The Mech Touch

"How..?"

Ves was utterly shocked at what he was looking at. How could the Four Aspects of Lufa defy their own expiration date and remain alive long after they reached their natural lifespan?

"Meow?"

Lucky floated around Ves as if he was an orbiting moon. The cat looked confused. Why was Ves making a big deal about these statues? Didn't they look the same as before?

"That's exactly what's the problem!" Ves shouted to his cat. "They're not supposed to look the same! Their lifespan was three months! Even if there is a bit of wiggle room to that estimate due to the influence of different variables, they shouldn't have lasted more than five months at most! They should have been in their graves already!"

This was a new and unknown phenomena that happened right under his nose! Who knew what his statues had turned into after months of precipitation.

At first, Ves remained on guard. He kept his distance and carefully scanned and observed the four statues with care and patience.

His instincts never warned him of any threat, and nothing shot out towards him or anything. It became increasingly clear that his fears of facing monsters of his own making were overblown.

"Why did I freak out? These aren't even mechs. They're just statues!"

The Aspects of Lufa differed substantially from his ordinary mechs by how they were able to move.

His mechs contained all of the internal mechanical parts necessary to move their limbs. They could even fly if they were equipped with a flight system.

In contrast, the statues in front of him shouldn't even be able to move! Though he did produce variants of some of the statues that were built like bots on the inside, those were just disposable decoys that had all been eliminated. The only ones left were the original ones sitting right in this compartment!

Once Ves confirmed that the statues were completely inanimate and did not pose a threat to him, he relaxed a bit and began to approach this case as an investigation.

First head to find out what exactly happened to them while they were lying in storage.

Ves first called up the security footage from the monitoring system and rapidly skimmed through many days of no activity. No one had sneaked up to the statues to tamper with them or anything. That ruled out the possibility of a third party deliberately messing with the organic tissue.

He then performed a more thorough scan on the statues. He moved closer and began to float around all four statues while holding his Vulcaneye as it performed a thorough investigation of their physical makeup.

"Interesting."

The solid inner base that was made out of inorganic materials was completely normal. The human tissue that had been molded to the exterior were also largely identical to normal samples.

There was just one strange point. The organic tissue remained at the peak of their health. While this was not particularly impressive for ordinary cloned biological matter, what made this case a lot weirder was that any biomatter only maintained their optimal condition for a relatively limited period of their natural lifespan.

This was especially the case for organic tissue that was not supported by an active replenishment system such as a human body or a biomech!

Since the Aspects of Lufas weren't biomechs, they didn't contain any mechanisms to regenerate or replenish aging and decaying biomatter. The cells should have exhausted themselves and dried out akin to dead skin cells.

Yet for some inexplicable reason, the cells of the Aspects of Lufa appeared as if they were never affected by the passage of time!

It was as if with each day that passes, the cells acted as if they were in a time loop or something.

Ves clutched one his hands through his hair as he tried to figure out the logic behind this unexplainable phenomenon. "It doesn't make any sense!"

While he wasn't a biotech researcher, he didn't need to consult Dr. Ranya to know that low-quality biomatter shouldn't have lasted this long. Even his scanner told him that the tissue was likely 'only' 17 days old.

"Seventeen days my butt! It's been a year since I departed from the Life Research Association!"

If the situation wasn't so frighteningly unknown, he would have felt a bit more elated at discovering a real instance of rejuvenation or functional immortality.

As it was, Ves did not like it when his products — especially his more dangerous ones — were subject to unknown influences that changed and mutated them in unpredictable directions!

"I don't have a problem with my products growing stronger, but I haven't anticipated any of this!"

Ves began to speculate what might have caused the flesh of the Aspects to become rejuvenated.

He couldn't help but think back on how life-prolonging treatments worked. These expensive and exclusive procedures relied heavily on serums that were produced in such a way that they contained an abundant amount of universal life-attributed spiritual energy.

If someone had injected a lot of raw serum into the organic tissue of the Aspects of Lufa, then Ves would have accepted that explanation. However, there were no signs that an unknown party had ever done that.

"There's no reason for anyone to squander expensive serum on a quartet of cheap organic statues that I can easily reproduce!"

The Four Aspects of Lufa may be the first organic totems that he had ever made, but they weren't particularly special when it came to their design and physical composition. He used bog-standard materials that were conveniently on hand during the time he was stuck on the surface of Prosperous Hill VI.

He did not insert any special ingredients in their structures like he did with the statue of the Superior Mother.

Ves inserted several unique and spiritually significant ingredients in the latter that allowed it to birth a powerful new ancestral spirit. All of the abnormalities that took place with the statues such as the fact that it drew an unexpected lightning storm could all be explained by the remarkable ingredients he used as well as the intervention of his powerful mother.

