The Dark Zephyr Mark III gradually began to take shape.
Ves and Gloriana worked with utmost concentration, as much as they could under the circumstances.
Ves clearly coped a lot better with the abnormal environnt than his wife. The mutated Living Workshop ability rendered the entire hall into a space where he felt completely at ho.
They already obtained a lot of relief by overcoming a major hurdle. They successfully transford a large batch of expensive and high-quality resources.
Ves did not hesitate to add another massive expense to the Larkinson Clan by investing over 500 million MTA credits in rare hyper materials, high-performance light-weight exotic alloys and exclusive composite materials.
Many of these materials could only be found in first-class expert chs!
While the materials far exceeded the paraters of second-class chs and quasi-first-class chs, they were considered serviceable but not exceptional when compared to genuine first-class expert chs.
Although Ves tried his best to future proof the Dark Zephyr by anticipating the living ch's needs once Tusa grew stronger and transferred to the Premier Branch, there was a limit to how much he could elevate the machine's structural performance.
The radical conversion into an archech and the already massive anticipated boost in performance would definitely induce a huge amount of strain onto the expert ch.
It was impossible for a human to transform into a True God in a single leap!
Under normal circumstances, breakthroughs needed to happen step by step. If the Dark Zephyr was a product designed by other ch designers, then there was no need to pay attention to this matter.
Let alone upgrade the Dark Zephyr with exceedingly high-quality materials worth as much as several billion MTA credits, Ves could have invested all of that money into designing and fabricating a brand-new machine!
The reason why he did not do so was because the Dark Zephyr was a unique living machine. The expert light skirmisher had painstakingly accumulated 14 Ascension Runes, each of which strengthened and specialized his spiritual capabilities along two distinct directions.
As far as Ves was concerned, the value of those 14 Ascension Runes far exceeded a blank expert ch worth billions of MTA credits!
Aside from that, the personality of the Dark Zephyr also held a lot of value in itself. The living ch grew up alongside Tusa from the beginning. As both of them beca more powerful, their cooperation and coordination also beca a lot more effective.
The difference this made was huge!
If Tusa and the Dark Zephyr dueled against a high-tier expert pilot paired with a non-living version of a high-tier expert light skirmisher, the forr combination would win 8 out of 10 tis without a doubt.
This was the value of the excellent synergy of an expert pilot and a third order living expert ch! This was the most direct expression of Ves' design philosophy!
In any case, Ves and Gloriana both understood that they were pushing the limit of what the Dark Zephyr could tolerate.
The material form of a living ch had a very large impact on the spiritual foundation of the sa machine.
Elevating the forr usually brought up the latter, but if the transition was too big and abrupt, the probability that the spiritual foundation might tear or break increased dramatically!
Ves never encountered this doom scenario before, but that was because he never took the initiative to get close enough for this possibility to co to pass.
This was the first ti he disregarded the safety rules concerning this possible outco.
Even though he wanted to play it safe, the situation did not allow for it. The current order in human space was beginning to deteriorate. Ves had read enough reports and observed enough clues to deduce that things would go worse from this point.
Instead of settling down and pursuing stable developnt, Ves chose to speed up his pace and accrue greater strength at a more reckless pace.
This was why he hoped that the Dark Zephyr Mark III would start off at a considerably stronger footing than normal.
Ves and Gloriana made good use of the expensive materials and designed a complicated archech fra that largely confird to high-quality first-class standards.
Of course, the implentation of these first-class materials was relatively basic and simplistic. While Ves and Gloriana most definitely tried to make the most out of all of the hypers and exotics, they mostly focused on upgrading the structural components and armor plating.
They deliberately kept the power reactor and a number of other key components at the quasi-first-class level in order to allow the Dark Zephyr Mark III to fight alongside other second-class chs.
In order to pave the way for the quasi-first-class expert ch's future ascension into a first-class ace ch, Ves and Gloriana designed the Dark Zephyr Mark III with enough semi-modularity that they could easily swap out the quasi-first-class components with genuine first-class components.
They also made sure to increase the accessibility to the Dark Zephyr's original resonating materials.
Once it was ti to install the defining features of a genuine ace ch, it shouldn't take too long for a competent ch designer to swap out the remaining pieces of Perfidious Steel and Bissonat, and replace them with much more powerful ace ch-grade resonating exotics.
There was a huge gap in performance between expert ch and ace ch-grade resonating exotics.
In fact, Ves did not fully understand the differences as he never worked with the latter. Only Master ch Designers and higher possessed the qualifications to work with them. That ant that the Larkinson Clan needed to gain the cooperation of an external ch designer in order to upgrade the Dark Zephyr Mark III into an ace ch.
The necessity of resorting to outside help to further strengthen the most strategic assets of the Larkinson Clan was a huge headache for Ves. He did not look forward to dealing with this problem.
