The Mech Touch

The Red Ocean Dwarf Galaxy's native alien races all sought to attain godhood by integrating as much phasewater into their bloodstreams as possible. This was extremely difficult and could kill any organism without exceptional measures and a lot of risk-taking.

Nonetheless, anyone who succeeded in this wild attempt would gain power far beyond the limits of their race!

If the path to godhood was defined by transcending one's racial limitations, then the act of injecting phasewater into an organic body definitely met the definition!

Having met a genuine phase lord in the form of the Trampler of Stars, Ves found it extremely impressive that a nunser warlord was able to fight against an ace mech like the Mars to a standstill.

Patriarch Reginald Cross had pushed himself far beyond what any ordinary human could bear, and he was also a rare talent in the mech piloting profession who had received personal tutelage from his deceased father, who also used to be an ace pilot!

By combining his prodigious willpower with an extremely expensive and powerful masterwork ace mech, Reginald and the Mars produced insane synergies, allowing this fantastic combination to challenge many threatening warships by themselves!

Back in the old galaxy, it would have been ludicrous to think that a single human could challenge such a powerful mech.

Though Ves knew better now that he had witnessed the might of the upper echelon of the FIve Scrolls Compact, that did not take away the fact that it was improbable for any organism to be able to match the power of a fully functional ace mech.

The phase lords of the Red Ocean managed to do so! Ves understood the power of these native self-proclaimed gods a lot better than anyone else because he had inadvertently started to evolve in this direction as well!

Ves and more notably Veronica had both been infused with different concentrations of phasewater.

Though Ves barely benefited from this change due to replacing just 0.01 percent of his blood with phasewater, it still gave him a taste of what he could become if he chose to continue to evolve as a phase lord!

Veronica boasted a much more impressive 7.1 percent concentration of phasewater in her cybernetic body. It was a pity that his cyborg cat was hiding in the middle of Block M at this time.

Not only had the people assigned to Block M been spared from getting kidnapped, Ves seriously doubted whether the controller of this pocket space facility possessed the means to break through his transcendent cyborg cat's formidable anti-detection capabilities!

In fact, he should be grateful that his living divine artifact remained in normal space. Veronica provided him with a strong guarantee that he would be able to claw himself back to life if his main body failed to make it out of this ancient pocket space alive.

He would rather have Veronica in the same space, though. If she managed to utilize her material mimicking abilities to circumvent the security measures of these alien facilities and escape her cell, then she would have been able to roam the other areas and find a way to free the other captives!

The absence of his most powerful cat to date limited a lot of his options, but that did not mean he had reached a dead end.

He still had plenty of cards up his sleeve. The most valuable of them all was entering System Space.

Having accumulated a lot of Ascension Points due to completing one Mission after another, he could do anything from buying a ready-made weapon from the Divine Bazaar, to purchasing a powerful metal and proceeding to forge it into a serviceable greatsword to give Ketis a much more effective means of hacking through walls.

He was reluctant to resort to the Mech Designer System right away. Those Ascension Points were hard to come by and he would rather save them up for a powerful Enlightenment Fruit that could open fantastic new possibilities for his mech designs.

This was why he was trying to think of more economical solutions to get out of this cell.

He turned towards his gem cat, whose teeth still ached after he tried and failed to bite through the stone floor.

"Miaow miaow miaow."

"Meow… meow…"

Clixie tried her best to console Lucky by licking his metallic face.

It appeared that Ves could not expect any help from the gem cat for the time being. The ancient alien cells were so well constructed that they even countered the properties of Lucky's phasing and material chomping abilities!

Ves became more and more intrigued at the nature of the materials that made up the cells. He refused to believe it was cut out of a rocky mountain. The walls had to be manufactured.

He even thought about how he could claim this powerful material for himself!

If he could break this entire facility down and move all of the blocks of stone to his clan, then he could utilize it to build the most impenetrable fortress in Davute.

Better yet, he might even be able to use it to build a mech or a starship that was practically impenetrable against both phase lords and phase whales!

"Let's not get ahead of myself." He whispered to himself.

There was no way he could realize any of these dreams if he and his relatives still remained stuck in the same place!

In order to get back on track, he inspected his own gear. Aside from equipping himself with the Unending Regalia with all of the auxiliary features that came with it, he also carried a few of the tools he regularly kept on his person.

The mech designers stuck in the same cell were already making good use of his Vulcaneye multiscanner, which was probably the most useful piece of auxiliary gear in his possession.

Aside from that, he carried the Hammer of Brilliance, the Hammer of Melody, a signal jammer, his comm, an emergency one-use teleporter, a pouch of Lucky's gems and several other knick knacks not worth mentioning.

Each of these tools could play a useful role in the right circumstances, but none of them possessed the power to get him and his people out of this confining space!

For example, Ves was pretty sure that this entire facility inhibited teleportation unless it was done by its controllers. Forcibly making use of his teleporter would either waste this expensive gadget or produce a fatal outcome that would certainly be ugly!

