The Mech Touch

The fabrication run began in full swing.

As the first proper attempt to produce a mech of the Hyper Generation, every participant embarked on a new experience.

Though Ves and Gloriana employed many of the same methods and approaches that they utilized before, a lot of variables were different this time. This made it so that the pair had to get accustomed to a much different situation from before.

They only used the well-equipped workshop machines of Diandi Base a few times in the past. All of the production equipment were built to Terran standards and offered superior results so long as they were skillfully used.

The materials used to fabricate the Jupiter Project were a lot different from the ones used to make their older works. Much of the resources were sourced from the Terran Alliance and offered better performance at an even greater cost.

Unlike the Greenaxe and Bloodripper that Ves and Gloriana fabricated a few months earlier, the Jupiter Project made heavy use of hyper materials from top to bottom. It was a true hyper mech, which meant that its parts needed to be fabricated in a different way!

Fortunately, the two Larkinson mech designers were skilled and knowledgeable enough in both old and new methods to adequately handle the new processes.

Their earlier projects had already given them enough experience with working with hyper materials.

Ves and Vulcan also possessed a strong feel and affinity for these materials.

It was not until this strange pairing started to handle hyper materials in reality as opposed to manipulating them in a projected design interface that they began to understand them on a deeper level.

Armed with all of these subtle new insights, they chose to deviate from the design schematics and apply minor changes on the fly because they instinctively judged that these alterations would lead to slightly better results.

The frequent adjustments could have led to greater friction and conflicts down the line if not for the design network keeping Gloriana up to date on all of these spontaneous decisions.

Though Gloriana did not entirely like it that their mech design apparently had a lot of room for improvement, she accepted the changes because it would ultimately elevate their work further.

As Blinky continued to flood the entire workshop with the energy of life and creation, the effects became more prominent than in the past.

Hyper materials naturally interacted with E energy. Even if all of the exotics integrated into the Jupiter Project consisted of sympathetic materials that were only responsive towards the light attribute, that did not mean that they completely ignored other influences.

Ves noticed that it had become noticeably easier to imbue more life into the parts fabricated in a Living Workshop environment.

If all of the materials consisted of hypers, then that could make a much greater difference!

He had a hunch that this might be a possible way for him to fabricate a fourth order living mech in the future!

Such an exceptional living mech would be the equivalent of a primordial human in the form of a mech!

Ves had to shove this interesting idea aside before it distracted him any further. He could think about future projects later.

As Ves continued to fabricate the more complicated but interesting hyper components of the high-tier expert mech, his cooperation with Vulcan became more smooth.

As an external incarnation, Vulcan did not represent another side of his personality like Blinky, but represented a more independent existence.

This meant that Ves did not and could not know what was going through Vulcan's mind unless he actively reached out. Even then, the mind of a design spirit was so overwhelming that it was impossible for Ves to internalize everything that Vulcan knew.

Just the huge amounts of knowledge related to so many different crafts would cause his brain to explode despite its continuous evolution!

All of this meant that Vulcan had accumulated a lot of useful skills, some related to mech design, that Ves could not master himself unless he took the effort to learn them by himself.

This was a waste of time as learning all of these unrelated skills took away far too much from his core profession.

He was fine letting Vulcan assist him whenever his breadth and depth of craftsmanship could play a useful role.

This was exactly the kind of situation where the design spirit could add a lot of value to his current work!

Ever since Vulcan reached the 2nd stage of the Metal God Method, he had begun to get in touch with the methods and traditions of a Divine Blacksmith.

While the Metal God Method did not incorporate the full inheritance of this extraordinary profession, just fragments of it was already enough to expand Ves' perspective on hyper technology!

Compared to mech designers who were still starting to get accustomed to hypers, traditional blacksmiths had learned to work with them for a much longer span of time!

Even if most of their work and heritage had been buried under the relentless march of time, the reintroduction of E energy to humanity finally made all of this forgotten knowledge useful again!

From what Ves could glean from Vulcan, true artifacts were almost entirely made out of so-called 'heavenly materials'.

Each one was a work of art, and it became a lot easier to create high-quality works because of their exceptional and complicated reactivity to E energy.

What separated an extraordinary artisan from a more mundane one was the ability to imbue their work with their own thoughts, emotions, ideals and more into the works that they fashioned with their own hands.

This was one of the fundamental processes of traditional craftsmanship and was common to every ancient profession at the time!

Unless they were dealing with disposable trash, ancient creation cultivators never engaged in any form of mass production.

Proper artifacts could only be made through excellence and individual expression. Each of them gained powerful properties depending on the skill and the mentality of their makers.

