From this day onwards, Ves would never look at high-ranking mech pilots in the same light ever again.

Ves had seen his fair share of horrifying and diabolical research projects. The infamous researchers of the Five Scrolls Compact knew no limits and broke ethical boundaries on a daily basis. Their fascination for biotechnology and spirituality caused them to perform a lot of awful experiments on innocent human beings.

Yet according to various sources like his mother, the Five Scrolls Compact no longer reigned in human space. The Big Two actively suppressed the powerful cult and made sure that its researchers could no longer kidnap a lot of humans and perform reckless experiments on them without their consent.

The times had changed!

The new values and principles advocated by the MTA and CFA when they came into power explicitly enshrined fundamental human rights.

The Age of Mechs was supposed to be a more restrained, enlightened era where humans treated each other with respect.

Even if wars broke out between different human states, their armed forces were supposed to fight against each other while restricting their attacks, methods and decisions to an acceptable range.

Honor was paramount!

Of every mech pilot who bravely fought on the battlefield, none were more nobler and honorable than the heroes who physically, mentally and spiritually exceeded their human limits!

Ves had long been accustomed to the galactic trend of viewing expert pilots as individuals who deserved great respect. Though he did not look up to them as much as he used to, he still held a lot of instinctive regard for demigods.

After all, as a mech designer, he was supposed to serve mech pilots, and expert pilots deserved even better treatment!

Therefore, it was initially hard for him to wrap his mind around how Supreme Sage treated expert pilots.

Of all of the research projects he encountered so far, Project Cain was the most outrageous to him. While he had certainly encountered more destructive experiments that had the potential to wipe out a lot more humans, the nature of this particular project hit especially hard to mech designers like Ves and Dr. Perris.

"This can't be.. the Supreme Sage.. he's one of the greatest doctors in the galactic rim… how could he do something like this? This is impossible! This experiment must be a fake! The LRA shouldn't be engaged in this kind of experiment at all! The MTA would have long shut this project down if it knew!"

Ves threw a pitiful glance at the biomech designer that he had decided to bring along. The evidence was clear and the research data was all real. The bodies in the vats truly belonged to expert pilots. He could confirm that by himself.

The conclusion was clear. The Supreme Sage unquestionably experimented on expert pilots.

Not only that, but this great researcher essentially farmed them as well! By extracting their brains and processing them into a special material, he sought to produce a key ingredient that was supposedly essential in the production of a type of high-grade life-prolonging treatment serum!

The only question was whether this formula was the same as the one utilized by the Big Two.

At first glance, such a notion sounded too absurd to be true. The MTA honored and celebrated high-ranking mech pilots. It gave them special privileges and encouraged every human in the galaxy to view them as heroes.

These measures all suggested that the MTA highly prized their existence.

Up until now, Ves always thought that the Association sought to lavish a lot of attention expert pilots and ace pilots in order to raise the amount of god pilots in the galaxy.

As the most powerful mech pilots that humanity produced, the power and majesty of god pilots was unquestionable. Whether their reality-defying powers allowed them to defeat CFA battleships or not, each new god pilot granted the MTA and the mech industry another opportunity to explore the absolute limits of what mechs were capable of! The possibilities that these inhumanly powerful mech pilots enabled through their existence alone were so great that the MTA was able to derive a lot of new innovations by studying the new phenomena!

Yet now, Ves began to see the MTA's obsession with nurturing high-ranking mech pilots from a different angle.

A more nefarious angle.

"Are they treating expert pilots and so on as raw materials?"

This was a shocking question that would doubtlessly cause everyone who heard it to beat him up! There was no conceivable way that the MTA was secretly farming expert pilots in order to enable more old geezer to live a few centuries longer, but this was exactly the scenario that Ves had to consider in light of Project Cain!

Had the MTA and CFA truly banded together and transformed the galaxy into a giant farm of high-ranking mech pilots?

Ves already knew that the Big Two were not above using unsavory means in order to fulfill their grand goals.

If the serum formula related to Project Cain shared an undeniable relation with the formulas utilized by the Big Two, then the true nature of the current order was much darker than Ves and many other humans suspected!

He quickly ran through what he knew about the current state of human civilization.

First, the Big Two were rebel off-shoots of the Five Scrolls Compact. Even if the Mech Trade Association and Common Fleet Alliance had forsworn the heinous methods of the once-dominant cult, the two trans-galactic organizations still shared a common root with the people who once nearly led the human race to ruin!

Second, the current makeup of human space in the galaxy gave a lot of space for mech pilots to advance in rank. There was no better way for them to break through by getting stimulated in desperate, life-threatening battles. The fractured and divided nature of human space meant that states frequently waged war against each other, thereby giving lots of mech pilots the opportunity to undergo apotheosis!

Third, although it looked incredibly macabre for someone to use the brains of high-ranking mech pilots as raw ingredients for a product that extended life, there was at least some logic behind this premise!

From his previous studies, Ves already discovered that one of the key factors that enabled life-prolonging serum to do the impossible and allow humans to live longer was because they contained an immense amount of universal life-attributed spiritual energy.

