The Mech Touch

Chapter 7554 Expanding Foothold

"So what have you learned, exactly?" Gloriana asked as she took Marvaine back into her arms. "Your descriptions of your gains are too broad and abstract. It is difficult for me to understand how you have improved. Your tone makes it clear that you have benefited greatly from your latest project."

She was correct. Ves had spoken too lightly about his gains.

"It is difficult to explain. It is as challenging as describing what a mech looks like to a blind person." He responded. "I have figured out deeper insights into the cycle of life and death. Perhaps it is better to give you a small demonstration."

He raised a hand with his palm upward and began to summon a mote of life energy.

"So warm." Marvaine commented with a smile even as his little arms tried to reach out towards the font of life.

However, that font of life began to sputter and lose activity in a matter of seconds. It progressively lost more and more of its luster until it had turned into a dark and seemingly lifeless seed.

The mote of life energy had turned into a kernel of death energy.

Gloriana raised her eyebrows in surprise.

This was hardly a unique transformation. What truly impressed her was how fast and seamless Ves managed to complete this transition!

Even if this was a very small and simplistic transformation, not just any practitioner could perform such a feat!

What he did next raised her appreciation for her husband even further.

He concentrated harder and began to exert himself a bit more. After a few seconds of delay, the seed of death seemed to ignite into a bright and life-bearing flame!Cha

Though the revived mote of life energy had become weaker and less stable than before, it still represented the outcome of an extraordinary action!

"You can turn death to life without relying on any intermediary processes or reagents?" She asked.

"I am something of an expert when it comes to life energy." Ves smirked. "As for death, there is so much of it around us that it is much easier to figure out its properties than unusual."

"Do not belittle yourself. It is one thing to comprehend the concept of death in isolation, but to be able to grasp the greater meaning of the connection between life and death is clearly an advanced operation. Normal qi cultivators of the Red Collective have to rely on talent, extensive study or very scarce reagents to achieve a comparable result. You have truly harvested greatly this time, Ves."

Ves couldn't help but feel prideful. "Thank you, honey."

Marvaine joined in on the party as well. "Papa is the best!"

"Haha, I don't dare to make that claim, little buddy. I am just a Senior Mech Designer. There are Star Designers that can produce much more grandiose results."

"I still think you are the best." Their son stubbornly maintained his stance. "Your mechs are more alive than the mechs made by others. I love them lots. Every mech should be as alive as yours."

"Not every mech designer agrees with you. Different mech designers have their own vision of what mechs should be. I would like to convince them all that living mechs are superior to lifeless mechs, but I need the strength to back up my convictions. I will become a lot more persuasive once I have been promoted to the rank of Master Mech Designer."

"Has your recent gains helped with that?" His wife asked.

Ves nodded. "Definitely. What I have learned not only helps me with developing better Woodsap mechs, but can also be used to enrich the other elemental Carmine mechs. The relevance may not be as high, but it is not low either."

"What other concrete benefits have you obtained?"

"Hmm." He paused for a moment. "I think I have a better understanding of the nature of the deathborn. I am more confident than before in my ability to unravel them. I know how to feed them as well as starve them. I am more confident in my ability to defeat them on the battlefield. I don't need to rely on a lot of complicated gear either."

He talked a bit more for 5 minutes straight. He gained a lot of small ideas, and he he looked forward to testing as many of them on the upcoming battlefield, provided that they did not introduce any excessive risks.

"You sound as if the deathborn are already on the chopping block. That is dangerous, Ves. We still do not fully understand what we are confronted by. Their true strength is unfathomable. It is too dangerous to look down on them when we are still far from invincible."

Her words woke him up a bit. He tried his best to reset his mentality and expectations and managed to make decent progress in it. He still felt unusually confident about the upcoming battle, but he became more aware that his current feelings may blind him from unexpected setbacks and difficulties.

"The final briefing starts soon." He said. "Our fleet should almost be close enough for us to witness what our enemies have prepared."

Gloriana assumed a serious expression. "That is true. Let us settle Marvaine first. He is still at least a decade too young to participate in our affairs. It is naptime for you, my son."

"I'm not tired! I don't wanna sleep! I wanna see!"

"Be a good boy and do what your mother tells you." Gloriana frowned.

Half an hour passed as Ves and Gloriana settled their children and took care of miscellaneous business.

