The Mech Touch

The birth of an entirely new universe happened quietly.

No one serving or living aboard the Spirit of Bentheim realized the amazing event that took place under their noses!

The expeditionary fleet still engaged in FTL travel as usual. The Larkinsons and their allies largely remained preoccupied with intercepting the next alien raiding fleet.

They had no reason to suspect that the Larkinson Patriarch had just managed to create a work that was destined to become one of his greatest creations!

A living universe that overwhelmingly consisted of spiritual energy had been born inside Blinky's intangible body!

Existing in dimensions that Ves could not even describe, this brand-new universe came about with a silent but violent bang!

Many different energies erupted from this primordial explosion.

Fueled by the complete disintegration of the Urvenk Obelisk, the raw power of stars and other stellar phenomena immediately created a new space and filled it up with the initial building blocks of a universe!

A landmass immediately formed right at the beginning. This little chunk of rock started off small, but quickly grew in size and scope as the energies absorbed by Blinky slowly shaped into an increasingly larger planet.

At the same time, the energies also started to form a small but incredibly hot ball of light in the distance!

The small prototypical star already began to illuminate and heat up the growing landmass!

More important than the creation of a new planet and star was the expansion of the internal universe itself.

With the help of the expenditure of too kilograms of phasewater, the eruption of power also expanded the diameter of the newly born space far beyond what it was supposed to for a newly established internal space!

It was not unusual for cultivation methods to create internal spaces that boasted a diameter of only a few hundred meters or a dozen kilometers.

While this sounded like a respectable amount of space at the start, these volumes amounted to nothing when the goal was to form a complete planet or star system!

The amount of volume required to form such exaggeratingly large stellar objects was astounding!

The downsides of forming a small internal space were myriad.

Their lack of size and mass made them fragile and vulnerable to external shocks.

Their lack of volume also meant that they couldn't store that much energy.

The poorer starting conditions meant that the cultivator had to expend a lot more effort to expand the volume of his internal space.

Yet because of the combination of special resources and the influx of a lot of spiritual energy, the foundation of the imaginary universe started off on a considerably stronger footing!

In fact, the conversion from an originally physical universe to a space that was overwhelmingly made up of pure energy massively decreased the resource requirements needed to grow and expand the setting!

Ves did not have to worry about needing to absorb a lot of materials to build up Blinky's internal universe.

However, the price for that was that it would become a lot harder and more energy-intensive to convert all of the imaginary stuff into physical matter in the future.

This was okay. As the initial growth spurt of Blinky's new internal space started to slow down and reach a more stable if somewhat glacial pacing, Ves began to test and evaluate what he could do with this new feature.

A permanent energy vortex formed around Blinky.

It was as if the Star Cat pricked a hole through the reality of the main universe. This hole acted like a drain that constantly caused all of the ambient spiritual energy to fall through and end up in a completely new universe!

"Mrow mrow."

"I know. Try and see if you can increase your cultivation speed."

The companion spirit began to exert himself. By following a specific cultivation method, Blinky was able to widen the diameter reality hole while at the same time raise the strength of the suction force.

The devouring organ derived from the Unending One played a crucial role in this regard!

The Imaginary Universe Method devised by Ves and perfected by his mother took great advantage of this organ's properties to serve as the main 'engine' to the imaginary universe's growth!

As Blinky tried to devour more and more indiscriminate ambient spiritual energy, its entire concentration and distribution began to deform in the surrounding space!

The entire experimental chamber as well as the compartments around the private lab and workshop began to experience increasingly more disruptive spiritual fluctuations!

Ves frowned. The stronger the fluctuations, the stronger the disruption to the environment. If he wanted to ensure that the clansmen and living mechs around him could grow and cultivate in a stable setting, then he had to ensure that Blinky's persistent cultivation did not mess up the environment too much.

Theoretically, Blinky should be able to devour spiritual energy at a much higher rate!

After all, Blinky did not have to do a lot of processing to the absorbed energies. Once they fell into his internal space, the captured energies either floated around like before or automatically formed into different planets and stars due to the direction from the cultivation method.

The current absorption rate did not satisfy Ves at all. The concentration of the ambient spiritual environment was still too low, and even if it was set to increase over the coming years, the limit would not be too high due to the Red Ocean's considerable distance from the source.

"If we can travel all the way to Messier 87, your cultivation speed should easily be a hundred if not a thousand times faster!" He told his own companion spirit. "The environment we are in right now is quite gentle, which is good for red humanity, but the conditions are not quite optimal for us. We can handle a lot more energy than most people!"

"Mrow mrow mrow."

Blinky had gained a virtually bottomless stomach all of a sudden. No matter how much E energy radiation he sucked in, his 'hunger' could never be completely sated!

After a bit of experimentation, Blinky eventually reduced his absorption rate to a more reasonable level. The energy vortex that surrounded his form became a lot less violent, which meant that his presence did not disrupt the ambient spiritual energies around him as much as before.

