The Mech Touch

The observations made by Ves and Ranya had shocked their entire views! Both descended into a silent stupor as their minds went into overdrive to parse the incredible discoveries they made.

Major Verle looked at them both with a perplexed expression.

"Nerds." He muttered. "As soon as they see something shiny, they get all lost."

As a former command officer, he had encountered sights like these before. He knew that there was no way of getting the two back in a short amount of time.

Right now, Ves and Ranya were fully consumed by the incredible insights they harvested from their brief observation!

Both of them realized that the serum was substantially different from what they imagined!

Not only that, but whatever they saw in it related very much to their respective interests!

Though Ves expected the serum to rock Ranya's boat, he never expected that his design philosophy and spiritual mastery possessed any relation to this highly-advanced product!

He held the vial with an amazed sense of wonder and began to extend his spiritual senses once again.

This time, he approached his inspection with much more care. He didn't barge his senses into the vial this time, but merely approached the edge and tried to get a faint impression of the majesty contained within.

After a bit of fumbling and exploration, he managed to gain a sense of the potent energy locked within.

He had never seen such a high concentration of spiritual energy in his life! This small vial contained enough energy to wipe out his Spirituality in an instant! There was simply no comparison!

That wasn't all. Aside from the extremely dense compression of spiritual energy, its spiritual attributes were remarkably similar.

"It's practically filled with life!"

The spiritual attributes all related to life in so many subtle varieties that Ves couldn't even tell what made them special. He had thought that life was rather simple and absolute, but the truth he saw within the vial made him realize that life came in vastly more forms than he conceived!

Though Ves wasn't able to inspect any of the life-related attributes in detail, he tried his best to sample the flavors from the periphery.

After some time, he roughly determined a few details.

First, the spiritual energy contained within the serum consisted completely of life attributes. No other attributes such as those related to mechs or perfections ruined its purity!

Second, the spiritual energy consisted of at least a hundred spiritual attributes! Each different attribute brought something different to the table while still remaining highly compatible with the other attributes!

It was like creating blended whiskey out of a large number of single malt whiskeys.

The goal was to achieve a balance where the resulting taste of the drink was substantially better.

What the creators of this serum had accomplished was roughly similar, but on a much grander scale!

Ves recognized the spiritual component inside the vial as a supreme application of spiritual engineering that could scarcely be accomplished on the fly!

To blend so many different spiritual attributes in such precise proportions and make them coexist and even interact with each other.

The result was a product of spiritual engineering that fueled all kinds of strange and unknown reactions!

As he continued to study the mysterious patterns of spiritual energy, he made a couple of guesses.

Perhaps the attributes kept the energy level of the serum constant.

Perhaps the attributes kept the spiritual energy compressed.

Above all, Ves was certain that they were essential to the mysterious processes that enabled a human to prolong their lives!

Ves made a very daring hypothesis. To extend someone's lifespan, it wasn't enough to upgrade their bodies.

They also needed to upgrade their spirits!

Why else would life-prolonging treatment serum contain such a high concentration of spiritual energy?

In a galaxy that was largely devoid of it, there was no way the MTA and CFA was able to generate it as easily as conventional energy!

Ves realized that he had come into contact with an unimaginably sensitive secret.

The life-prolonging treatment serum that originated from the CFA possessed an undeniable connection to the Five Scrolls Compact!

As the masters of biotechnology and spirituality in human space, the enormous cult had supposedly invented the treatments in the first place. The nature of the vial strongly hinted that this claim was true!

He never expected the serum to be a product of spiritual engineering as well as pharmaceutical engineering.

He always assumed that it was just a simple application of high technology. Even if the Big Two stole the technology from the Compact, they must have surely innovated it further until they incorporated their own methods!

"Maybe a lot has changed over the past three centuries." He whispered.

It had to be said that this serum was technically an outdated product. Three centuries was enough time for the best biotech researchers of the Big Two to make huge strides in developing better serums. Perhaps the third-round serum offered by the Rim Guardians in exchange for an astronomical amount of merits shared no resemblance to the older version that Ves held in the palm of his hands!

However, the fact that these serums seemed to depend so much on such an extreme concentration of life-attributed spiritual energy said otherwise.

The people who created these serums wouldn't add something so incredible if it wasn't needed!

The ultimate conclusion that Ves could make from this observation was something he could hardly wrap his mind around.

The serum was alive.

Yes. Though the extreme concentration of spiritual energy didn't resemble anything that Ves had seen before, he made enough contact with it to realize that it wasn't as inert as regular spiritual energy.

In a spiritual sense, Ves could quite confidently state that the serum was alive! Not only that, but the vitality it bore was of such a high strength that it handedly overpowered the life he infused in every single mech design to date!

"This substance is alive!"

"What?!" Ves turned to Dr. Ranya. "What did you say?!"

Her astonished eyes looked up the projected readout of her handheld scanner. "It's unlike anything I've seen before. This serum is not an ordinary medicine. It's.. organic..and alive, in a sense. It contains at least some of the characteristics that are ascribed to life."