After that, they both entered a virtual conference room that had already become half-filled with various distinguished individuals.

Shortly after the pair sat down, Saint Commander Casella Ingvar finally commenced the meeting.

"As most of you are already aware of, we have taken a considerable risk by sending ahead scout mechs and scout vessels. The Command Field projected by my Victrix has kept the deathborn and the dark miasma at bay, but that has still left them somewhat vulnerable to ambushes conducted by enemy strike forces. I still decided to send out a scouting force because most of the potential losses are bearable."

The combined fleet would not lose all that much if the scouting force got annihilated. The only truly irreplaceable asset was the Victrix. If the situation truly became desperate, then the resonance-empowered owl was probably strong and fast enough to make it back to the combined fleet with or without any friendlies.

In the worst case scenario, Casella had been prepared to dispatch Tusa and the Dark Zephyr as a high-speed rescuer.

Fortunately, that hadn't been necessary. Who knew what kind of trouble might befall the ace light skirmisher if he ventured out alone into the dark miasma!

The central projector came to life.

It depicted a relatively fuzzy map of Hypeh-Tekas II and its immediate orbit.

Ves and many others could quickly tell that this snapshot was hardly complete. The image had been constructed with the use of multiple sets of sensor data, yet because of all of the interference and hardware data, they possessed very little awareness of what was located at the blind spots.

Still, the visible details already gave them plenty to talk about.

"So the Red Cabal is able to maintain activity amidst the deathborn after all." The projection of Commander Zonrad Reze said with a serious expression before raising a finger to highlight 4 major structures. "These orbital structures are clearly fortresses of native alien designs. While they are derived from mass-produced templates, their specifications rank among the top of what we have encountered during the Red War."

The projection of the Fiery Axe snorted. "These fortresses are too stationary to evade our axes. My giants and I can demolish them with ease!"

"These are not standard native alien orbital defenses." Casella shook her head. "Do not forget that they are anchored in the heart of the initial stronghold of the deathborn race in this dwarf galaxy. These orbital fortresses appear completely intact and fully functional despite the fact that they are engulfed by dark miasma and the deathborn. This makes me believe that they have most definitely received upgrades of indeterminate nature."

Taking down these fortresses may not be as straightforward as they wished.

"Those orbital fortresses are not the real concern." Ves spoke up. "It is what our enemies have built on the surface that is truly critical for us. The native aliens or the deathborn have built a massive structure on the planet. Not only is it big enough to be easily seen from this simplified display, it is also generating a huge amount of emissions."

The bizarre alien structure possessed an architecture that was utterly foreign to the Red Ocean.

It did not look like anything that a human or a species from the new frontier could conceive!

What further convinced the gathered leaders that the structure was extragalactic in design was that a large number of deathborn rose up from its central cavity and spread out into the surrounding space!

This… planetary-scale temple-like structure appeared to be the primary source for all of the deathborn in the Hypeh-Tekas System!

"How can it produce so many deathborn?" Saint Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson asked. "Don't they emerge from the corpses of deceased aliens?"

The Saint Commander already had a guess in mind. "Look at the starships that are situated along a line. Most of them are not warships. Our analysts have determined that they consist of a mix of large-capacity transport haulers and civilian passenger ships. It is reasonable to speculate that they are shipping in large amounts of bodies, both living and dead. We may have found out where the native aliens have sent the human populations of dozens of captured planets in this war theater."

"Wait, commander! Are you saying..?!"

Multiple people made a horrifying realization!

"The native aliens have packed up billions of captured human soldiers and civilians just so that they can dump them on this planet in order to sacrifice them en masse to produce so many deathborn." Casella flatly relayed her analysis. "And that is not the worst of it. The Red Cabal has not let off their own species either. In order to strengthen their new allies, the local alien races have not hesitated to sacrifice billions if not trillions of their own brothers and sisters. We have stumbled upon an extermination center of enormous properties! They have committed all of this killing to grant the deathborn race an increasingly more formidable foothold in the Red Ocean. The longer this detesting activity persists, the more these menaces from Messier 87 have planted their roots in our dwarf galaxy. This. Cannot. Be. Tolerated."

That was an understatement!

For the sake of all of the murdered human captives alone, many of the gathered people felt an undeniable obligation to put a stop to this ongoing atrocity!