Visiting the Redfeather in order to observe the Shield of Samar up close bore fruit. Ves not only learned how it expressed its individuality, but also developed a strong guess how it came about!

At the heart of it, the Shield of Samar grew alongside its mech pilot. The mech experienced Jannzi's every victory or loss, every boring patrol and every live practice session.

Each time they bonded together, Jannzi gained something from her mech. At the same time, the Shield of Samar gained something from its mech pilot.

Ves believed that this exchange was a slow and gradual process in ordinary cases.

The spiritual foundation of his products started off weak. Giving too much of it away to the mech pilot risked damaging its root!

Normal mech pilots also couldn't give too much of themselves away. The spirituality of the majority of mech pilots was so small that they were almost invisible in his spiritual vision!

Only those with spiritual potential were able to donate more, but what they could contribute was very paltry compared to expert candidates and expert pilots.

In fact, now that Jannzi advanced to expert pilot, her force of will had grown by leaps and bounds!

Not only that, but as long as she continued to grow, her resonance strength and other spiritual parameters would likely grow exponentially stronger!

If she could only feed the Shield of Samar with a single biscuit with every piloting session when she was an expert candidate, now she was capable of serving an entire meal!

In the future, this would become even more exaggerated. Perhaps she was capable of feeding an entire container's worth of food when she reached the limit of an expert pilot!

"The problem is that her case is an exception. Most of my mech pilots don't have any hope of becoming expert candidates or expert pilots!"

Ves returned to his stateroom. He didn't look much better than Lucky, who was still splayed on his table while slowly waiting for his mechanical body to recover.

"Meoow…"

Now that he thought about it, Lucky might have absorbed some life as well. According to Ketis, the gem cat bit the statue of the Unending One when it was actively releasing darkness.

Perhaps one of the reasons why Lucky's spirituality felt so weak was because it was having trouble 'digesting' the darkness he inadvertently absorbed!

Ves sharpened his eyes as he observed his cat for signs of abnormality. However, aside from intensifying the definition of his black tiger stripes, Lucky hardly looked any different.

There weren't any signs of contamination. Ves closely probed Lucky's spirituality, much to the cat's annoyance, and found no remnant influence or parasitic existence.

Of course, Ves wasn't arrogant enough to believe he was able to detect any signs of impropriety, but he intuitively knew that Lucky remained pure.

Lucky ate exotics all the time. His ability to phase wasn't his greatest strength. Aside from his ability to produce gems, Ves most admired his absorption ability.

He became whatever he ate!

Yet the downside of this was that it cost a lot of valuable resources to keep Lucky sated. Whatever entered his stomach disappeared from reality.

"It's a zero-sum game."

Adding something meant removing something else. Ves couldn't cheat this process. Either he gave up some valuable exotics, or he kept Lucky deprived of his food. There was no way he could avoid both outcomes at the same time.

"The same should apply to growing mechs."

Growth was a costly transformation.

Babies needed care and nutrition in order to grow up into healthy a.d.u.l.ts.

Seeds required soil and a source of energy to grow into vigorous plants.

Ves had to expend a lot of materials to build a mech.

In short, almost every process in reality consisted of some sort of exchange.

The same should apply to life.

To grow the life of a mech, a price needed to be paid.

So far, Ves couldn't think of anything a mech pilot could pay except for his own presence and the life he bore in his mind.

The man-machine connection forged a convenient channel to facilitate this transaction. Yet the reason why most LMC mechs weren't able to grow that much was because most mech pilots were too weak!

Certainly, it was not as if they were completely incapable. Ves sensed at least some progress in every LMC mech in the Larkinson Clan. It was just that the rate of progress was too slow.

Only Venerable Jannzi and the expert candidates jumped out of this pattern. Their stronger force of wills provided much more 'nutrition' to their mechs.

"If this is true, then individuality is basically a luxury. Only stronger mech pilots are able to develop their mechs!"

This was not what Ves wanted!

Sure, it was definitely good if high-ranking mech pilots gained significantly more from his mechs. Ves did not object to the advantages they gained due to the merit of their strength.

Yet Ves was not like Gloriana, who would likely be content with designing expert mechs for the rest of her life.

While he hadn't explicitly thought about it, Ves wanted his products to be available to everyone. It was fine if expert pilots gained more out of his products. What Ves didn't enjoy was if the main benefit of piloting his mechs was largely deprived from his general audience!

Some mech designers believed that they benefited the most if they designed the strongest mechs. These passionate people were readily willing to give up on providing mechs to the masses.

Such an outcome did not sit well with Ves. While he didn't develop an obsession to push his mechs onto every mech pilot in existence, he still wanted to offer those who were willing an opportunity to grow alongside a living mech.

Ves could forget about progressing his mech designer if he didn't solve this problem.