The highly reactive properties of hyper materials provided traditional blacksmiths and other ancient craftsmen with an expanded canvas for them to express their own skill at creation!

Ves grew more and more enamored with the theories, methods and advantages of these old traditions.

He even learned that one of methods used by traditional artisans to create high-quality works was to imbue them with life!

Many of them actually shared some of the same values and goals as Ves!

The biggest difference was that they did not have the ability to create life forms from scratch as far as he was aware of. A Divine Blacksmith may be a maestro when it came to forging swords and armor, but he was not able to make them 'alive' by himself!

This was quite problematic as practically all of their most powerful works had to possess an autonomous consciousness for multiple reasons!

A high-grade artifact actually consisted of at least dozens of different hyper materials, each of which possessed different attributes.

If these materials were just hammered together in a single product, the finished work would perform way below its actual potential as it wouldn't be able to harness the power of heaven as well as it should!

It was like producing a mechanical cat, only to forget about uploading an AI. This AI was necessary to intelligently control all of its components in an effective and cohesive manner.

If a traditional blacksmith could not bestow life to their high-end works, then they could only stick to producing cheaper and more generic products!

It just so happened that ancient creation cultivators figured out various different ways to make up for this shortcoming.

The most common solution was to use existing lives as resources!

A traditional blacksmith could use a soul extracted from a powerful organism and stuff it into his incomplete work!

So long as the soul properly merged with a sword or a suit of armor, it would evolve and maybe even sublimate into a much more impressive artifact!

Ves was both horrified and fascinated by these ancient practices.

Although most ancient crafting traditions mostly advocated for the use of souls extracted from alien beasts, it was also possible to merge an artifact with the souls of human beings!

Regardless of whether they came from humans or aliens, every soul that successfully merged with an artifact turned into a so-called 'artifact spirit'!

The benefits brought by artifact spirits sounded incredibly familiar to Ves. Not only did they make artifacts a lot more intelligent and responsive to their users, but they also increased the efficiency of every process, enabling these amazing works to unleash much greater power with much less effort!

"So that is why the Heavensword is so amazing."

Vulcan's knowledge caused him to look at this ancient relic weapon from a completely different perspective!

In the eyes of a traditional blacksmith, the Heavensword was not just a grand work that brilliantly combined a large variety of exceptional hyper materials, but also transcended the limits of lesser swords because it was driven by an exceptional artifact spirit!

In fact, given its known functions and its strong obsessions in preserving the heritage of traditional swordsmanship, Vulcan speculated that the Heavensword was actually governed by the transformed soul of a sword saint!

The sacrifice had to be voluntary in order to imbue the Heavensword with so much power and harmony. The way in which the ancient relic perfectly bestowed its wielders with the Heavensword Style meant that the artifact spirit must have mastered it during his lifetime!

It was so amazing for Ves to be able to peel back the hidden truth of the Heavensword. This old relic was one of the few powerful works that had managed to survive the unknown cataclysm that broke the Milky Way Galaxy.

The absence of the power of heaven had devastating effects on most artifacts that existed at the time.

Heavenly materials were intricately related to heavenly energy. When the latter disappeared, the former lost much of the support that made them so extraordinary!

Slowly but surely, a lot of powerful artifacts started to crumble as the long-term drought of E energy started to take its toll.

Their artifact spirits must have died out first as they were most dependent on heavenly energy to sustain themselves.

The heavenly materials started to degrade next. Once the formerly powerful works completely degenerated into a mundane product, their deaths were complete!

The Heavensword managed to avoid this fate because it possessed an internal pocket space that contained a small but complete slice of heaven.

Its ancient artifact spirit existed in a time period that preceded the rise of modern humanity, yet managed to outlast almost all of its peers due to its rare advantages!

As Ves continued to focus on his own work, he couldn't help but think how that related to his own products

How similar were his living mechs to the artifacts of the past?

When Ves put serious thought into this question, he found that there were a lot of similarities.

He could see strong relations between traditional craftsmanship and modern mech design. The former had definitely served as a predecessor to the latter! There were just too many parallels to reject this obvious connection!

The absence of artifact spirits was rather conspicuous, though. Somehow, the Progenitors of Mechs managed to make modern mech design work without relying on this macabre requirement.

How?

Ves suddenly thought about his design flame and why it existed.

He thought of all of the mechs that became more than the sum of their parts due to his design philosophy.

He thought of the Kingdom of Mechs that secretly supported the entire mech community in many different ways.

One or more of these factors played an integral part in making mechs stronger!

Creation cultivation had evolved. While the old ways weren't necessarily weaker, it was clear that modern mech design was much more suitable for modern times!