Directly affecting others through spiritual manipulation wasn't as easy as it sounded. From his earlier experiments, he learned that people with spiritual potential possessed a defense mechanism that caused their spirituality to turtle up and become almost untouchable.

While this largely cut the mech pilot off his own spirit, any external threat would have a very hard time abusing it any further.

What Ves sought this time was not to find a way to alter it. He wasn't trying to figure out how to create expert candidates and expert pilots on demand.

He wanted to achieve the opposite result. He wanted to downgrade a mech pilot with spiritual potential to someone who was still alive but spiritually dull.

"This will be a delicate operation."

Ves had moved to an enclosed test chamber elsewhere on his ship. He ordered his guards to bring in another captive pirate and strap the fellow down to an operation table.

Once the guards left, Ves approached the scared and thrashing pirate and contemplated his options.

What he wanted to do was very cruel. People who were lucky enough to develop spiritual potential possessed more chances at achieving greatness. Becoming an expert pilot or Journeyman was a dream to many people, but the strength of their spirit determined whether they could even open these doors.

To Ves, depriving someone of most of their spiritual potential was almost as bad as killing them. He felt as if there was something profoundly wrong and abhorrent about what he was about to do.

"Why do I feel this way?" He frowned.

In a way, the act went against everything he wanted to accomplish. As a creator and a service provider, he oriented his life around improving the lives of those who used his products.

The thought of millions of mech pilots happily using and entrusting their lives to their LMC mechs gave Ves an immense amount of satisfaction. His success fueled his motivation to continue with his work and develop even better ways to meet the demands of his customers.

According to this outlook, it was wrong for him to induce actual harm to his people. Developing ways to actively harm people sounded more like something the Five Scrolls Compact would do. What he wanted to do was exactly what the MTA least wanted to occur!

"Well, it's for a good reason." Ves shrugged and excused himself. "As long as I succeed in figuring out how to design a legacy mech, then everything will be fine!"

After solving his moral conundrum, he faced his frightened test subject without any measure of guilt. Scientific progression couldn't be stopped. If he wanted to make a few omelets, then he had to break some eggs.

Ves grinned at the thought of what he was about to do. "I've never done anything like this before. How exciting! Let's see how I can cripple you. Don't worry. You probably won't die!"

The test subject in question only fought harder against his restraints!

"MMMEMMFMWWMFMFW!"

"Calm down, man! Don't you know how hard it is to perform a surgical operation on you when you are lashing out all the time?"

Despite his advice, the man did not follow his advice despite the fact it was in his best interests to do so. Why were pirates so stupid?

"Oh well, don't blame me if anything goes wrong."

In order to affect someone's spiritual potential, he had to worm inside the person's mind. The key was to perform his operation quickly. If more than a second passed, his test subject's spirit would probably realize it was under attack and bury itself in a hole. By then, it was too late for Ves to do anything meaningful for a long time.

For this reason, he wasn't in a hurry to do something. He carefully acc.u.mulated his energy and formed a strong and stable spiritual knife in his mind.

Though the pirate was unwilling to subject himself to a dangerous experiment, he could only thrash against his restraints for so long. The fellow slowly tired himself out. When the pirate gradually grew tense but less afraid, Ves finally struck!

He held his palm over the test subject's face to gain access and thrust his spiritual knife forward.

Cut!

With a single attack, Ves attempted to cut off around seventy percent of the pirate's spiritual potential!

Yet as soon as his 'knife' touched its target, he barely had any time to cut off a chunk of spirit before his attack became invalid.

The man's spirit had rapidly engaged its self-defense mechanism!

"MMFMMEW!"

The pirate's stress levels abruptly spiked as the man experienced unimaginable pain! Even so, the vast majority of his spiritual potential remained intact, if temporarily bottled up in order to protect it against external influence!

Vs frowned at this outcome. His test subject's spiritual potential was a lot more reactive towards active threats than against other forms of manipulation. Its reaction time was pretty insane!

No matter how much he thrust his spiritual knife, the man's spiritual potential had already entered a different phase. There was no way for Ves to proceed with his experiment.

"Damnit. Off you go, then. Bring in the next test subject!"

He thought about why he failed. Now that he looked back on what he had done, he realized that his test subject was still on guard against him when he performed his cutting procedure.

"I knew it wouldn't be so easy." He sighed.

Ves believed he might achieve better results if he lowered his test subject's guard. Naturally, he wouldn't be able to do so through persuasion. He could only resort to other means.

Once the next test subjects arrived, Ves took out a sedative and injected it into the body of the next pirate to endure his experiment.

"Go to sleep."

Once the pirate fell unconscious, Ves inspected his latest test subject and saw that the spirit was still somewhat active, but not as bad as before.

Just to be sure, Ves waited for an entire hour in order to calm the spirit even further. In the meantime, he spent his time supervising the work of his design teams and made some small tweaks to his ongoing mech designs.

After an hour had passed, his patience wore thin. He returned to the testing chamber and quietly approached his current test subject.

