The Mech Touch

Chapter 5997  Restrained Upgrades

The Dark Zephyr Mark III gradually began to take shape.

Ves and Gloriana worked with utmost concentration, as much as they could under the circumstances.

Ves clearly coped a lot better with the abnormal environment than his wife. The mutated Living Workshop ability rendered the entire hall into a space where he felt completely at home.

They already obtained a lot of relief by overcoming a major hurdle. They successfully transformed a large batch of expensive and high-quality resources.

Ves did not hesitate to add another massive expense to the Larkinson Clan by investing over 500 million MTA credits in rare hyper materials, high-performance light-weight exotic alloys and exclusive composite materials.

Many of these materials could only be found in first-class expert mechs!

While the materials far exceeded the parameters of second-class mechs and quasi-first-class mechs, they were considered serviceable but not exceptional when compared to genuine first-class expert mechs.

Although Ves tried his best to future proof the Dark Zephyr by anticipating the living mech's needs once Tusa grew stronger and transferred to the Premier Branch, there was a limit to how much he could elevate the machine's structural performance.

The radical conversion into an archemech and the already massive anticipated boost in performance would definitely induce a huge amount of strain onto the expert mech.

It was impossible for a human to transform into a True God in a single leap!

Under normal circumstances, breakthroughs needed to happen step by step. If the Dark Zephyr was a product designed by other mech designers, then there was no need to pay attention to this matter.

Let alone upgrade the Dark Zephyr with exceedingly high-quality materials worth as much as several billion MTA credits, Ves could have invested all of that money into designing and fabricating a brand-new machine!

The reason why he did not do so was because the Dark Zephyr was a unique living machine. The expert light skirmisher had painstakingly accumulated 14 Ascension Runes, each of which strengthened and specialized his spiritual capabilities along two distinct directions.

As far as Ves was concerned, the value of those 14 Ascension Runes far exceeded a blank expert mech worth billions of MTA credits!

Aside from that, the personality of the Dark Zephyr also held a lot of value in itself. The living mech grew up alongside Tusa from the beginning. As both of them became more powerful, their cooperation and coordination also became a lot more effective.

The difference this made was huge!

If Tusa and the Dark Zephyr dueled against a high-tier expert pilot paired with a non-living version of a high-tier expert light skirmisher, the former combination would win 8 out of 10 times without a doubt.

This was the value of the excellent synergy of an expert pilot and a third order living expert mech! This was the most direct expression of Ves' design philosophy!

In any case, Ves and Gloriana both understood that they were pushing the limit of what the Dark Zephyr could tolerate.

The material form of a living mech had a very large impact on the spiritual foundation of the same machine.

Elevating the former usually brought up the latter, but if the transition was too big and abrupt, the probability that the spiritual foundation might tear or break increased dramatically!

Ves never encountered this doom scenario before, but that was because he never took the initiative to get close enough for this possibility to come to pass.

This was the first time he disregarded the safety rules concerning this possible outcome.

Even though he wanted to play it safe, the situation did not allow for it. The current order in human space was beginning to deteriorate. Ves had read enough reports and observed enough clues to deduce that things would go worse from this point.

Instead of settling down and pursuing stable development, Ves chose to speed up his pace and accrue greater strength at a more reckless pace.

This was why he hoped that the Dark Zephyr Mark III would start off at a considerably stronger footing than normal.

Ves and Gloriana made good use of the expensive materials and designed a complicated archemech frame that largely confirmed to high-quality first-class standards.

Of course, the implementation of these first-class materials was relatively basic and simplistic. While Ves and Gloriana most definitely tried to make the most out of all of the hypers and exotics, they mostly focused on upgrading the structural components and armor plating.

They deliberately kept the power reactor and a number of other key components at the quasi-first-class level in order to allow the Dark Zephyr Mark III to fight alongside other second-class mechs.

In order to pave the way for the quasi-first-class expert mech's future ascension into a first-class ace mech, Ves and Gloriana designed the Dark Zephyr Mark III with enough semi-modularity that they could easily swap out the quasi-first-class components with genuine first-class components.

They also made sure to increase the accessibility to the Dark Zephyr's original resonating materials.

Once it was time to install the defining features of a genuine ace mech, it shouldn't take too long for a competent mech designer to swap out the remaining pieces of Perfidious Steel and Bissonat, and replace them with much more powerful ace mech-grade resonating exotics.

There was a huge gap in performance between expert mech and ace mech-grade resonating exotics.

In fact, Ves did not fully understand the differences as he never worked with the latter. Only Master Mech Designers and higher possessed the qualifications to work with them. That meant that the Larkinson Clan needed to gain the cooperation of an external mech designer in order to upgrade the Dark Zephyr Mark III into an ace mech.

The necessity of resorting to outside help to further strengthen the most strategic assets of the Larkinson Clan was a huge headache for Ves. He did not look forward to dealing with this problem.