"Such as..?"

"There are signs pointing to the presence of growth, reproduction, homeostasis, metabolism and more. This serum is made up of a large amount of tiny organic and inorganic particles, all of which temporarily combine into greater structures that act akin to cells and even organs!"

"What does that all mean?" Ves frowned. "Does that mean you can cultivate more of it out of this sample?"

She immediately shook her head. "Perhaps it's possible, and perhaps that is how this serum was originally made, but it is far from simple. At the very least, it's impossible for us to obtain all of the high-grade ingredients needed to produce more!"

"Ah."

It was a futile notion anyway. There was no way a substance as rare and precious as this could be reproduced in some kind of cheap lab!

"Did you learn anything else from your scans?"

She nodded obsessively. "I have detected the traces of many interesting organic compounds, most if not all of them come from plants! Even if I'll never be able to unlock the secrets to reproducing this serum, I can still derive a huge amount of insights by studying the nature and interaction of these organic compounds!"

"What use would that be? If you can't make more serum, then what is the point?"

"You don't know anything!" She huffed in a similar manner as Gloriana. "There are too many applications to count. If I can decipher the operation of even one of the sublime organic processes that take place within the serum, I can develop all kinds of flora-based augmentations! Don't forget that life-prolonging treatment serum is not something that is meant to exist by itself. The life contained within that vial is designed to blend with a human body!"

That statement was far more literal than Ranya realized. The serum was literally infused with the energies of life!

As Ves considered what he learned, he began to feel a bit troubled. He intuitively guessed that studying the serum on a spiritual level would allow him to make substantial gains in his understanding of spiritual engineering.

While he wasn't delusional enough to think he'd be able to reproduce such a valuable substance, he believed he was in the same situation as the Wodin doctor.

As long as he managed to figure out one of the many complex operations of this living concentration of spiritual energy, he could apply what he learned in all kinds of ways!

To the both of them, the vial contained the secrets of life.

If the serum was a book, most of its contents were incomprehensible to them. However, as long as they studied it extensively enough, they might be able to decipher some portions of a single page!

Though Ves realized the incredible gains that he could make, he forcefully drew himself back.

He was a mech designer. Only someone like Dr. Jutland would feel passionate about studying the intricacies of the serum!

As for Ves, his passion always lay in mechs. His design philosophy reflected this undeniable truth. His design seed wasn't only based around the attributes of life, but also the attributes of mechs!

Though the processes surrounding the life-prolonging treatment serum held an undeniable attraction to him, he severely doubted whether any of the insights he could gain was relevant to his profession.

If it didn't improve his ability to design mechs, why should he waste his time on studying so arcane?

Researching this vial might even distort his design philosophy and lead him astray!

This was what Ves feared the most. Right now, he believed in his design philosophy, and was determined to carry it forth!

"Hmm…" He slowly and reverently placed the vial back into the box. "I'll be keeping this serum safe and secure."

"You can't!" Dr. Ranya grew desperate! "I need it! Please, Mr. Larkinson! I can figure out so many high-level operations if I can study it for a year, no, a decade!"

Ves sighed and shook his head. "Didn't you extract a tiny sample? You can study it in your free time as long as you make sure you keep it confidential. In fact, hand over that scanner to me. I'll keep it with me until we build a secure biolab on this ship."

"No! That's too onerous!"

Ves did not budge on this matter. The Scarlet Rose was currently the most secure location to study the serum. Not even Ranya's own starship was as secure! Who knew how many backdoors the Wodin Dynasty built into the Frozen Leaf!

No matter how much Ranya pleaded, the power dynamic between them had reversed.

She was no longer a superior Hexer imposing her will on a boy from a lesser state.

Ves had become the patriarch of a rapidly-growing clan, while Ranya was merely a newly-adopted member of the same organization!

Aside from that, Ves had already gained far too much prominence to be considered inferior by someone of her stature.

All of this meant that all of the female supremacy instilled by her upbringing in the Hegemony had no effect anymore!

"I'll tell Gloriana!" She finally huffed!

"You agreed to keep the serum a secret." Ves shot back. "I told you that you are not allowed to pass it on to my girlfriend. Will you break your oath?"

As soon as the thought came to mind, Ranya suddenly grew uncomfortable! A sense of threat and guilt suffused her mind!

The strange part of it all was that the threat she sensed didn't come from the clan patriarch.

Instead, she felt as if it came from the book he held!

"I.. understand. My apologies. I will guard this secret."

The sense of threat subsided as soon as she said those words.

"Good." He nodded and peered at her carefully. "It isn't enough to keep your mouth shut. Don't act sloppy and write any notes that others can easily hack into or something. The entire point of building a new biolab here is because we have to ensure that every single tool you use to study this serum won't act as a source of propagation to unknown parties! Now give me that bioscanner so that I can secure the sample and feed the device to Lucky."

"Meow?"