The best solution was to wait until he managed to advance to Master ch Designer and design an ace ch upgrade himself.
However, Ves did not think he would be able to breakthrough anyti soon, especially when he needed to spend much of his ti on mastering the art of designing first-class chs.
Ves vaguely predicted that if he decided to stick with designing second-class chs, he should be able to advance to the rank of Master ch Designer within a decade.
His many insights, his innovative design applications and his rapid progress so far all gave him the capital to challenge the Polymath's record!
However, rank was not everything.
The Red Association already forced him to beco a first-class ch designer. Since that was the case, he might as well go all-in, trying to master enough principles of high technologies to be able to design the most powerful first-class multipurpose chs.
Even though he might delay his breakthrough by one or two decades, his foundation beca much broader and stronger.
All of this sounded nice, but it did not leave Ves in the best position in the short term. This was why he had already accepted the need to give up a lot of confidentiality and let another Master transform the Dark Zephyr Mark III into an ace ch.
He already formulated a few plans with regards to this future need.
"Pay attention, Ves. The incompatibility between archetech and conventional technology is creating more issues than expected."
"Ah, sorry. I am on it, Gloriana."
The pair had already fabricated all of the necessary archetech components.
The two ch designers usually treated the assembly phase as a cakewalk. So long as the ch design did not contain too many finicky components, it was relatively easy to fit all of the parts together.
Upgrade runs were different due to the need to keep an existing living ch alive throughout the entire process.
However, the difficulty of the assembly phase for the Dark Zephyr Mark III exceeded that of any other project!
The archetech used to develop all of the new parts worked on a completely foreign tech base.
Gloriana employed completely different technical standards, ranging from the standard voltage settings to the use of a completely different set of programming languages.
Therefore, trying to upgrade a conventional ch by taking out old components and filling up the gap with new components was far more troubleso this ti!
Gloriana may have anticipated this problem in advance and constructed all kinds of bridges, stopgap components and converters to force temporary rgers between two different tech bases, handling them during the assembly phase was anything but simple.
As the difficult work proceeded at a fairly slow but still risky pace, Ves felt as if he was trying to transform an ordinary human into an orven while keeping the individual's personality as intact as possible!
Such a conversion process should have been impossible to pull off. Even if the conversion process was viable from a biological perspective, the ntality of the subject would have collapsed instantly due to the complete lack of familiarity!
This was why Gloriana could not complete the transformation of the Dark Zephyr alone. She may be a lot more skilled and proficient in conducting the complicated physical conversion, but she did not possess the expertise to help the spiritual foundation adapt to the insertion of a completely foreign part.
"It's okay, Dark Zephyr. We expressly designed these archetal parts for your use. Feel them out. They will feel as natural as your old parts as long as you spend a bit more ti acclimating with them. Be patient. Once most of your ch fra consists of archetal components, the sense of incompatibility will fade."
Ves and Gloriana stretched and abused the Ship of Theseus concept much more extensively than before!
It was a considerable gamble on their part. So long as the Dark Zephyr still managed to retain his core identity after such a radical upgrade, Gloriana would have no qualms about converting the other Larkinson expert chs into archechs!
As ti continued to pass, the Miracle Couple gradually gained more confidence in their work.
The Dark Zephyr Mark III was starting to take shape without any obvious signs of collapse or other undesirable complications.
Although a few incidents happened here and there, Ves already anticipated them in advance and activated the appropriate contingency plans to prevent the irregularities from cascading into more serious problems.
A lot more shadow energy and other E energies began to accumulate into the increasingly more complete archech.
Exchanging Unending alloy for more specialized hyper materials made the Dark Zephyr a lot purer and more efficient in his interactions with E energy.
His total capacity also grew by a moderate extent after Ves carefully installed the Dark Wind Module.
Ves had been worried whether the partially disassembled fra of the Dark Zephyr would produce a lot of disturbances when he installed the powerful Ultimate Module, but the actual outco was quite mild.
Aside from saturating the Dark Zephyr with even more shadow energy, the expert ch remained stable for the most part.
This was a testant to Gloriana's excellent design work. The design of the Dark Zephyr was fairly solid and robust for a light ch. This was also one of the advantages of working with archetech.
As the reconstructed expert ch neared completion, the pace slowed down even further as Ves and Gloriana were beginning to apply the finishing touches.
Their main concerns no longer centered around the Dark Zephyr.
They beca more and more concerned about whether Venerable Tusa would be ready to pilot his new and improved expert ch when the ti had co.
"Is he…?"
"Give him more ti, Gloriana. I can tell that his ntal state is in an unusually active state at the mont. Let's see whether he can ta the phasewater rampaging inside his body by relying on his own strength. In any case, it is already admirable that he managed to last so long."
The ti had co for Tusa to prove himself.
Did he need dical assistance in order to extract the phasewater from his body, or would he be able to solve this problem by exerting his willpower?
User Comments
0 comments from readers