The Mech Touch

Ves wanted to spread the advantages of cultivation to his clan.

He decided to start with his grandfather and his living mech because they were relatively new additions to the Larkinson Army.

They did not experience as much growth as other pairs. Their spiritual states had only changed relatively recently and should still remain fairly malleable.

Although Ves was slightly concerned about impacting Benjamin's relatively poor physical fitness, he understood on a rational level that his grandfather was not as fragile as he looked!

Venerable Benjamin Larkinson possessed all of the traits of a genuine high-tier expert pilot outside of physique.

His reforged willpower was even stronger and more solid than the willpower of other Larkinson mech pilots!

Prodigies such as Venerable Joshua and Venerable Jannzi may have grown remarkably quickly over the past decade, but their life experiences and mental development could not match up to a grandfather who already lived a full life of ups and downs!

Ves considered Benjamin to be a good test subject for that reason. The old man had already endured great trauma in the past and could easily take a few blows.

It was difficult for Ves to explain what he wanted to do the Blood Star.

Cultivation was not part of the culture of modern humanity. Ves suspected that the MTA and CFA deliberately suppressed this concept in order to deprive the Five Scrolls Compact of support back in the old galaxy.

"So let me get this straight." Benjamin said as he rubbed his gloved fingers against his wrinkled chin. "You have come up with a tech that can upgrade the Blood Pact and help my mech and I grow faster, is that correct?"

"You can say that. It's a little more complicated than that. I need both of you to adjust your behavior, acquire a set of new habits and possibly meditate on a cultivation mantra. I am trying to figure out if you can skip on that last part. It is troublesome for you and your expert mech to spend conscious effort on deliberate cultivation. I am hoping that I can whip up a solution that will essentially allow you and your living mech to cultivate on autopilot."

The old expert pilot looked completely lost at this point. He eventually threw up his hands.

"Just do what you want. My mech and I will cooperate with you as best as possible."

After gaining his grandfather's tentative approval, Ves began to conduct a series of tests and examinations.

The new mech testing chamber built adjacent to his private workshop came extremely handy at this time.

The large compartment offered a decent amount of space for the Blood Star to fly around and test its skills against dummy targets.

As Venerable Benjamin was having the time of his life by hacking its sword against different bots, Ves constantly studied the spiritual condition of the Blood Star.

A lot of different ideas entered his mind as he gathered a huge amount of interesting data.

His vastly expanded depth in cultivation science had opened a new world to him. Ves found that he could notice a lot of small but important variables that he completely overlooked in the past!

The more he studied the Blood Pact, the more he admired how he managed to make it come to life.

Even so, his greater vision and understanding also caused him to wince at times whenever he spotted aspects of it that were either suboptimal or completely detrimental!

This was an unavoidable consequence of indirectly forming a contract cultivation method. The Carmine System did the best it could to forge a permanent spiritual bond between the mech and the mech pilot.

"It has character, but... there is far too much room for improvement for me to leave it alone."

Cultivation science centered around developing the most efficient and effective ways to convert energy into growth and more specifically metaphysical growth.

As Ves adopted the mentality of an engineer to this important side project, he meticulously deconstructed the existing natural cultivation methods and utilized his extensive theoretical frameworks to formulate a lot of improved cultivation processes.

Ves was actually working with three cultivation methods rather than just a single one at this time.

First, his grandfather unconsciously 'practiced' the mech piloting cultivation method that was automatically dispensed by the Kingdom of Mechs through a mechanism that Ves could not detect.

With the understanding that Ves possessed today, he already understood that mech pilots actually did not have to do anything special in order to 'cultivate'.

They just had to do their jobs and actively engage in training or fight in real combat missions to make actual progress!

As long as they possessed sufficient spiritual potential, each of them had a chance to exceed the extraordinary threshold and form extraordinary willpower, all without requiring any conscious direction!

Even their breakthroughs were secretly managed by the Kingdom of Mechs in order to ensure they proceeded smoothly and without any errors!

Just as with his own mech designer progression trajectory, there was nothing that Ves could do to alter or improve the cultivation method for mech pilots.

The only way he had any hope of doing so was to gain enough authority over the Kingdom of Mechs and change the cultivation method from the root!

Ves shook his head. "I don't need to worry about this. I should focus on what I can control."

Right now, he needed to formulate at least one general cultivation method for living mechs and one dual cultivation method for the users of the Carmine System.

"The two should complement each other."

If a living mech was able to grow stronger through its own efforts, it would be able to provide more assistance to its mech pilot.

The existence of a Blood Pact between the two meant that this reinforcement relationship became a lot more effective!

Ves could easily imagine that Carmine pilots would be able to grow five times if not ten times faster than their more regular counterparts!

Of course, the premise of sustaining this rapid growth was whether the Carmine mech could continue to grow fast enough on its own to provide a lot of cultivation assistance to its bonded pilot.

In the video games that Ves used to play in the past on occasion, this was a process called power leveling.