"How can I facilitate the growth of a mech when their mech pilots don't have much to offer?"

He scratched his head. "Maybe both of them have to work together. As long as they achieve greater synergy, perhaps a remarkable transformation can take place."

He developed a few preliminary ideas how he could accomplish this. The problem was that he wasn't sure about any of them without testing them for real.

"This is risky, though."

Unlike most of his spiritual experiments, his latest ideas involved both mechs and mech pilots in combination. How could he create a method to accelerate the individual growth of his mechs if he didn't test it out with actual mechs?

Not just any mech would do. Ves had to conduct his experiments with LMC mechs. This was very troublesome.

"Do I have any other choice than pairing up my test subjects with my products?

The Battle of Ulimo Citadel delivered a lot of fresh test subjects to his holding cells. At least several of them were surviving mech pilots. Each of them possessed spiritual potential, but due to their chaotic lifestyles they were no close to advancing to expert candidates.

Regardless, their spiritual potential provided them with a greater degree of tolerance towards losses than other mech pilots.

This was good. It meant the chance his experiments killed his mech pilots was low. Yet Ves still had to test his experiments on mech pilots without spiritual potential as well.

Ves frowned a bit. Every pirate captive the Larkinsons picked up so far consisted entirely of people with spiritual potential.

Those who didn't possess this quality were deemed useless! The Larkinsons outright executed the hardened pirates. Those who were innocents were spared from this fate. The clan merely left them behind at Ulimo and told them to do whatever they wanted.

It didn't matter. In time, some other powerful pirate group would come to the half-broken pirate base and rebuild it anew.

"I should have grabbed some of them on the way out!"

Perhaps the Larkinson Clan would be lucky enough to stumble on a weak pirate outfit along the way out. If that happened, Ves could easily get his hands on some suitable test subjects.

In the meantime, Ves spent a few hours on theorizing. He wanted to flesh out every idea as much as possible before he resorted to actual experiments.

"I need to make some progress quickly. The Chiron and many of my other ongoing design projects can benefit from this innovation."

Individuality, not uniformity, was the key to progressing his mech design. Ves had already noticed that his design seed had become more active than ever during the last few hours.

Ves believed he was on the right track!

As long as he discovered the right method and developed it further, he believed that he could make it all the way to Senior. It might take a couple of decades, but once his mechs started to develop their own individual characters after days of use, then glows should no longer be the primary selling points of his mechs!

"Wait. I forgot about the third player in the game!"

Glows! Glows came from design spirits, which were very powerful spiritual entities!

Their power was immense. They constantly grew stronger due to the sheer volume is spiritual feedback they derived from mech pilots.

His most popular model, the Desolate Soldier, was being piloted by millions of mech pilots spread throughout the Komodo Star Sector and beyond!

However, not all of it was useful. When Ves inspected the state of the Solemn Guardian, he already noted that the design spirit was already saturated with spiritual energy.

Even if tens of millions of mech pilots were added to the equation, the Solemn Guardian didn't actually benefit.

The spiritual feedback that all of those ordinary mech pilots provided was too low in quality!

The Solemn Guardian was flooded with so much low-quality spiritual feedback that the design spirit was forced to discard most of it! It was like pouring water into a mug.

At some point, pouring additional water merely caused the liquid to spill over.

"Where does all of that excess water go?"

Basically, all of it went away! This was a pretty egregious waste of spiritual energy. Even if it was very heterogeneous, it was still a resource that could be spent!

What if Ves took this excess spiritual energy and instead fed it to the spiritual foundation of his mechs?

It would have gone to waste otherwise!

Though the spiritual feedback of a single mech pilot was miniscule, combining them all together resulted in a very considerable quantity.

Of course, it wasn't easy to accomplish his desired outcome. All of that mixed spiritual energy was very diverse and mixed with a lot of junk. Recklessly feeding them into a mech would probably warp the mechs.

This was where his design spirit came in. Directly feeding the spiritual junk from millions of mech pilots into a specific was wrong. It needed to be processed, and what better way to do so than through the design spirit?

Ves glanced at Lucky.

In a way, weren't design spirits similar to Lucky?

They ate all kinds of junk, and produced remarkably uniform output in return!

What Ves had to do was to establish a spiritual mechanism where the output of his design spirit was being put back into mechs!

He suddenly halted. "There's a problem with this method."

Feeding a mech with the spiritual energy of its own design spirit would only reinforce its uniformity. How could the mech pilot possibly develop a closer relation with his mech if it continued to align itself to its design spirit?

Ves needed to add another process!

He began to develop a headache as he tried to figure out a way to solve this new problem. He felt as if he needed to do more and more spiritual engineering to come up with increasingly more sophisticated solutions.

Despite these difficulties, Ves began to grin!

"At least I have found my direction! This is better than getting lost!"