The man had calmed a lot, whether in body, mind or spirit. Though Ves could wait a couple more hours, he didn't think it would make that much of a difference.

He formed his knife and performed a cut without hesitation!

This time, he succeeded!

"MMWMWMWWEFF!"

The muffled man's body suddenly woke despite the sedatives trying to keep him under! Ves didn't care as he recognized he succeeded in cutting away at least eighty percent of the pirate's spiritual potential.

The test subject's self-defense mechanism hadn't been on guard! It activated too late!

Unfortunately, this was not enough to achieve the result. While the test subject's remaining spiritual potential had lost a huge amount of strength, it still remained intact!

"Damn! I should have cut off more!"

Perhaps it might be interesting to study what happened to people who heavily damaged their spiritual potential. Ves wasn't interested, though. He commanded the spiritually-injured test subject to be moved back to the brig while calling up yet another test subject.

"I'm running out of captives to experiment upon." He muttered. "I don't have that many of them in the first place."

It took two more cutting attempts before Ves successfully managed to cripple a test subject's spiritual potential!

Ves estimated that he had cut off 95 percent of his latest test subject's spiritual potential. What remained no longer possessed the strength to retain its distinctive characteristics. What remained retracted into a seed that was so weak and tiny that Ves could hardly sense it in the first place.

His eyes lit up as the poor pirate m.o.a.ned in pain.

"Hahahaha!" Ves laughed. "This is it! This is what I wanted to see!"

While he hadn't managed to develop a method to imbue spiritual potential into someone who lacked it, he at least came up with a means to do the reverse.

The actual application of this technique was a little dubious, though. He couldn't perform this cruel technique at a distance. He needed to touch his target's head or find some other way to gain direct access without tripping any alarms. Then he needed to estimate how much he could cut without mind-killing his patient.

The limitations effectively meant that there was little chance for him to employ it effectively in battle.

"That's fine. I'm not asking for much."

Now that he transformed an unsuitable test subject into one that fulfilled all of his original criteria, he moved quickly.

Ves commanded some bots to bring the crippled test subject out of the testing chamber and into the mech workshop.

Even though the test subject was still suffering a lot of soul-searing pain, Ves couldn't wait. Once the pirate was locked onto the piloting chair, Ves commanded the Desolate Soldier to boot up and interface with its unwilling mech pilot.

The outcome surprised him. Minutes passed as the mech successfully interfaced with its mech pilot.

"Mmwmmwef! Mfemwmfemfe!"

The current test subject still exhibited a lot of signs of pain, but the mech wasn't actually inducing that much stress against its own user. The test subject's lack of sensitivity towards further spiritual attacks limited what the mech could do against the pirate.

"Interesting!"

This meant that those without spiritual potential were actually a bit more capable of resisting dangerous spiritual pressure!

Ves found it rather ironic that the weakest mortals possessed an advantage in this aspect. The lucky ones who developed spiritual potential had to guard their spirits well.

He began to perform a follow-up experiment. As the mech was still in use, Ves requested the Solemn Guardian to feed back a portion of its energy to the Desolate Soldier mech.

He wanted to find out the spiritual tolerance of someone without spiritual potential. How much pressure could his current test subject withstand before reaching his limit?

Quite high, it turned out.

As the mech continued to inflate with spiritual energy, the tortured test subject still managed to hold on to his life, though there were various signs that he would suffer permanent brain damage if this process proceeded for more than an hour.

Ves did not halt the process but continued to monitor the situation in multiple ways as the Desolate Soldier mech grew stronger.

"MMFMEW!"

The mech pilot finally succ.u.mbed when the mech had almost reached saturation! Ves looked closely at both the telemetry and spiritual activity and concluded that the test subject's small and crippled spirit finally succ.u.mbed.

The man suffered a mind death, the same as the second test subject.

"At least there isn't a mess this time."

As the bots began to remove the mentally-dead pirate from the c.o.c.kpit, Ves began to wrap up this round of experiments. He didn't want to waste his remaining test subjects without going over his current results.

This was a fruitful day to Ves. He developed several new concepts such as lethal threshold and spiritual tolerance. He also came up with three more spiritual techniques that he could add to his expanding toolbox.

Spiritual foundation enhancement was a method of empowering the spiritual foundation of individual mechs. It was also reversible if not too much time had passed.

As the experiments had already shown, spiritual foundation enhancement was very potent but dangerous. Most mech pilots couldn't withstand the consequences of interfacing with excessively powerful mechs if there was any hostility between the two. Mech pilots with spiritual potential had to be extra careful against threats from this direction!

So far, Ves had only seen the downsides of spiritual foundation enhancement. Yet he wasn't quite sure what happened if an empowered mech couldn't kill its own mech pilot.

Would such a mech truly be able to grow faster than if it hadn't been fed with a large amount of spiritual energy?

It was difficult to know for sure, especially if he kept pairing pirate mech pilots with an upright mech like the Desolate Soldier.

"Do I really need to turn one of my own Larkinsons into my test subjects?"