In fact, Ves suspected that this component alone was responsible for at least 90 percent of the desired effect of life-prolonging serum!

Without this essential spiritual component, the physical serum barely did anything to rejuvenate the aging bodies of regular humans!

Of course, Ves wasn't entirely sure whether this was truly effective and efficient. He already knew that while expert pilots developed a high degree of spirituality when they broke through, the root of their strength was their extraordinary will!

According to that bastard James Ylvaine, spirituality was just an amplifier and assisting factor to the strength of an expert pilot. The force of will that emerged was much more powerful than spiritual energy and willpower alone!

"In fact, this component actually becomes less important as expert pilots continue to grow stronger."

As these powerful pilots continued to advance, they gradually allowed their wills to overtake their spirits. Supposedly, the end point was for ace pilots to replace their entire spirituality with their powerful wills alone!

According to this logic, ace pilots and god pilots shouldn't yield as much value as expert pilots.

Yet that was assuming that the quality of spiritual energy in ace pilots did not substantially improve.

If quality was the crucial factor in determining the grade and efficacy of life-prolonging serum, then that might explain why the more valuable serums were so rare and difficult to acquire.

The supply of raw materials was too low! There weren't enough ace pilots to go around!

In fact, maybe even god pilots were not exempt from being regarded as another ingredient source.

If the formula for the serum actually made use of the extraordinary will of expert pilots as an essential component, then not even god pilots were exempt from being treated as cattle!

Of course, the Big Two couldn't act too blatantly in this regard. The value of high-ranking mech pilots was more than just their potential to enable the production of life-prolonging treatment serum. They were powerful warriors in their own right and were capable of performing many miracles by relying on their wills.

Yet in the bigger scheme of things, this excuse sounded a bit hollow. After all, with only a hundred or so known god pilots in all of human space, it was far too difficult to rely on them as an essential pillar of human strength.

It was much easier for the Common Fleet Alliance to produce tens of thousands of battleships than it was for the Mech Trade Association to nurture a single god pilot!

Therefore, a rational group of human rulers should never put too much stock in such a horrendously slow and inefficient way to raise the might of human civilization.

The benefits that god pilots provided was not commensurate with the immense trouble that the MTA took in order to maximize their rate of emergence.

It only truly made sense if god pilots had value beyond the obvious!

Perhaps… god pilots were essential ingredients for the production of the highest grade of life-prolonging treatment serum. In fact, Ves even guessed that their value might be beyond that! Perhaps their true value lay in the potential to contribute to a formula that was even more potent than the ones that the Big Two currently used.

For example, processing the brains of god pilots might be an essential step to allow certain individuals to live for a thousand years!

Ves did not underestimate the intense greed and desire for powerful old geezers to live forever. No amount of centuries of lifespan was enough for people who were long used to wielding great power!

Nothing else was valuable to them. Ideals meant nothing. Principles were just another tool for them to maintain control over their own subjects. They were willing to doom trillions of humans to their deaths and bring many states to ruin if that was what it took to live another century!

Yet… wasn't this theory a little too far-fetched?

Ves didn't immediately believe in this horrendous scenario. The MTA and CFA might not be entirely straight, but even if they broke their own rules, they always had a justifiable reason for their behavior. They shouldered the enormous responsibility for defending humanity and maintaining the prosperity of its civilization. It was unavoidable for them to make some sacrifices for the greater good.

The ultimate question now was whether the serum formula associated with Project Cain was reflective of the methods of the Big Two.

It could be that the Supreme Sage's immoral experiments were just part of an isolated attempt to develop a substitute formula.

Perhaps the proper key ingredient was too rare and difficult to acquire through other means. The Big Two would have definitely allowed more old people to grow older if serum was easier to produce.

This could even be the main reason why the Big Two was able to hold a monopoly on high-grade life-prolonging treatment serum. Only they possessed the means to acquire this proper key ingredient!

If this was the reality, then biotech researchers outside of the Big Two were left in a difficult position. Their inferior standing prevented them from gaining access to the proper key ingredient. This left them with little choice but to look for substitute materials that could stand in for this unobtainable substance.

Just like how Master Katzenberg specialized in combining cheaper exotics in order to replicate the effects of a rarer and more expensive exotic, the Supreme Sage sought to do the same but only for a very rare spiritual material!

This possibility puts the Big Two in a better light. Only the Supreme Sage went in the wrong.

Yet was this theory too optimistic? Was he trying to make excuses for the MTA and CFA?

"Which theory is right?!"

Ves didn't have enough information to know for sure. He deeply wanted to know which one was true!

He turned his eyes to the terminal where Dr. Perris discovered the truth. The biomech designer looked broken as she tried and failed to reconcile her previous impression of the Supreme Sage as a model researcher with the image of a heartless scientist who did not hesitate to defile the bodies of noble expert pilots.

"This can't be… the Supreme Sage… why is he… are we living in a lie? How can he…"

"Get out of the way." Ves said as he shoved her suited form aside.

The only way for him to get to the bottom behind this situation was to look at the research files himself!