Chapter 7339: Purging Biomass As the Ixith Goliath suffered more and more ailments, Ves keenly took advantage of the moment and analyzed as much of the remarkable creature as possible! He knew that he had gained a unique opportunity to study this unprecedented organic creation up close before anyone else. Even though there were plenty of mechs and warships on the battlefield that possessed powerful sensor systems, the data they could gather in this busy and interference-rich environment was limited and biased towards material properties. Ves on the other hand was able to utilize Blinky’s excellent senses to study the extraordinary biological makeup of the Level 8 Goliath. While the enemy’s stolen resonance heavily interfered with his own scans, he was still able to glean a lot of details, especially as the withering curse and the unleashed demons actively weakened the megavoribug’s biomass. Any piece of compromised flesh became fair game to everyone! As Ves continued to absorb a large amount of data and insights, he already started to entertain wild and increasingly more outrageous ideas. He was gaining a lot of inspiration at the moment! The Goliath Hive introduced an entirely new framework that had never been introduced on a large scale in the past. Though the Ixith Goliath possessed a number of shortcomings, that did not detract from the fact that it was able to leverage the power of willpower cultivation without putting in the hard work! This alone was invaluable to the human race! Ves and a growing number of other people saw hope of leveraging the exceptional strength and unlimited possibilities of willpower cultivation on a wider and more industrial scale. This was not an exaggeration. The Ixith Goliath was the product of an alien race that had only burst onto the scene relatively recently. This indicated that the technological principles behind this phenomenon might not be difficult to reproduce. What was truly valuable was the original idea and the unique voribug advantages that made this special strain possible. Since the voribugs could steal the concept of resonance from red humanity and make their own version of it, red humanity should be able to steal the principles that made the Ixith Goliath as well! A race had already kicked off, and Ves just happened to enjoy a headstart. While his knowledge base, experience and industrial base could not compare to the other major players of human civilization, his competitors all happened to be stationed on planets and starships located many light-years away from the battlefield. How much data and insights could they gather from remote observations and sensor data dumps alone? Not as much as Ves’ first-hand observations, that was for certain! Ves did not ask to invent anything too big and ambitious. For example, since the Ixith Goliath possessed the mass and volume of a very large battleship, could the Red Fleet develop a dreadnought that was able to generate its own form of resonance? Such a vessel would be a gamechanger for the RF and all of the other big players! Even if the resonance strength of these strange warships could not surpass a couple of dozen laveres, that was already good enough to amplify their combat performance by at least an order of magnitude! Of course, Ves did not even dream about inventing such a miraculous ship. Instead, he thought about applying his inspiration on more relevant projects, such as the development of his elemental Carmine mechs. If he wanted to create living mechs based on the Ixith Goliath, then he had to satisfy at least two requirements. First, the mech needed to be composed of his own versions of the sentient organic components that made up the Level 8 Goliath. Second, the mech had to possess a Mentalist Crystal or equivalent that was able to form the distributed intelligence and potentially act as a source of extraordinary willpower. Getting his hands on a Mentalist Crystal and especially a complete one was very difficult, but not impossible. If the output of Mentalist Crystals did not rise anytime soon, then the Hunting Association would profit immensely from the massive increase in demand! People already developed a lot of useful applications of this rare and mysterious hyper material, but now that they knew they could potentially create works like the Ixith Goliath, their desire for it would shoot through the roof! More and more enterprising individuals and organizations would definitely begin to research how to mass produce Mentalist Crystals, but Ves did not think that any of them could succeed in the short term. Mentalist Crystals were exclusively grown by rare mutated beasts that randomly started to develop their intelligence rather than any more directly useful physical enhancements. Such beasts were extremely rare no matter the ecosystems, and not every clever creature grew an actual Mentalist Crystal. So long as this remained the case, the output of Mentalist Crystals was destined not to reach the scale of mass production, and that was a big shame. This meant that Ves could only produce limited quantities of elemental Carmine mechs with stolen resonance capabilities. It was not worth it to develop such machines for most potential customers, but it was a different story if he limited this invention for internal use! Ves keenly saw an opportunity to harness the might of willpower cultivation without being a high-ranking mech pilot or swordmaster himself! The Dark Apostle’s combat effectiveness would definitely skyrocket if his future Polymetal mech and raiment