The best solution was to wait until he managed to advance to Master Mech Designer and design an ace mech upgrade himself.

However, Ves did not think he would be able to breakthrough anytime soon, especially when he needed to spend much of his time on mastering the art of designing first-class mechs.

Ves vaguely predicted that if he decided to stick with designing second-class mechs, he should be able to advance to the rank of Master Mech Designer within a decade.

His many insights, his innovative design applications and his rapid progress so far all gave him the capital to challenge the Polymath's record!

However, rank was not everything.

The Red Association already forced him to become a first-class mech designer. Since that was the case, he might as well go all-in, trying to master enough principles of high technologies to be able to design the most powerful first-class multipurpose mechs.

Even though he might delay his breakthrough by one or two decades, his foundation became much broader and stronger.

All of this sounded nice, but it did not leave Ves in the best position in the short term. This was why he had already accepted the need to give up a lot of confidentiality and let another Master transform the Dark Zephyr Mark III into an ace mech.

He already formulated a few plans with regards to this future need.

"Pay attention, Ves. The incompatibility between archetech and conventional technology is creating more issues than expected."

"Ah, sorry. I am on it, Gloriana."

The pair had already fabricated all of the necessary archetech components.

The two mech designers usually treated the assembly phase as a cakewalk. So long as the mech design did not contain too many finicky components, it was relatively easy to fit all of the parts together.

Upgrade runs were different due to the need to keep an existing living mech alive throughout the entire process.

However, the difficulty of the assembly phase for the Dark Zephyr Mark III exceeded that of any other project!

The archetech used to develop all of the new parts worked on a completely foreign tech base.

Gloriana employed completely different technical standards, ranging from the standard voltage settings to the use of a completely different set of programming languages.

Therefore, trying to upgrade a conventional mech by taking out old components and filling up the gap with new components was far more troublesome this time!

Gloriana may have anticipated this problem in advance and constructed all kinds of bridges, stopgap components and converters to force temporary mergers between two different tech bases, handling them during the assembly phase was anything but simple.

As the difficult work proceeded at a fairly slow but still risky pace, Ves felt as if he was trying to transform an ordinary human into an orven while keeping the individual's personality as intact as possible!

Such a conversion process should have been impossible to pull off. Even if the conversion process was viable from a biological perspective, the mentality of the subject would have collapsed instantly due to the complete lack of familiarity!

This was why Gloriana could not complete the transformation of the Dark Zephyr alone. She may be a lot more skilled and proficient in conducting the complicated physical conversion, but she did not possess the expertise to help the spiritual foundation adapt to the insertion of a completely foreign part.

"It's okay, Dark Zephyr. We expressly designed these archemetal parts for your use. Feel them out. They will feel as natural as your old parts as long as you spend a bit more time acclimating with them. Be patient. Once most of your mech frame consists of archemetal components, the sense of incompatibility will fade."

Ves and Gloriana stretched and abused the Ship of Theseus concept much more extensively than before!

It was a considerable gamble on their part. So long as the Dark Zephyr still managed to retain his core identity after such a radical upgrade, Gloriana would have no qualms about converting the other Larkinson expert mechs into archemechs!

As time continued to pass, the Miracle Couple gradually gained more confidence in their work.

The Dark Zephyr Mark III was starting to take shape without any obvious signs of collapse or other undesirable complications.

Although a few incidents happened here and there, Ves already anticipated them in advance and activated the appropriate contingency plans to prevent the irregularities from cascading into more serious problems.

A lot more shadow energy and other E energies began to accumulate into the increasingly more complete archemech.

Exchanging Unending alloy for more specialized hyper materials made the Dark Zephyr a lot purer and more efficient in his interactions with E energy.

His total capacity also grew by a moderate extent after Ves carefully installed the Dark Wind Module.

Ves had been worried whether the partially disassembled frame of the Dark Zephyr would produce a lot of disturbances when he installed the powerful Ultimate Module, but the actual outcome was quite mild.

Aside from saturating the Dark Zephyr with even more shadow energy, the expert mech remained stable for the most part.

This was a testament to Gloriana's excellent design work. The design of the Dark Zephyr was fairly solid and robust for a light mech. This was also one of the advantages of working with archetech.

As the reconstructed expert mech neared completion, the pace slowed down even further as Ves and Gloriana were beginning to apply the finishing touches.

Their main concerns no longer centered around the Dark Zephyr.

They became more and more concerned about whether Venerable Tusa would be ready to pilot his new and improved expert mech when the time had come.

"Is he…?"

"Give him more time, Gloriana. I can tell that his mental state is in an unusually active state at the moment. Let's see whether he can tame the phasewater rampaging inside his body by relying on his own strength. In any case, it is already admirable that he managed to last so long."

The time had come for Tusa to prove himself.

Did he need medical assistance in order to extract the phasewater from his body, or would he be able to solve this problem by exerting his willpower?