"Wait a minute."

Lucky and Clixie weren't the only cats at his disposal.

They also had their companion spirits!

"Blinky. It's time for you to shine again."

Mrow?

The purple Star Cat emerged from his forehead. His intangible furry body looked pleasantly plump and the light trails coursing through his body were bright and streamlined.

Blinky had returned to his best state, which was good news to Ves as his companion spirit was not only able to manipulate spiritual energy, but also the much more materially potent Worclaw energy!

"What is that, patriarch?"

"Wow, it's Blinky! He's so cool!"

Though Ves took a risk by exposing his companion spirit to the party responsible for kidnapping him and a lot of people, he was pretty sure that no outsiders were monitoring him at the moment.

Lucky had already sniffed the surroundings for any alien monitoring systems, but the cell was completely solid aside from featuring miniscule air vents.

Ves' instincts also did not warn him that he was being stared at. Sure, it may be unreliable to base his actions on an unexplainable hunch, but he was feeling pretty confident that there were no direct methods to monitor what went on inside this cell.

After all, any electronic components represented possible weak points that extremely powerful and resourceful phase lords could exploit.

Ves did not bother to waste his time on introducing and explaining Blinky to the clansmen who weren't initiated to his secrets.

His clansmen knew better than to disturb him with annoying questions. If he did not want to explain a phenomenon, then nobody would be able to get an answer out of his mouth.

He ignored everyone else and approached a wall that was adjacent to a corridor.

Though the wall was completely smooth, he imagined that there had to be an entry mechanism built into it somewhere. He refused to believe that it was a completely solid barrier and that the only way to get in and out was through the use of portals. That sounded way too extravagant even for the phase whales!

When Blinky approached the wall, Ves half-expected the damn transphasic stone surface to repel the spirit from sinking inside.

That did not happen, much to his relief!

Ves watched on with gratitude as Blinky seamlessly moved through the incredibly tough and frustrating wall as if the companion spirit wasn't even real!

That was not actually the case, but to the cell structure it may as well be true.

Blinky's intangibility might look similar to that of Lucky and Veronica's phasing ability, but they were two completely different phenomena that just looked superficially similar!

In the case of the former, a spiritual entity mainly resided in the spiritual realm. If any spirit showed up in the material realm, then it mostly represented a shadow or a reflection more than anything else.

Only through special measures such as coming up with an invention as whacky as the Geist System had he recently been able to allow spiritual entities to affect the material realm in more substantial ways.

In any case, Blinky's continued penetration of the meters-thick transphasic wall showed that the ancient facility clearly had not been built to guard against spiritual shenanigans!

"Hehehe." Ves chuckled behind his helmet. "Now we are talking."

He was desperately in need of intelligence now. With Blinky being able to travel through the transphasic stone structure without getting hindered, his incarnation should finally be able to provide him with a solid glimpse of any internal mechanisms as well as what lay outside of this cell!

Ketis soon walked next to him. "Is it working?"

Ves nodded. "Blinky is able to go through unhindered, though I cannot rule out the possibility that this facility has countermeasures against spiritual entities. If you want, you can help by exploring another direction with Sharpie. She should be able to phase through this stone material as well."

"You're right. I should have thought about that earlier. I think I will explore what lies below."

When Ketis started to imitate Ves by sending Sharpie out of her stiletto and dispatching her extraordinary companion spirit straight through the floor, others noticed what they were doing.

"Can I help, papa?" Little Marvaine asked.

Gloriana quickly stepped closer to the boy and patted his head lest he get any ideas. "Let the adults take care of this, Marvaine. It is too dangerous for you to send your immature companion spirits out at this point. Wait until you are older, alright?"

"But mama…" Marvaine whined.

After she made sure that the children did not do anything foolish, Gloriana decided to join the effort by sending out her red companion spirit.

Alexandria dove through the ceiling but did not go straight upwards.

Instead, the Queen Cat followed the miniscule air vent channels in the hopes of finding a mechanism or control room that could manipulate their cell.

For a moment, everyone fell silent as they waited for the three mech designers to report their findings.

"This is odd." Ketis furrowed her brows. "There are no electronic systems or anything comparable to it throughout the floor."

"Perhaps the aliens responsible for constructing this facility built it to last." Gloriana speculated. "The use of so much simple but solid defensive construction suggests that the builders may have intended to keep its prisoners captive over a span of time that is unimaginably long to us. I would not be surprised if this cell is meant to contain its occupants over centuries or millennia as opposed to months or years."

Ves was inclined towards this conclusion as well. The most telling clue was the lack of fragile and less reliable electronic systems. Aside from the phase whales and certain other races, the rest of the natives of the Red Ocean definitely made use of conventional technology to a degree!

For such systems to be absent around this cell suggested that it may truly be built to isolate the native version of 'gods'!

He slowly smirked behind his helmet.

"It's a good thing that I am not a god. I am just a mech designer."