The Mech Touch

To Ves, spiritual fragments held a special meaning. Drawn from spiritual entities, the concentrated accumulation of energies inherited some of their character.

When Ves studied a spiritual fragment, he evaluated them by several different criteria.

He first observed their spiritual imprint. To his understanding, an imprint was both a brand and a carrier of someone's fundamental existence. It possessed mysterious properties and served an essential role in ensuring that someone maintained possession of their own spirituality.

When Ves studied the spiritual imprints of the three fragments, he noted that all of them appeared to be strong and vivid. They were harvested fresh from the corpses of the dark gods, though the fragments of the Inexorable One and the Blinding One were a tad weaker.

Considering that the Unending One showed no hesitation in devouring his fellow dark gods, Ves immediately formed a hypothesis.

"The Unending One specializes in devouring other spiritual entities. He likely possesses many means of efficiently breaking down foreign spiritual energy."

He could not help but remember what took place after the Unending One betrayed his fellow dark gods. The tentacled whale grew immensely in both size and power. Although it appeared that his rapid boost in strength produced many repercussions, it was a testament to its powerful digestion abilities that it could power itself up in battle.

Some interesting ideas came to mind as he speculatively regarded the fragment of the Unending One. While the dark god used to be his enemy, a remnant of the tentacled whale's existence had now fallen into his hands.

Considering his track record of what he did with other spiritual fragments, he could definitely find some way of converting it into his own strength!

The second criteria he paid attention to was the spiritual attributes contained within the fragments.

As far as he was aware of, no form of life embodied just a single attribute. Every living entity always possessed a mix of attributes. The purer ones possessed many different related attributes while more complex entities usually possessed a greater degree of diversity.

Each spiritual attribute reflected the character traits and the abilities of the entity in question.

By studying someone's spiritual attributes, Ves was able to understand the true nature of other people and entities to some degree. He didn't dare to look closely at someone whose power far surpassed his own for fear of exposing himself or suffering some kind of backlash.

For example, looking deep into the dark gods when they were at their prime was just asking for death!

"Well, I'm just looking at their fragments now, so it's okay." He muttered.

Each of the dark gods carried an air of antiquity. They had lived for eons and survived through many different ages. Living for so many years caused the dark gods to gain a lot of spiritual attributes, though most of their proportions were miniscule compared to their main attributes.

"It's the equivalent of dust."

Ves wasn't interested in these trivial attributes. They showed up so rarely that it took far too much effort to make use of them. He would rather turn his attention to the major attributes that defined the entities in question.

When he compared the attributes of all three fragments, he noted that much of them were identical.

For example, he sensed a set of attributes that felt dark, malicious and dangerous to him. "The evil within them is strong!"

Personally, he was reluctant to label something as evil, as many people and entities were usually righteous in their own way. Even his bastard of a cousin Ghanso fought for what he thought was right in his own twisted perspective.

Ves found it hard to rationalize the darkness that suffused the dark gods. Whether they descended into evil on their own accord or became contaminated by it, the three fragments posed a considerable threat.

If any of these fragments became conscious enough, he did not doubt that they would find some way to screw him over!

He could not afford to provide them with the same autonomy he granted to his other design spirits.

Different from hostile entities like Zeigra, the dark gods doubtlessly developed a wealth of methods and techniques that bordered on the arcane. Who knew what they would get up to if Ves left them alone.

"I need to process these fragments soon. Leaving them in their current state is just asking for trouble."

This was because unlike Nyxie, Ves did not possess any means of restraining them other than putting them in his B-stone lockbox.

Despite the filth marring the fragments, they possessed plenty of other attributes that attracted Ves like a moth to a flame.

As Ves had previously observed, the Unending One revolved around hunger, swallowing and digestion. The only downside was that the fragment suffered a higher degree of pollution than any other spiritual fragment that he encountered.

Evidently, the Unending One also absorbed some of the traits of its food by retaining a portion of their distinctive attributes. Ves did not see the advantages in this as the pollution probably warped the tentacled whale's personality even further.

"It's no wonder he turned against his fellow dark gods."

The spiritual fragments of the Inexorable One and the Blinding One both exhibited problems as well. Evidently, his mother had salvaged them from the Unending One's stomach as they were being digested.

"They're not in good shape." Ves muttered.

In general, none of the fragments were very pure. This was something that he paid a lot of attention to because it was much easier for him to leverage the advantages of purer attributes.

While Ves developed techniques that allowed him to excise the undesirable attributes from his fragments, the amount of waste was considerable.

Without the benefit of Nyxie, the Grand Dynamo and the serum, Ves had suddenly turned into a pauper in terms of spiritual energy!

