Mystical Journey

Mincar took his hand off the sphere in front of him and put it down, looking at Garen.

“We need to find a way, a way to create cannon fodder that’s strong enough but using the least resources, or a way that’s useful enough. The one you’ve chosen now is a Pet Lion’s sphere, as a Pet Lion, it’s usually reared by humans as pets. It doesn’t need sharp teeth and claws with blood grooves, and it looks sweet and adorable on the outside as well. It has a gentle disposition, as well as a pretty and majestic appearance. Of course, this would be different for those people who like ferocious beasts.”

Garen nodded to indicate that he understood.

“Then how should I analyze it? What do I need to use to control the gene chain?”

“This is the little thing we use the most often in this lab.” Mincar walked to the side and took a small white sphere off the window sill, throwing it to Garen directly.

After the white sphere was tossed out, it gradually slowed down, and finally floated in front of Garen.

It was a silver-white sphere, about the size of an egg, and it had something like a camera lens in the middle that was even turning and adjusting slightly.

“Genetic Operators, an extremely precise instrument that can only be used with Energy Machinist Willpower.” Mincar clapped his hands. “This thing is worth more than a million crystals, remember to be careful with it. There’s a computer control panel on it, you can search up the genetic chains of the creatures you’re looking for. You’ll need to remember a lot of things, so I suggest you choose the simplest one to start with.”

He turned around and left the lab after saying that, leaving Garen there alone.

Garen picked up the sphere and played with it for a bit, but as soon as he touched, he felt his right eye blurring slightly.

He blinked, and instantly felt the field of vision in his right eye expand. Everything had instantly been magnified, as though he had gone through an extremely long tunnel. After the dizziness passed, Garen saw a tiny particle of dust floating in front of his right eye. It had a strange hexagonal hole on it, and a strange-looking little bug had started living in it, constantly poking its black head out of the little hole.

“Is this a magnification effect?” Garen instantly realized that his right eye seemed to have zoomed in a spot in front of him.

Without further hesitation, he used his left eye to lock on to a position, and looked for the Cultivation Sphere as well. Soon enough, he found a small sphere that cultivated a wild wolf imprint.

Wild Wolves were low-practicality creatures among the cannon fodders, since they used up quite a lot of energy but were not all that powerful. Still, since Garen had a Wild Wolf Imprint now, he planned to research the principles behind it properly, to see if there was a simpler, more convenient way to reach the quantity limit.

He tried to release his Willpower threads, and as expected, those threads that used to be as thin as strands of hair, in the extremely magnified vision of his right eye, was made of even more, even thinner strands of threads woven together. Each thinner thread could be controlled, so Garen tried it, and confirmed his suspicions.

He tried to control the threads to approach that mound of grey cotton candy inside the Cultivation Sphere, that was a very primal grey cell. It was oval-shaped, and the cell nucleus looked like a walnut, surrounded by three black dots like satellites.

“How do I operate it?” Garen grabbed his laptop with one hand, there was a lot of internal information there. The Genetic Operator required very powerful computing power to maintain, because it was constantly burning up a lot of the Energy Machinist’s computing power. Garen felt as though he was a water tank being filled up, the burden on his computing power was just like the water being poured in. As time went on, he felt heavier and heavier.

After operating the super-thin Willpower threads for some time, Garen had no choice but to stop and rest for a while, giving his burning brain some reprieve. He read the information on the computer carefully, there was several hundred M’s worth of words and data on the genetic construct of Wild Wolves, which was equivalent to several hundreds of millions, or even up to a billion characters. These were all words he had to memorize…

“That’s why they say Energy Machinists are all monsters!” Garen could not help but swear. “No wonder I need the Energy Machine Imprint to continue to improve, without the save function of the Energy Machine Imprint, an average person could try for their entire life and it still would not be enough for them to memorize all this information.”

He rested for a while, and then started to let the computer flip the pages quickly, so his eyes could scan the information and save it into the Energy Machine Imprint. But the speed of the page-turning was extremely fast, several pages would have passed before an average person could even register what it was seeing.

This was the part of the Imprint that was responsible for computing power, the Computing Mod had a whole set of functions, including basic ones like saving, computing, and sending information. But just because he saved it, did not mean that it was his now, he still needed to memorize it to properly transfer it into his brain’s memory.

Put simply, this so-called Energy Machine Imprint was like a chip in the brain created from Willpower. It could help Energy Machinists perform all sorts of complicated operations.

But to Garen, who was himself an expert in biology, this was nothing. He already had a deep understanding of genetics from the Totem World.

To create an Energy Machine Imprint, he could use the gene fragments that already existed in the creatures, and then he could choose what to take and what to discard. But mostly, it involved him using his understanding of the creature’s gene chain to create a new gene fragment on his own, and then splicing it perfectly into the creature.