The most crucial part about making power leveling work was to create a sufficiently large difference of power between the mech and mech pilot.

Reality was not a video game, and it was not entirely necessary for a Carmine mech to be a lot stronger than its mech pilot.

They just had to remain within a reasonable range of power in order to benefit each other.

"Let's focus on the cultivation of the living mech first since that is a crucial precondition to increasing the effectiveness of the Blood Pact."

There were three fundamental variables that affected the growth of a living mech.

The first was time. The more time passed by, the more a living mech was able to engage in natural cultivation and slowly develop itself further.

The second was interfacing with a mech pilot. When a living mech was used for its intended purpose and when it formed a man-machine connection with a human, the machine grew more rapidly by being exposed to different stimuli.

These two variables already existed from the moment Ves produced his first living mechs. They had been the factors responsible for enabling all of his products to grow over time.

From humble commercial mechs such as the Desolate Soldier to powerful high-ranking mechs that had eventually turned into living legends such as the Ouroboros, their growth had all been sustained by the power of time and experiences!

It was only recently that a third variable came into the picture. The Age of Dawn introduced exotic radiation to red humanity, and all of the living mechs stuck in the Red Ocean became graced by constant exposure to E energy radiation.

Even if living mechs did nothing at all, their very nature as sentient life forms caused them to passively absorb ambient spiritual energies that aligned with their own domains.

Ves focused on this phenomenon in particular. His goal was to supercharge this natural process by implementing a lot of highly effective artificial cultivation processes!

He immediately pulled up a copy of the Atmer Guardian Mantra and began to alter its cultivation steps in an attempt to make it suitable for living mechs.

He had to hollow it out quite a bit as much of it was specifically directed towards strengthening organic human bodies.

This pretty wiped out the body cultivation aspects from the mantra, but that was fine as living mechs almost never improved the physical defenses of their bodies on their own in the past.

Unless they incorporated smart metal or turned into an ace mech, living machines had to rely on humans to manually upgrade their physical defenses.

"Can I do better, though?"

It was too impractical to incorporate Gloriana's god body method as it was too high-end and imposed a lot of difficult requirements.

What Ves needed to formulate was a more general and accessible body cultivation method that was suitable for every living mech.

He quickly swept through all of the cultivation knowledge that he had recently acquired and paused when he touched upon the fundamental theories of the five elements.

"Metal. Mechs are products of metal. This is a great starting point!"

That was not all. He also drew from a lot of theories and processes of the Colica Sect Equipment Maintenance Sutra to figure out how to strengthen the structure and the spiritual foundation of mechs in more esoteric ways.

The biggest challenge to adapting the cultivation processes of the Equipment Maintenance Sutra was to make it less dependent on external repairs.

Ves had to employ his full creativity and thinking power at times in order to develop brand-new solutions that combined traits from multiple different cultivation inheritances!

Several days passed by as Ves obsessed over this work. He continually examined the performance of not only the Blood Star, but also several other notable machines such as the Quint.

The old stalwart provided Ves with a surprising amount of useful feedback. The Quint had already figured out a lot of stuff on its own and possessed a greater sensitivity towards the changes induced by different cultivation processes.

With the active assistance from his living mechs, Ves eventually completed the first iteration of the Larkinson Metal Guardian Mantra!

When third order living mechs such as the Blood Star and the Quint began to practice this rather complicated cultivation method, they began to form small energy vortexes in their immediate surroundings.

This was a clear sign that their energy absorption efficiency had skyrocketed!

"It's working!" Ves exulted!

Unlike Blinky who was absorbing a lot of ambient spiritual energies regardless of their properties, the living mechs that tentatively learned this new cultivation method only stuck to absorbing metal energies and a bit of life energies. This meant that practicing the new method generated less disturbances.

Even so, Ves could already tell that the Larkinson Metal Guardian Mantra was at least 7 times as effective in terms of cultivation speed when compared to the previous state!

Not only that, but the new cultivation method exclusive for the living mechs of the Larkinson Mechs also used up the captured energies a lot more efficiently.

Many different aspects of the living mechs became steadily more fortified without generating as much waste as before.

Ves could vaguely tell that both the Quint and the Blood Star were experiencing minute physical reinforcement, which was a highly desirable phenomenon that was previously exclusive to ace mechs and god mechs!

"The physical strengthening effects share a certain resemblance to the effects of willpower baptism!"

This was exactly what Ves wanted to see! Instead of relying on the extraordinary willpower of a rare ace pilot, his new cultivation method relied purely on the ubiquitous supply of ambient spiritual energy attributed towards the metal element in order to fuel the physical growth of his living mechs!

Ves could scarcely foresee how much stronger all of his third order living mechs would become once they practiced his new Larkinson Metal Guardian Mantra!

However, his work was far from done.

He still had to solve a greater challenge.

"I need to turn this into an instinctive cultivation method for all of my second order living mechs."