Sometimes, talking and teaching about something that he knew intimately still generated some new insights.

Talking about his design philosophy with Maikel provided Ves with a fair amount of food for thought.

Before this discussion, whenever Ves always directed his attention towards the more advanced applications of his specialty. He tinkered with design spirits, glows, spiritual constructs, spiritual augments, triggered abilities, innate abilities and so on on a daily basis.

He had good reason to do so. He needed to obtain a lot of power to achieve his purposes, and he couldn't do so without resorting to the formidable arsenal of spiritual techniques he developed over the years.

Ves had come a long way since he first became an Apprentice who couldn't accomplish anything more than bestow a little X-Factor to his mech designs!

With the help of his innovations, the Living Mech Company grew to a behemoth that sold hundreds of thousands of mechs on a monthly basis.

Due to the threat of his glow-oriented mech designs, hundreds if not more high-ranking mech designers had spent more than a trillion hex credits to study them in order to form counters.

The potential of his design philosophy earned him the appreciation of the likes of Master Moira Willix and plenty of other authoritative figures in the mech industry.

Oh, he also became engaged with Gloriana as well. Despite her many.. eccentricities, she was one of the few people who trusted him and he could trust in turn. That was extremely valuable in a galaxy where trust was hard to find.

Certainly, the benefits he obtained from the System enabled many of his accomplishments. Yet Ves did not let himself be limited by his greatest secret, but sought to surpass it. Although the System initially pushed him on this path, he formed and developed his design philosophy up to this point through his own efforts.

His constant urge to innovate and seek greater gains had yielded many successes.

"However… am I losing sight of my initial goals?"

Since when did his design philosophy center around glows?

Why should he constantly seek to create more powerful design spirits?

Long after Maikel left to do his homework, Ves remained silent in his office.

Great doubt stirred in his mind.

He started to question his own purpose.

"Do I regret the path I've taken and the decisions I've made?"

Nope. Not at all. Though he had made plenty of mistakes and dubious decisions up to this point, he rarely felt regret. The decisions he made and the outcomes he obtained shaped him as a person and a mech designer.

He always looked forward. He spent most of his time planning and working towards a better future. No matter his inadequacies today, he would be able to meet all of his goals once he advanced far enough to have a real say on the galactic stage.

His drive advance reinforced his tendency to look forward. He spent so much time chasing after greater gains that he never really looked back all that often.

"Is this a mistake?"

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Ves always feared he would stagnate if he became too preoccupied with the past. Slowing down in any way had become one a taboo of sorts to him. The example of Professor Velten who engaged in too many distractions over the course of her career provided him with a very clear image of what he might end up if he slowed down.

It was only recently that he recognized how far he had gone astray. Obsessing over glows and turning them into the primary feature of his mechs caused him to overlook that his design philosophy never centered around them. The auras that his mechs and most notably his design spirits produced were supposed to be welcome additions at best.

Now that he was starting to bump into the limitations of glows, Ves recognized that it might be better for him to return to his original approach. He had already done so recently with the exploration of spiritual constructs, but so far he had mainly used them to enhance the operation of his glows rather than his mechs.

"My perspective is wrong."

Glows and design spirits were merely tools. Both existed to enhance the performance of the mech and mech pilot in some way.

What Ves realized today was that he used to focus on other ways to improve the performance of this pairing.

In the beginning, Ves attempted to accomplish the more modest goal of integrating mechs and mech pilots. He sought to increase their synergy by increasing the X-Factor of his designs.

What was his definition of X-Factor?

To him, the X-Factor represented the alignment between mech, mech pilot and mech designer.

During his rise to prominence, Ves no longer relied entirely on his own strength as a mech designer and instead resorted to external help in the form of design spirits.

In essence, the X-Factor of all of his recent mechs actually reflected the alignment between mech, mech pilot and design spirit!

Was this bad? Not necessarily. Undoubtedly, this paradigm yielded a lot of success.

The latent problem was that success in the short term did not guarantee success in the long term.

To become a Senior who possessed great control over many applications, Ves needed to explore different options while remaining true to his heart.

To become a Master and realize profound and unique design philosophy, Ves had to find a way to transcend his limitations and achieve the impossible.

"My design philosophy has never been about creating gods. Why am I trying so hard to do so lately?"

Perhaps spending a lot of time with Gloriana warped his views. Even though he always rejected her ambition to create gods in the form of mechs, she may have succeeded in contaminating him through constant repetition.

Ves reflected back on his latest three spiritual products.

The Golden Cat and the Superior Mother both surpassed the definition of design spirit. By tying them to the Larkinson Clan and the Hexer people respectively, they had already taken on at least some of the properties traditionally associated with the divine.

