The Mech Touch

Ves became speechless for a long time.

Was this gift valuable?

Undoubtedly.

The newly discovered hyper that had apparently been bestowed with the simple name of Ice Fire Rock was a rare manifestation of a medium energy environment.

Just as its name suggested, it had an affinity with the attribute of ice. Blinky could clearly perceive the energy vortex surrounding the rock that was constantly drawing in ice energy.

Ice was considered to be a derivative of water for whatever reason, so Ves possessed a slightly greater than average understanding of this attribute. The Oceancaller did not excel in this concept, but it was clearly familiar with this particular elemental expression.

Ves actually found the ice attribute to be a bit weird. It was a composite between the concepts of low temperature and water. He would have thought that the frost attribute should be more common in nature, but apparently everything had to be interpreted through the lens of the five classical elements as much as possible.

Whatever the case, ice was a fairly powerful element for cultivators to specialize in. It was a good way to apply the power of water in more pronounced effects.

Ice excelled in both offensive and defense. From causing bodies to lose so much heat at once that they turned into frozen popsicles to generating thick ice walls to block incoming attacks, wielders of ice naturally belonged on the battlefield.

However, ice had a lot of other uses as well. It could be used to keep people cool in a hot environment. It could also be used to forcibly stabilize overheating components. As long as the cultivator was clever enough, there were many ways to make use of ice outside combat!

The Ice Fire Rock did not simply freeze stuff, though.

A normal ice hyper would have simply cooled the temperature around it in a uniform manner.

The object that Gloriana obtained through an auction house deviated from this pattern by channeling its freezing power to anything that touched its odd blue flame.

Blue flames usually signified greater heat than regular orange flames, but this was different. The fire produced by the hyper did not generate anything that reminded Ves of warmth.

Instead, it continually drained the air it came into contact with of heat!

This was why the living room quickly became colder as the Ice Fire Rock appeared out of its enclosed container.

The advanced environmental regulation systems quickly became more active and pumped in additional heat in order to compensate for the inexplicable drop in temperature.

However, the room only became warmer for a brief moment of time before the Ice Fire Rock started to produce an even stronger flame!

It was as if the injection of additional heat affronted it on a personal level!

Ves and his children watched on with amazement as the larger and more violent flame became even more determined to such out all the thermal energy from the room!

"Howl"'

Blinky carefully observed the strange hyper. The companion spirit was perceptive enough to obtain a clear view of the reaction promoted by the Ice Fire Rock.

Ves suddenly stiffened as he realized what was happening.

"The Ice Fire Rock is naturally converting conventional thermal energy into ice E energy!"

Gloriana proudly nodded. "Exactly! Did you think I would spend 1,300,000 MTA credits in vain? This properly alone turns the Ice Fire Rock into a valuable research object, especially for a so-called 'spiritual engineer' such as yourself. This rare new hyper contains a natural blueprint on how you can convert heat into E energy. As long as you are able to replicate it, you can generate artificial E energy with any potential power source!"

This was an amazing find. It instantly reminded Ves of his recent exchange with Master Ginevra Hubert-Colmain.

Such a rock undoubtedly fell right into her ball park! Ves even had the impulse to call her right away and solicit her opinion on this odd hyper.

Ves felt a lot better about his wife's profligate expenditure. She might be a lot less conservative than him when it came to spending money, but she wasn't stupid. She was at least able to justify her purchases with logical arguments.

As the room's environmental control system continually started to work harder in order to return to the designated temperature, its programmed resistance seemed to incite the Ice Fire Rock into burning even harder!

The blue flames became twice as big as before as more heat was being drained from the surrounding air than ever!

Frosty condensation started to form on the floating bottom plate that held the rock. A real chill started to spread across the room as the Ice Fire Rock never seemed to run out of energy in its attempt to produce negative entropy.

"This hyper... is actually using heat to produce cold." Ves uttered. "What is amazing about this is that the process is so efficient that no excess heat is being generated at all. If there is, then it would just get fed back into the cycle to the point there is no waste anymore. The net result is that the process is nearly too percent efficient!"

Ves realized that the Ice Fire Rock was very aptly named because it actually made use of both ice and fire-attributed E energy to sustain its elegant operation!

It was a hyper that encapsulated the duality between two fairly opposing elements.

Normally, an attempt to forcibly combine ice and fire attributes together would either produce a violent explosion or cause the two to produce anti-synergy.

This did not happen in this case. The natural processes induced by this magical hyper effectively utilized the power of fire to grant the rock the ability to treat heat energy as input rather than output.

This was a miracle!

Anyone with a basic understanding of science and engineering easily understood that it was nearly impossible to attain too percent efficiency in any process.

Wheels would turn forever and mechs would never produce any heat when they started to exert themselves if the opposite was the case.