Yet what about the four statues? Ves didn't recall putting in any serum or other extravagant ingredients. The only design spirit that was connected to them was Lufa.

Was he the source of all of the changes?

That was a worrisome thought. His spiritual products as well as his natural design spirits generally didn't mess with reality.

For one, it was quite difficult and costly for them to reach beyond the spiritual realm and affect the material realm directly. Unless they had a very good reason and lots of spiritual energy to squander, they usually didn't bother to show up and instead focused on their own growth.

The instance where the Superior Mother descended onto the workshop in order to bless the fetus growing in Gloriana's belly was already an extravagant move!

Yet it was this move that Ves was currently thinking about when he tried to come up with an explanation of what happened to the statues.

"Did Lufa empower the Four Aspects in a similar fashion?"

It sounded plausible, if unlikely. Lufa's spiritual domain wasn't based on life, so his spiritual energy affected matter in a different way. Perhaps his purity was able to rejuvenate organic matter but that sounded extremely unlikely.

He decided that the best way for him to get some answers was to get them directly from the most likely subject!

Ves concentrated his mind and began to contact the design spirit through his Spirituality. Once he established a line, he wordlessly conveyed his question.

Lufa did not react with surprise of what had happened to the Four Aspects that were based around him. As the source of their glows, he had to have been aware of what was going on with the statues.

"You really didn't mess with them in a particular way?"

The design spirit firmly stuck to that story. Ves didn't think that Lufa was lying. The act was against the spiritual product's nature and it was hard to hide dishonesty through a direct spiritual connection.

After asking a number of related questions, Ves reluctantly concluded that the Angel of Tranquility hadn't tampered with the statues in any way.

"Then how did these statues manage to remain in such a youthful condition?"

Lufa supplied Ves with an answer that sounded unbelievable.

"Say again?"

Ves already heard it the first time and Lufa was not the sort of spirit to lie or joke around. He just couldn't accept what he heard.

According to the design spirit himself, the Four Aspects of Lufa became empowered through the worship they received from many different people.

"This…"

Ves recalled how he had utilized the statues during his time on Prosperous Hill VI. He made heavy use of the Aspect of Tranquility and Aspect of Healing to treat and soothe the Lifer refugees who had become victims to the civil war that broke out in the Life Research Association.

Though it had been a long time since he left the place behind, many of the Lifers who originally basked in the glows of the different statues still retained their memories of what it was like to experience the sensations.

If Lufa's answer was correct, then these survivors were not only reminiscing about the experience, but also showing their gratitude to the Aspects by worshipping them as if they were divine!

"This is crazy!"

The Four Aspects may have profoundly changed their lives for the better, but these stupid people didn't have to go as far as to worship the tools that treated their traumas!

To Ves, it sounded as stupid as worshipping a fire extinguisher just because it saved them from getting burned. A tool was a tool and even if the statues were organic and alive in a sense didn't mean that they were anything greater!

He did not dare to accept this conclusion for now. He had way too little proof of what was actually going on. A single source, even one as credible as Lufa, could still be wrong due to perspective bias and limited understanding.

There were several incongruities with this simple answer.

First, how could the worship of several thousands or at most tens of thousands of average people lead to such a profound transformation to the Four Aspects?

They had not only changed from a physical perspective, but also a spiritual one! Each of them were a bit more 'alive' than before, and Ves had only seen this in mechs and objects that were being personally used by their respective pilots and owners.

Second, if misguided religious worship was related to their empowerment, then how come all four of the Aspects became empowered instead of just the two most public ones?

The Aspect of Tranquility and the Aspect of Healing were by far the ones that had been exposed most often to other people.

The Aspect of Rationality barely got any use at all and most people who were able to view the Aspect of Transcendence in person were already dead!

"Did the deaths of those test subjects feed the Aspect of Transcendence? Did I accidentally sacrifice human lives to fuel the growth of an unholy monstrosity?"

Ves shuddered. This was a ludicrous fantasy! He would have noticed if a notable amount of spiritual energy transferred from the exploding corpses to the Aspect of Transcendence.

"Could it be.. that the worship generated from the slow but significant sales of the Sanctuary Treatment Editions directed back to the initial models?"

This was a more plausible explanation, though it still sounded unlikely. Any spiritual feedback  generated by the satisfied patients that had been treated with the few Sanctuary variants that had been sold to various treatment institutions should have flowed directly to Lufa.

"None of these answers are sufficient."

If Ves wanted to get to the bottom of this phenomenon, he needed to conduct a more proper study.

He shrugged. "I don't have time for this. I'll just throw the Four Aspects onto Ranya's new secret research department and see what it can make out of them. I really want to know how their disposable organic matter is able to defy the passage of time."