The Mech Touch

The surprise test gave Ves an excellent overview

All 100 students who enrolled in his Advanced Manual Superfab Operation course came from different layers of Terran society.

While none of them came from the absolute top or bottom layers of the Terran Alliance, they all grew up under different economic circumstances.

This gave Ves enough diverse samples to study the overall level of performance of different students with different levels of augmentations.

Klaus Robar-Fulton was not the worst performer among the 100 students, but his augmentations certainly ranked at the bottom.

His performance was a testament to how much he was able to utilize his limited resources to a higher degree. He did not let his relatively cheap cranial implant hold him back from pursuing his dreams and make his way up in society!

His approach and determination reminded Ves a lot of himself. This caused him to grow even more sympathetic towards this earnest mech design student.

Of course, the main reason why Ves held a lot of interest towards Klaus was that his latent spiritual potential was among the strongest out of his fellow students!

It was a pity that talent did not determine everything. Ves had encountered plenty of bright third-class and second-class mech designers in the past.

However, their inferior backgrounds and cheaper cranial implants heavily limited their upper boundaries.

The only realistic opportunity for them to be promoted to first-class mech designers was if they advanced to the rank of Master Mech Designer and utilized their much higher earning potential to upgrade all of their conditions.

Even then, it would likely take decades of their precious time to complete this cumbersome transition.

This clear separation between the classes was yet another example of how much the quality and price tier of a cranial implant affected the accomplishments of a mech designer.

Ves continued to study the performance of his students. He moved from superfab to superfab until he stopped behind Kalister Devos.

As his name suggested, Kalister was a branch member of the Devos Ancient Clan. That automatically meant that his augmentation package was among the most powerful out of the 100 students in this class.

The fifth-year mech design student was superior to Klaus in every other way. Kalister had completed more advanced courses. He learned noticeably faster. The teachings of his powerful ancient clan also gave him a head-start in many important areas.

Still, even when Ves took all of these variables into account, it was abundantly clear that Kalister was able to leverage much greater processing power in his work!

Ves had deliberately come up with a scaled-down mech design that contained a lot of subtle deviations from the norm. It threw the students off-guard and forced them to devise a lot of small solutions on the spot if they wanted to fabricate the parts to a satisfactory standard.

A lot of the problems could be efficiently solved by adequate mech designers who could leverage a lot of processing power.

The stronger the cranial implant, the faster and better their output!

Given these conditions, it did not surprise Ves at all that Kalister Devos pumped out high-quality parts at a faster rate than his peers.

What did surprise him to a small extent was how extensively Kalister was able to surpass the likes of Klaus!

The enormous gulf between the two discouraged Ves.

The display illustrated the power of modern mech design-oriented augmentations.

Ves yearned for this power. He would have tried to make a deal with the Terrans of the mechers to replace his old Archimedes Rubai with a proper implant that was designed with his profession in mind if he could!

The fact that he had mutated so far beyond the scope of humanity that this was not possible anymore frustrated him beyond belief.

There was no easy way to lift the upper limit of his productivity.

This meant that he remained stuck in an awkward place in the mech industry.

Currently, Ves estimated that his design speed exceeded that of a typical second-class mech designer.

He could even catch up and surpass the likes of Klaus Robar-Fulton in certain circumstances!

However, Ves was far behind in these areas when he compared himself to the more deep-pocketed individuals such as Kalister Devos and Alexa Streon.

This did not bode well for his future as a first-class mech designer.

Sure, Ves may have been able to become a tier 3 galactic citizen in advance, but he knew extremely well that his current mech design capabilities could not support this extravagant status!

This was bad news. Once he became a first-class mech designer, it would become clear to everyone else he worked with in the future that he was still behind on this important aspect!

Even if his fellow colleagues still respected him for his innovative design applications and his occasional bouts of brilliance, they would still become frustrated at his inability to keep up in other aspects.

Ves needed to close the performance gap to other upper level mech designers.

He could choose from at least two different approaches.

The easier solution was to embrace his differences and focus on strengthening his advantages at the cost of neglecting his weaknesses.

The more difficult solution was to rely on cultivation science and spiritual engineering to shore up his weaknesses and achieve parity with other first-class mech designers.

Ves wanted to try the latter approach first. The advantages of doing so were clear and obvious.

At the very least, he would be able to boost his design speed by several times, allowing him to complete his ongoing mech design projects a lot faster than before!

While it would still take at least a year to design a highly complicated first-class multipurpose mech, he could complete second-class design projects at a much faster rate!

On top of that, his ability to learn and master vast amounts of advanced first-class knowledge became a lot better as well. This could potentially allow him to become a first-class mech designer a year or two earlier!