Every single move and process inevitably generated waste energy which usually came in the form of heat, which was usually difficult to recycle into more useful applications.

This was why heatsinks were always necessary in any power-hungry device. The more energy they consumed, the hotter they became!

There was no way to prevent this from happening through conventional means. It became an increasingly more limiting factor when mechs became more powerful and sophisticated.

Third-class mechs usually worried the least about this problem. Their power reactors were the weakest of all and could not support the operation of overly demanding mech parts. They could get away with utilizing cheap but inferior heatsinks to keep the machine relatively functional for a time.

Second-class mechs started to juggle with this problem a lot more. Energy weapons and flight systems were the main culprits of rapid heat build-up. Their heat management systems needed to be a lot more effective in order to prevent the machines from melting from the inside, and that usually required the use of much more powerful and expensive heatsinks.

It was also why Ves had never abandoned his use of luminar crystal technology!

The alien tech may be weird and indecipherable in many ways, but its greatest strength was that it was remarkably efficient when it came to producing energy beams.

Luminar crystal weapons generated less waste heat than conventional energy weapons, which meant that it imposed a lighter burden to the heat management systems. This granted many advantages to his mechs, such as being able to fire more powerful energy beams without worrying about overheating!

Ves already started to come up with many different ideas on how to make use of this Ice Fire Rock.

He first wanted to study its operation and see if he could artificially replicate it in whole or in part. Just being able to create a device that could directly convert heat into E energy was invaluable in itself!

It did not matter if the imitation device could produce all kinds of E energy or just ice E energy. Ves could make lots of use of this reaction in either case!

Gloriana smiled more and more as she saw that her husband became fascinated by this wonderful gift.

Her obvious pleasure reminded Ves of the cost to obtain this expensive treasure.

"Wait a minute." Ves suddenly said. "According to our schedules, you probably attended the auction in Vulit well before I started making gains in Bortele. You spent a lot of money in a time when the Larkinson Clan's financial position was much weaker. The LMC's sales have begun to nosedive because we haven't brought our existing product lines to the new mech generation. Our only major source of income is the revenue obtained from selling all of the salvage from the Trailblazer Expedition, but much of that money is already reserved for investments related to strengthening our fleet and setting up a lot of new branches. Our cash is being drained almost as quickly as it is pouring into our accounts. How can you possibly pull 1.3 million MTA credits out of nowhere? Even if we had that much money floating in one of our accounts, I am pretty sure I set a limit and an alert."

His wife looked at him as if he was stupid.

"Poor Ves. We are no longer paupers. When you became a tier 3 galactic citizen and moved to this planet, our net worth has already become higher than ever! The value of this first-class base with its materializer and all of its other first-class instruments is already astronomical. This does not even take into account the worth of all of our other assets, from the Spirit of Bentheim to all of our intellectual property. If it is necessary, we can selectively sell them in a hurry in order to raise a large amount of cash, but that is completely unnecessary. We can just use our net worth to expand our credit line."

"You mean..."

"Do you remember the Yem-Tar Trade and Commerce Bank?" She grinned. "We have been using its banking services for years. The Great Severing caused severe disruptions to the entire banking sector, which made it a lot more difficult to borrow large sums of money because everyone's assets and liabilities had become split between two different galaxies. The turmoil has ended by now. Yem-Tar has a good understanding of our finances, so I hardly encountered any delays when I requested it to expand our line of credit. From what I have been able to gather, the bank isn't worried at all how much money a tier 3 galactic citizen wants to borrow. They always have ways of paying back their debts. In fact, it is more favorable for the bank ton continually collect interest payments from all of its well-heeled clients. "

That was certainly true. Tier 3 galactic citizens were bigshots without exception. None of them reached such a high position without working hard enough to rise above their peers.

However, Ves was still uncomfortable with loosening his previous spending limits.

He suddenly narrowed his eyes in suspicion. Given his wife's proclivities, she definitely purchased way more than this interesting gift!

"How much money did you actually spend during your trip to Vulit?"

Gloriana crossed her arms. "It is not much compared to our current financial strength. There is no need for you to worry about it. If I knew that you had managed to become a large shareholder of Isthmus Manufacturing, I wouldn't have been so restrained in my spending! It is not every day that I can visit a location as prosperous as the Vulit Central Star Node."

"How. Much?"

"Around 517 million MTA credits."

"What?!"

"Our credit limit at the time was much higher than that! You should thank me for being frugal under the circumstances!"

"How much interest does Yem-Tar charge?"

"Its APR for our credit line is currently set at 8.9 APR."

"Dammnit Gloriana! That means we have to pay 46 million MTA credits on paying off the interest alone! That is wasted money that could have been spent on more useful investments, such as refurbishing our combat carriers or building new mech factories! What the hell did you spend all of this money for, anyway?!"

"Handbags, perfumes, toys..."