As for Lufa, Ves literally dubbed it the Angel of Tranquility!

Did he regret creating these three pseudo-divine entities? No. Each of them were very useful in their own way.

"Not regretting doesn't mean that what I'm doing is right."

The development of design spirits and glows was always supposed to be a side path. They complemented his design philosophy. They were never supposed to take it over.

No matter how much it pleased his fiancé to continue down the path of creating gods, to Ves this was only supposed to be a means to an end.

What was the end he sought?

"Making mechs alive."

The nuance here was that the definitions of those words were subject to interpretation. There were different ways he could think of to bestow life to mechs.

Instilling them with a design spirit and integrating the two together was one way to do it. The Devil Tiger was perhaps the best embodiment of this approach.

Pursuing glows to an extreme in order to make everyone acknowledge his mechs was another way. Mechs such as the Doom Guard and the Blessed Squire closely aligned with this approach.

When had he last designed a mech that just sought to integrate the mech and mech pilot in a plain manner?

Ves found to his disappointment that none of his original mechs matched this criteria. He felt as if he was inputting a search term, only to obtain no valid results.

"Have I gone that far off-track?"

Strictly speaking, Ves didn't entirely believe that he had gone astray since his Apprentice days. He just went overboard with playing with a new toy that his mother introduced a couple of years ago. If she hadn't gifted him with a novelty in the form of the spiritual fragment of a long-dead alien leader, he would have continued to make use of spiritual images and other modest techniques to add value to his mech designs.

If he had to make a choice of which mech designs best represented his aspiration to make mechs alive by integrating them with their mech pilots, then he would go as far back as picking the Young Blood and Old Soul virtual designs!

His goal in designing these two mechs was to augment the learning of mech cadets. By allowing them to gain closer bonds with mechs that were set up to mentor future mech pilots, Ves believed he succeeded in helping a lot of potentates achieve greater success in the future!

"Isn't Joshua one of them?" Ves recalled.

He decided to perform a little investigation. He activated the desk terminal and began to look up what people thought about his old Young Blood and Old Soul virtual designs.

[Thank you for selling this great mech! The Young Blood helped me so much when I was struggling with piloting melee mechs. With the help of this knight mech, I can finally pass my melee mech courses!]

[It's been four years since I first piloted the Old Soul. I initially thought this mech was a joke due to its slow-firing rifle and ambush orientation. I was wrong! This mech not only helped me graduate at the top of my class in marksmanship, but also taught me the value of patience and good planning. I wouldn't have been able to enter the mech officer track of my advanced academy without pouring thousands of hours in mastering this mech!]

Despite their rough and rudimentary design properties, both training mechs earned a lot of praise.

Ten minutes passed as Ves smiled in contentment. Even though the two virtual designs were filled with flaws to his current self, they nonetheless managed to earn the gratitude of hundreds of thousands of Iron Spirit players!

While that didn't sound like much compared to the sheer number of professional mech pilots who piloted his real mechs, Ves felt that the praise of these mech cadets was much more authentic.

The mech cadets who piloted his Young Blood and Old Soul praised his actual work.

The professional mech pilots who piloted his Desolate Soldier and Blessed Squire fawned over their glows and design spirits.

While Ves could argue that the latter was also a reflection of his strength and ability as a mech designer, he couldn't quite agree with this sentiment.

He decided to take a look at his current design projects.

He manipulated the desk terminal to project all six design projects side by side.

The Valkyrie Redeemer.

The Cat's Paw.

The Chiron.

The Ferocious Piranha..

The Sanctuary.

The Crystal Lord Mark II.

Each of these designs incorporated some of his latest applications.

Before, he felt very proud of them. Now, he no longer felt pleased.

Almost all of his designs had become overly dependent on their glows. This was a design choice that Ves was so accustomed to making that he had stopped questioning it. By making the same choice on autopilot everytime he embarked on a new design project, he slowly began to lose touch with the essence of his design philosophy!

Ves took a deep breath. "It's not too late. I can still reorient myself."

Did that mean that he intended to abandon the use of glows and design spirits? No. He just wanted to lower their emphasis in favor of empowering his mech designs according to his original intentions.

He still wanted to design mechs which allowed his mech pilots to embody their design spirits.

He also wished to design mechs that blurred the difference between man and machine.

As Maikel put it, making the human closer to a machine and making the mech closer to human should be his ultimate goal!

"It's a bit funny how a teenager has taught me the meaning of my own design philosophy." He smirked.

It proved that even the best and most successful mech designers were still fallible!