Ves continued to think about what sort of measures he could take to reach his current goal. He continued to mull over potential solutions until the class had finally come to the end.

"Alright, time's up!" Ves announced the entire class. "You are not allowed to do any further work related to your product! Clean up your work stations and make sure to properly shut down your superfabs. If you have enough time to stick around, then you are free to linger while I begin to evaluate your work."

Once Ves completed his work and left the Eden Institute, he reunited with his wife in the design lab of Diandi Base.

Gloriana knew Ves well enough to know what he was troubled about.

"Are you still struggling to devise a means for you to upgrade your brain?"

Ves nodded. "I am. My ability to come up with spiritual products is not weak, and I have enough of a foundation in cultivation science to devise simple solutions. That does not leave me with a clear direction, though. I can't just come up with a random cultivation method that adds a spiritual computer in my brain. It doesn't work that way, and doing anything rash will threaten my foundation as a mech designer. I really don't know what else I can do to upgrade myself in a way that works."

His wife threw a jealous look at him. "At least you are able to exert the power of a god to transform your own conditions. I have to rely on costly augmentations to do the same."

It was rather funny that his wife grew envious at Ves' own ability to improve himself.

"If you were in my place, how would you approach this problem?" He asked.

That caused Gloriana to pause in thought. "Hmmm. You told me that you have no clear direction on how to solve it, so the first step you need to take is to find one. Instead of trying to devise one from the ground up, I suggest you look at existing solutions and try to imitate them to the best of your ability. Your work might not be as original as you prefer, but at least you can reduce the uncertainty by adapting an existing template."

That... was actually a good suggestion. Ves hadn't thought of that. He was so fixated on coming up with his own solutions that he didn't think about copying other people's work.

Ves did not like to think in this direction because it was inherently dishonorable. Mech designers tried their best not to turn it into a habit because it would ultimately degrade their ability to solve problems by themselves.

Still, a case like this was not directly related to mech design, so Ves felt it was permissible for him to adopt this approach.

His wife projected a typical first-class cranial implant.

"What you want is to imitate the hardware and software of a cranial implant. The most obvious way to do so is to recreate it in a spiritual form. You do not even need to make it as compact as an actual implant. According to what I have learned from you, spiritual constructs are intangible and do not occupy the same space as material objects. You can create a much larger 'spiritual implant' that is as large as your head. Is it feasible for you to create such a product?"

Ves looked intrigued, but quickly shook his head.

"It's not possible because my head is already occupied by my design flame. This is the part that is related to my profession as a mech designer. Now that I have become a Senior Mech Designer, it is crucially important for me to prevent it from getting contaminated by messy and unrelated influences. I can't engage in multiple competing forms of cultivation at the same time. There is not enough available capacity."

Ves was currently a creation cultivator and a body cultivator. While they entailed two completely different forms of growth, they covered drastically aspects of himself. Their overlap was minimal and did not interfere with each other.

The story would be different if Ves engaged in a form of qi cultivation or willpower cultivation. Doing anything like that would begin to intrude on his existing real estate and displace his existing cultivation!

This was why mech designers could never become mech pilots at the same time.

After they crossed the extraordinary threshold, they could only ever commit to a single path.

Of course, there were always exceptions.

One notable figure that managed to break this rule was Ketis. She had been able to become both a swordmaster and a Journeyman Mech Designer at the same time.

"Wait a second." Ves widened his eyes as he made an important realization!

At the same time, his wife chimed in as well!

Alexandria emerged from her head and began to fly around her body.

"Maow."

"I do not know too much about this cultivation science that you are so obsessed with as of late, but if there is no room in your body to accommodate a spiritual implant, then what about our companion spirits? If Ketis can imbue Sharpie with her potent willpower, then it should be easy enough for you to devise a means to turn your companion spirit into a supercomputer. I am not sure whether you can make it so that you can merge your mind thoroughly enough to directly upgrade your cognition, but if that is not the case, you may be able to make this happen by activating a design network."

"That's brilliant, Gloriana! You've given me lots of inspiration!"

Ves truly meant what he said! As he mulled over the suggestions made by his wife, he suddenly realized that compared to himself, Blinky was not short on capacity in the slightest!

After all, Blinky had already made decent attainments in the cultivation of the Imaginary Universe Method Version 3.0.

The Blinkyverse had already grown a lot larger after continuous cultivation. Blinky had recently completed the first stage and formed a complete planet!

Even if all of it was intangible and made out of spiritual energy, that did not change the fact that there was a huge amount of free space inside the Blinkyverse!