"This should be fine for the time being."

Although the growth rate of Blinky's brand-new internal space also slowed down because of this, Ves did not think it was that big of a deal.

One of the greatest advantages of the Imaginary Universe Method was that Blinky could easily practice it non-stop!

According to Cynthia, most actual cultivators only possessed a single body. Incarnations were dreams to them because nobody could make them with as much ease as Ves!

Since the practitioner had to do all of the work himself, he needed to reserve a significant amount of time in his daily schedule of sitting around doing nothing aside from 'cultivating'.

In other words, they remained stuck in a single room or space for hours, days, weeks, months or even years on end!

This sounded like a gigantic waste of time to Ves!

As a highly productive mech designer whose time was incomparably precious, he could not afford to waste too much of his attention and concentration on making sure that his companion spirit cultivated properly.

Fortunately, the Imaginary Universe Method was a lot easier than other qi cultivation methods.

Instead of relying on forming extremely elaborate and complicated multi-layered artistic conceptions, Blinky simply relied on upholding a framework of an imaginary universe and steadily filling it up with large quantities of spiritual energy.

It still retained a lot of touches of the original body cultivation method that Ves used as a source of inspiration.

The overall mindset behind either cultivation methods was to rely on an overwhelming quantity of resources to eventually trigger qualitative transformations.

It was a brute force approach to cultivation!

As Blinky steadily settled into his new state, the companion spirit did not experience any undue mental strain.

Practicing the Imaginary Universe Method was almost as easy as natural cultivation!

Ves and Blinky grinned at the same time.

"This is great! Everything is working according to expectations. No accidents have occurred and the growth of your new universe is proceeding without any obvious deviations."

Ves tried to evaluate Blinky's current cultivation speed and progress.

Due to his excellent start, Blinky completed the first stage of the Imaginary Universe Method in record time!

He had already moved on to transforming the primordial landmass into a primordial planet. The second stage demanded an exponentially greater quantity of energy to complete than the first stage, so it demanded a lot more time and effort.

Blinky had little choice but to keep draining ambient spiritual energy day and night and slowly complete the first real planet of his private universe.

"It shouldn't take too long. You'll probably be able to complete the second stage in two weeks or so." Ves estimated.

"Mrow mrow mrow." Blinky concurred.

Strangely enough, the new cultivation method already affected the appearance of the Star Cat.

His purple intangible body no longer depicted points of lights that trailed across his entire body in linear trajectories.

Instead, a single point of light as well as a slight circular dark patch appeared on his fluffy belly.

It became clear that his altered visual manifestation had begun to reflect the actual state of his new internal space!

Ves could easily infer that as Blinky expanded his personal universe and filled it up with progressively more stars, the companion spirit's outward appearance would grow increasingly more elaborate and impressive!

Perhaps he might one day look like a giant feline embodiment of an entire cosmos!

"Mrow mrow!"

Blinky looked forward to assuming such a form one day! The more impressive he looked, the more power he had at his disposal!

Still, for now his internal universe lacked serious growth and development. It did not bring any measurable advantages to the companion spirit aside from giving him an enormous and expanding storage space where he could dump a lot of spare spiritual energy.

"This is pretty useful already."

Blinky lacked this capability in the past, which meant that he constantly had to draw on external sources of energy whenever he or Ves needed to perform an energy-hungry procedure such as sustaining his Living Workshop ability.

Now that Blinky gained access to a giant reservoir of spiritual energy, Ves could burn almost as much spiritual energy as he wanted without needing to worry about disrupting the environment or borrowing lots of juice from his design spirits!

"Can you store real objects inside your space?"

"Mrow... mrow...?"

Ves picked up a metal bar and tried to stuff it inside the reality hole.

It didn't work.

"Sure enough. I knew it wouldn't be that simple."

His hope of treating Blinky's new internal space as an alternative of the System's Vault of Eternity was dashed, at least for the time being.

He predicted that Blinky needed to advance to a much later stage or begin to enter into the second mode of the Imaginary Universe Method in order to turn it into a gigantic portable pocket space!

As Ves continued to analyze the properties of this latest addition to his life, he eventually found it to be cumbersome to refer to it as 'Blinky's internal space' or 'Blinky's imaginary universe'.

He needed to bestow it with a proper name so that he could effortlessly distinguish it from his main universe.

Ves stared into the eyes of his companion spirit. "Do you have any good suggestion?"

"Mrow mrow... mrow?"

"That... is actually a brilliant name for a new universe!" Ves responded with a smile! "From now on, your internal imaginary universe shall be known as... the Blinkyverse!"

The Blinkyverse!

For now, it could only function as a large and portable reservoir of different spiritual energies, but its future potential was endless.

As long as Blinky remained alive and continued to absorb spiritual energy without interruption, it was possible for the cheekily named Blinkyverse to eventually match the scope of the main universe!