Ves was happy with how his bioch design ended up so far. He filled out much of the biological fra with an intricate collection of interconnected biological components.
"It's like putting organs inside a forrly empty biological shell." He mused.
Just as with conventional chs, it was a lot easier to start from the outside and work his way inward.
In truth, it was more proper to start the other way around, but Ves only dared to adopt this approach when he designed the tallic chs that he had worked with for many years.
Ves adopted the easier and arguably lazier approach of designing the exterior bone scale armor system first.
Although the bone material was strange and novel to him, there was nothing complicated about its composition or its properties.
The toughness and defensive strength of the bone plates were rather diocre in his eyes, but the upside was that they were cheap, easy to grow and incredibly easy to work with under most circumstances.
He could shape them in any way he liked and he could even add bioprogramming to his bioknight that enabled it to grow new plates on an independent basis.
Of course, allowing the bioch to repair its own exterior plating was like asking a ch pilot to perform field repairs on a heavily damaged ch.
Combat machines simply weren't set up to perform complex and resource-intensive repairs on their own. Biochs could regenerate ordinary tissue damage easily enough, but growing brand new bone plating would take months and also demanded access to the right kinds of raw materials.
Ves was aware of the existence of biochs that could actually cannibalize fallen biochs to facilitate their restoration. More advanced biochs were even able to digest parts taken from regular chs or any other non-organic machines!
"It's kind of like an organic version of what my Devil Tiger can do. Self-evolving organic chs are considered so of the most advanced products of the bioch industry!"
It was much more difficult to design a bioch that could evolve its physical form on its own by devouring random materials. The depth of bioprogramming required to evolve every biological component in specific ways was so deep that Ves didn't even think about adding such a powerful feature into his Blood Knight Project.
"My Novice-level Biotechnology Skill is too inadequate. There are far too many features that are beyond my reach."
It was frustrating to set aside a promising and useful function because of his own lack of competence.
His ability to design a bioch fell far behind his ability to design a conventional ch, and the constant reminders of this fact frequently ruined his mood.
It would have been better for his ntal state if he wasn't already an accomplished Journeyman ch Designer.
This was because as long as he looked at a specific aspect of his bioch, he could always think of a way to design a much better implentation using non-organic materials and parts.
"I can't keep thinking like this. I need to let go and accept that I won't get everything perfect on the first try."
It was his inner Gloriana that was mostly kicking a fuss about all of the obvious shortcomings of his current work. He had worked together with Gloriana so many tis in the last few years that her work philosophy had definitely contaminated his psyche.
No matter how many tis he tried to loosen up, he could still get triggered whenever he noticed an obvious flaw.
This was good because his ability to optimize and improve a ch design had beco a lot better after he started to learn from Gloriana's thod.
It could also be bad in situations where he was working on a tight deadline!
Whenever Ves compared the state of his incomplete bioch design to many of the biochs that he had encountered in the past, he beca irked at the obvious differences in refinent.
Since biochs were organic beings in essence, this ant that the Blood Knight Project was like a human who developed a lot of congenital defects.
A more skilled 'doctor' could easily address these defects, but a hack like Ves who had just gotten started in this field could do little but apply a few patches to open wounds!
Fortunately, despite his lack of depth in biosciences, Ves believed that the current state of the Blood Knight Project was quite serviceable.
"It will do the job more or less."
He relied a lot on his established ch designer capabilities to make it work. Compared to other bioch designers who had just started out, Ves was already an experienced ch designer who had dozens of original ch designs under his na.
He not only possessed an extensive set of developed Skills and Sub-Skills, many of which were relevant to both biochs and conventional chs, but also possessed an intuition honed over years of working with chs.
Ves was not surprised that his powerful intuition wasn't able to provide as much assistance when working on biochs.
He felt it had to do with his domain. His Spirituality was expected towards both life and tal.
Although this suggested that he should have a powerful advantage when working on organic chs, his lack of practice and familiarity ant his intuition didn't know what to do at tis.
The lack of cold tal components caused a part of him to feel profoundly lost. It was as if a bioch was not a 'proper' ch due to lacking the traditional parts that Ves had always associated with chs.
Fortunately, his intuition was able to provide a semblance of a boost, so he wasn't left to his own devices.
The result of approximately 28 days of constant design work with very little breaks in between was an almost functional bioch.
"In fact, it is already functional to a degree." Ves surmised as he looked at his current design with a critical eye. "It can interface with a ch pilot with the help of a standard neural interface that is especially adapted to biochs. It can walk on its legs, lift a tower shield and attack with its sword. Its sensors can observe the environnt while its communication systems can keep the bioch connected to friendlies."
It could even fly in space, though it had been anything but easy to integrate an organic flight system to a bioch.
