.

He would have loved to extract all of the phasewater out of the diluted mixture right away, but that required a significant amount of time and effort to arrange.

Given that he would have to spend at least 1 day in the System Space to set it all up, he simply did not bother to go through all of this trouble and just settled for buying enough storage space to contain the diluted mixture.

The additional storage space would still be useful for an entire year after he had bought it, so he did not mind it if he purified the phasewater later.

"The question now is whether I need to spend time and resources to build extra gear to support what may come next." Ves frowned.

It would cost far too much AP for him to craft additional gear for his troops. His honor guards along with the security guards working for the state were already well-equipped.

Though the group of soon-to-be-freed humans also consisted of a lot of civilian non-combatants, they were all VIPs or relatives of important figures, so it was extremely likely that they carried personal shield generators themselves.

As long as they stayed in the rear where enemy forces couldn't reach them, they should remain out of the fight.

He could always remedy the situation by entering the System Space and spend enough time inside it to fix up a new solution.

There was not much time left before the prison would supposedly teleport the human captives to the recreation and socialization chamber.

Hopefully, these systems hadn't decayed to the point where they became inoperable. He made sure to double-check them when he still had access to the systems connected to the secondary control room. The cells were marked green for good reasons.

"I need to be there to greet all of those people. Who knows what they would do if they were left to their own devices."

Ves had been extraordinarily productive during this crisis. He spent several subjective days on trying to find a way out while everyone else only experienced a few hours in their cells.

He had already used much of his additional time on planning out the measures he would have to take in order to command all of the scattered people that would get confused quite soon.

He could already imagine how bored, frustrated and feared they would be when they showed up in another strange place all of a sudden.

"Goddamn Davute." Ves cursed again. "This will be the last time I visit this cursed planet."

Helena gave him an understanding look. "I do not blame you. Do you want me to be present or absent while you try to herd your latest flock?"

"Hmmm… maybe it is better if you stick around. Most people won't know what to make of you, and that is good. We need to maintain a strong rhythm as time is running out. I don't know what our enemies upstairs are doing, but I have a feeling that the earlier quake is not a good development."

Ves could feel that ever since he confronted the culprits behind this whole event, the entire prison became a lot less stable and enduring. He had a premonition that the entire facility may no longer pass through the ages as leisurely as before. Its existence might get cut short very soon!

"Have you come any closer to deducing the identity of our current adversaries and why they chose to abduct so many Davutan leaders?"

"I am no closer to the answers than before." Ves replied. "It doesn't matter too much. It won't take long before we can find out the answers. No matter what motivations possessed them to launch an attack on us, their actions are unforgivable. Whether they are agents of Karlach or Davute, I will smash anyone who thinks they can mess with me or my family!"