Cutting it, adding in the necessary features, standardizing the creature while specializing its abilities, and then reducing the energy consumption as well as the production times — these were all things Energy Machinists needed to do when creating an Energy Machine Imprint.

“The better you understand the creature, the more you will know about kind of gene fragments this type of creature can handle without falling apart, and at the same time, you also need to reach a new, delicate equilibrium.” Garen quickly understood the meaning behind this job.

It was indeed very difficult; to completely study a creature, including its genetic information, every stage of its physical development, its internal equilibrium, its endocrine exchange metabolism, and so one, would undeniably he a Herculean task.

But Garen had strong foundations in this, and after adding that to his terrifying computing power that was far beyond that of a regular Level Two Energy Machinist, he was soon trying his hand at modifying the Wild Wolf Imprint’s Production Mod. The first attempt ended in resolute failure.

But with the steadiness of his operating, as well as his using his computing power to fix it constantly, it was easy for him to gain full control of a mere Level One Imprint in no time. He just had to try twice, and succeeded easily.

At first Mincar had thought he would need a week to understand this, but he got it completely within two short hours.

Undoubtedly, having put so many potential points into his Intelligence, Garen was now an undisputed genius.

But learning his lesson from last time, after successfully producing a Wild Wolf Imprint that used less than 10% of the energy, he did not stop, and continued to modify the Imprint until it was practically unrecognizable, and even purposely made a few more difficult mistakes, putting on the appearance of what a normal, average Energy Machinist should be like.

It might not be a good thing to stand out too much too easily.

He checked the time, and only then did Garen realize that more than two hours had passed. Mincar had not returned yet, and he had finished reading the information, so he decided to study how to increase the upper limit of the number of cannon fodders he could control.

This included reducing the consumption of Willpower when controlling each unit, like Garen used just now. He could also use other items, like something that could amplify and support the Willpower, magnifying it, so that he could also reach his aim of a large-scale increase in the number of cannon fodders he could control.

Other than that, someone had also found the best combination to control the cannon fodder, using electronic chips to support the controlling, and the disadvantages of using that to replace Willpowers on most fronts, et cetera.

There was an essay there that mentioned this.

“Undeniably, the Energy Machinist is a powerful profession that developed from the ancient Modulation Engineers, and they are also the singular battle unit with the most potential in history, by a long shot! Even the most powerful Inherited Level pilot cannot match the potential of the Energy Machinist is large-scale battles. In that case, the upper limit of the creatures they can control has always been a huge problem plaguing low-level Energy Machinists. Most times, it is true that the cannon fodders can achieve unexpected effects. Therefore, to solve this problem, I would like to introduce a new idea. That is to self-distributed control units, L-units for short. This skill should be able to let Energy Machinists control a few of the other cores, and then using those cores to distribute control to many other cannon fodder creatures. A few of those cf creatures can also control cf creatures of the level beneath them, and as the layers go on, it will result in a powerful leveling system.’

This essay clearly defined the units, and Garen could not help but admire the technology of the time. Each of those peak-level scientists was the real deal, his only specialty was the little bit of background he had from the civilization of another world. In other aspects, he was lacking compared to these people.

“This is a level-based control system like that of the military, but it requires a great deal of resources to sustain. Compared to producing a squad like this, it would be more effective to use all those resources to properly train an elite task force.” Garen shook his head slightly.

This was followed by the detailed aspects of the essay, including the production process of a basic unit. But it was set aside because there were too many core techniques that were missing, in the Interstellar Age, there were too many weapons of mass destruction, so no matter how many cannon fodders you had, they could not match up to one peak-level powerhouse.

These skills naturally fell by the wayside, and no one provided them any more funds to advance the research. Even the author had probably more or less forgotten about it by now.

But when Garen read through it, he realized that the theory in this essay fit his Resonation Skill very well.

He could use the Resonation principle to create a control system, use his Willpower to control this system, and then use this system to connect to other energy sources, to control the large horde of cannon fodder underneath that.

“It’s perfect!”

Garen could not help a sigh of wonder, and then he quickly memorized this essay. But the essay also mentioned a production instrument that was necessary for creating the parts and the chip, as well an instrument to insert them safely, and finally they were missing a reliable control core communication skill, one that was not easily interfered with, and would not decrease with distance.

The first two were harder, but the last one could be easily substituted with Resonation Skill.

“That’s the one!” Garen turned off the website, feeling extremely pleased.

If he could just realize this skill, then he could break through the upper limit for the number of cannon fodders an Energy Machinist could control. In other words, as long as he had the materials, he could spawn Big Wild Wolves infinitely from the Biochemical Pool.