Different from conventional chs, it was a lot harder for biochs to gain flight capabilities because the processes involved took a great toll on biological systems.
Ves couldn't simply slot an existing organic flight system into the back of a bioch and be done with it. He needed to make a lot of adjustnts to the organic ch fra itself to ensure that the heat buildup didn't boil the more fragile cells and so on. He also had to prevent the flight system from blowing up the bioch from the inside whenever it sustained significant damage.
It was all difficult and tedious work, and he couldn't always rely on a textbook to design his way out of a corner.
Fortunately, his abundant experience in designing conventional chs along with his extensive knowledge base in working with conventional systems allowed him to co up with his own design solutions.
Perhaps his hobrew thods might not be as refined as the thods of more professional bioch designers, but he was confident that he managed to make the organic flight system work.
"I can't expect much from it, though."
He had opted to integrate a slower, weaker and simpler organic flight system in order to reduce any possible complications.
It wasn't all that bad, though. The beginner version of a biological flight system was also solid, robust, efficient, highly tolerant towards damage and was able to self-correct itself to a much better degree than other options.
"The Blood Knight Project won't be able to win any races, but it can hold the line and keep fighting even if it has sustained a lot of damage to the rear."
One of the annoyances of including an organic flight system to a bioch was that it limited the strength of the tentacles he had added to his bioch design.
The four, bone-covered tentacles in black gave the Blood Knight Project an inhuman vibe.
They looked a bit incongruous to the rest of the Blood Knight Project, but Ves insisted on adding them because of how much they added to the design.
Two of the tentacles were designed to help the bioch attack up close. They were rather long and could pierce an opposing ch from a side angle.
Ves had also designed them so that they could grip other objects such as lighter weapons or tools in case the Blood Knight Project needed to carry extra gear.
The limbs weren't too impressive at the mont, but they could easily be upgraded without adversely impacting the rest of the bioch.
The second pair of tentacles were a bit more special. Ves had turned them into ranged weapons by integrating a set of luminar crystals into the ends of the tentacles!
In effect, Ves had added two half-organic laser weapons to his bioch design!
"Since I have a 5 percent allowance for non-organic parts, I might as well make use of this quota."
The half-organic laser tentacles weren't capable of outputting a lot of damage at once, but they added a lot of much-needed versatility to the Blood Knight Project.
"Everything is fine except for the most important organic system of all. Without a blood sharing chanism, there is no reason for this bioch to exist."
His ambitious plan to develop a bioch that could share its blood to its ch pilot and vice versa was an exceedingly radical notion!
The difficulty of designing the biological parts that could perform all of the necessary processes was not low.
He needed to solve two major challenges in order to allow his bioch to forge a working Blood Pact with its pilot.
First, he had to ensure that the bioch and ch pilot did not get adversely affected while foreign blood was running through their veins.
This would require him to dig much deeper into the field of Biotechnology than before.
Second, he had to make sure that this mutual exchange of blood empowered both parties through developing an accompanying spiritual chanism.
Ves had to apply his spiritual engineering capabilities in a completely different context in order to turn his newly conceived Blood Pact into a reality!
While Ves had been able to coast by up to this point, it was clear that he could no longer muddle his way through.
Although the second challenge sounded the most difficult, Ves was fairly confident he would be able to develop a suitable spiritual chanism to the blood sharing system.
He was accustod to developing new spiritual engineering-related solutions. This was the advantage of figuring out how to manipulate spiritual energy from scratch. His habit of developing new spiritual constructs to solve different problems made him confident that this would be no different.
"The real challenge is the physical component of the blood sharing system. There is nothing in my basic biotechnology textbooks that can give any clue on how to tackle this assignnt."
That said, there was one source of knowledge that might help.
"Scarlet Oak Trees might provide with the examples that I need..."
What was special about Scarlet Oak Trees was that they possessed a defined tree biology. Yet they also included a different set of bioparts that produced blood that clearly weren't native to the trees.
The Scarlet Oak Trees were not only capable of producing alien blood, but were also able to circulate this foreign substance throughout its trunk without causing any harm!
Neither the plant cells nor the blood cells experienced any decay!
"In fact, it's the opposite!"
One of the more brilliant traits about Scarlet Oak Trees was that they actively nurtured the blood they produced!
The blood that poured out of the trees whenever the Blood Cultists ca to collect the harvest was always rich and filled with vitality.
Since blood played such an important role to the Blood Knight Project, Ves wanted to reproduce this effect!
"If I can pull this off, then the enriched blood can not only improve the bioch, but also the ch pilot who is physically integrated with the organic machine!"
It was a completely new form of mutual growth!
It was so radical and innovative that Ves couldn't predict whether it would end up as a revolutionary new form of empowernt or turn into a horrendous biohazard!
"I can't wait to see what happens!"
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