Previously, he didn't care about how much spiritual energy he threw away whenever he processed his spiritual fragments.

It was different now. He needed to relearn how to value each and every unit of spiritual energy no matter how much it reeked. He had to adopt a new mindset oriented around efficiency and making the best use out of a limited supply of ingredients!

"My old methods are too wasteful. I can't just throw away potentially usable energy. This requires much further consideration." Ves rubbed his smooth-shaven chin.

He only realized up to this point how much he wasted in the past. As someone who initially started designing third-class mechs with heavy budget constraints, he felt as if he had completely forgotten himself when it came to spiritual engineering.

"Quantity matters."

This was the third criteria he watched out for. His mother harvested a considerably bigger fragment from the Unending One than the other two dark gods. She was quite generous, which Ves found strange because she was not much different from the Unending One when it came to her insatiable demand for juice.

"They're different but also similar now that I think about it. How is this possible?"

Both possessed different spiritual attributes. The Unending One reminded Ves of a hungry super-predator. The aquatic beast was very primitive but effective when it came to devouring and digesting his prey.

In contrast, his mother apparently developed a more abstract domain. It reminded him of the wonder and brutality of nature. Survival of the fittest reigned supreme and the weaker beings were destined to become nutrients to the strong.

Ves couldn't imagine what it took to develop such an elaborate spiritual orientation. It felt high-class to him, and there was definitely more to it than he observed from the surface.

"Despite that, she possesses the same devouring capabilities of the Unending One."

The main difference was that the Unending One digested his food by instinct while his mother likely had to take a more active approach.

In any case, the Inexorable One and the Blinding One did not possess these devouring capabilities. Ves wondered how they managed to grow up to this point if they did not rely as heavily on predation.

"Is it related to their supposed divinity?"

Now that was a can of worms that Ves did not like to open. At the end of the Battle against the Abyss, the distance between the material realm and the imaginary realm had become closer than ever before.

This highly-unusual condition produced numerous anomalous effects. One of them was that Ves gained the capability to peer deeper into the imaginary realm than ever before.

He discovered a facet of the imaginary realm that he had never noticed before. He not only observed the huge and powerful torrents of faith, but also managed to tap into them, if only for a moment.

This faith-based energy was very weird to Ves! There were so many aspects about it that put it beyond his capabilities. The quantity and quality of the faith surrounding the Holy Sons was so immense that his intuition rang alarm bells as he got close.

Back then, he deeply felt he would burn up if he actually embraced the potent faith energy!

"Obviously, it's a form of high-level energy that I'm not qualified to handle in my current state." He concluded after recalling his mother's reminder.

He didn't know whether this faith energy was actually different from spiritual energy. He suspected that they were actually the same thing. It was just that the spiritual feedback flowing through the imaginary realm was so dense and potent that its properties were incomparable to regular spiritual energy.

Perhaps only the entities that were called gods were capable of doing so. It would explain how a tiny luminar alien managed to grow so powerful and huge.

Ves would be lying if he said he was not interested in tapping into this huge energy source. There was so much of it and its quality surpassed the energy he was able to derive from the likes of Qilanxo and Nyxie.

Yet Ves was deeply suspicious of it as well. if embracing this faith energy distorted him to the point where he became as degenerate as the dark gods, he would rather stay away from it. Just because he wanted to harness more energy didn't mean he felt eager to poke his finger into a power socket!

As for deeper implications like whether this energy created or sustained gods, he dismissed these questions. The existence of the immense amount of faith energy flowing through the imaginary realm merely reinforced his views that faith was actually an extortion racket!

Spiritually-powerful entities took advantage of the power and information disparity between themselves and their worshippers to harvest faith.

If the unknowing sheep knew the truth that they weren't devoting themselves to actual gods, they would probably find some way to take power into their own hands!

"I'll never become like them!" He vowed!

Whether the other Holy Sons embraced the powerful faith energy or not did not matter to Ves. He was different from everyone else and always followed his own path. He instinctively felt repelled by anything related to faith and religion.

That said, Ves could not deny that he was a Holy Son anymore. No matter what he did in the future, he would probably come in touch with faith energy sooner or later.

He shook his head. "That's too far away. In normal space, the two realms are too far apart for me to venture into the deeper layers of the imaginary realm."

He turned his attention back to the three fragments. He put two of the P-stones holding the fragments into his B-stone lockbox before stowing it away. He kept the P-stone that contained the fragment of the Blinding One and took it back to his stateroom.

He wanted to delve deeper into it. He had long developed a fascination for the luminar race and wanted to see if he could get something useful out of the remnant.

"Let's see what you are made of, little fragment!"