combination also happened to generate its own resonance empowerment! However, Ves was not yet certain whether it was even possible to create such an outrageous machine. It depended on whether nanomachines could substitute all of the key functions of the so-called sentient organic components. If Ves was not able to do this without resorting to biological products, then he could only limit this application to organic Carmine mechs. It would be a huge disappointment if he could only impart the power of stolen resonance to his Woodsap mechs and his as-of-yet-unrealized Mergewater mechs. Both mech concepts possessed a lot of advantages, but Ves possessed a clear preference for his Polymetal mech concept. It was the only elemental Carmine mech type that perfectly leveraged his strengths as a mech designer. The key to imitating the principles was figuring out the nature of these ’sentient organic intelligences’. Ves knew too little about them to be honest. He could only vaguely sense their existence. While they were not as small as individual cells, they were not that big either. The smallest ones were as small as rats while the larger ones could rival the size of a nunser. Regardless, all of these semi-independent organisms possessed their own minds. Ves had studied them long enough to ascertain their sapience and their ability to experience emotions. Of course, that did not necessarily mean that they were as smart and aware as humans. Their intelligence appeared significantly deficient, or else they wouldn’t have been so susceptible against corrupting influences. The Goliath Hive imparted the sentient organic components with enough intelligence to generate willpower, but not enough for them to develop true individualism. Ves already had an idea on how to create a living mech that imitated such a construction. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶 He just needed to create a new variation of a multi-spirit living mech. He had already theorized the existence of multi-spirit living mechs back when he developed the Fey Fianna, but this was a much more extreme version of his initial daydream. Just like how he was able to bring a living mech with an Ultimate Module or several fey to life, he could extrapolate this method further in order to produce an even more extreme result. What if he designed a living mech that was divided into millions of lives? There would no longer be a dominant spirit among them! Each of them had to be as equal to each other as possible. Major variations and deviations in strength would make it exponentially harder to synchronize them with each other. Such an extreme multi-spirit living mech may resemble the distributed intelligence of the Ixith Goliath just enough to satisfy one of the key requirements! Of course, developing such a radical living mech was easier said than done. He had already reached a limit when he developed the Fey Fiannas. While they were able to spawn more subordinate spirits and accommodate more living fey as they grew older over time, this expansion rate clearly did not satisfy the demands for a true ’Ixith-style’ living mech! Blinky furrowed his feline eyes. How could he overcome this limit? He knew from past work experiences that there was a limit to how many times he could ’partition’ a spiritual entity. They were not like data chips where he could easily divide their digital storage spaces into as many drives as he wanted. A living spirit was much more delicate and mysterious than that. Cutting them up was like cutting into a person’s brain. A small slice or three shouldn’t produce any noticeable differences, but a million slices would definitely cause the mind and consciousness to collapse! Ves did not feel that this was an insurmountable problem to overcome, but he needed more time to think and experiment before he could come up with a solution. That was assuming that he was willing to go through with this experimental project. Just as he began to consider a few possible ideas, a sudden change occurred on the battlefield. The Ixith Goliath was in much worse shape than before. Though it had not suffered any truly catastrophic blows up to this point, all of the successive attacks from the Dark Apostle, the Ascended Giants, the Rubarthan ace mechs and heavy fire support from assisting warships and defensive installations all took their toll on the massive insect. "Death by a thousand cuts." The ’cuts’ in these cases were attacks that were powerful enough to tear any ordinary first-class mech apart with a single blow, but given the scale of the Ixith Goliath, they were truly small under the circumstances. Yet it was through these cuts that the Level 8 Goliath’s physical condition worsened with every passing minute. The protection afforded by stolen resonance gradually declined due to both internal and external sources of pressure. Its immense buffer became more vulnerable and started to accrue damage far in excess to its regeneration rate, which had also become impaired. The Goliath and its distant controller must clearly know that there was no feasible way for it to escape this deadlock as long as it stuck to its present methods. The only way to escape this doom loop was to resort to drastic measures. The switch happened in an instant. All of the attackers at close range suddenly became engulfed by a wave of biomass! The Ixith Goliath blew up all of a sudden! "Ahh!" "Retreat!" "A mutation has occurred!" The Dark Apostle grunted as his armored form got struck by a giant piece of shell! The impact was strong enough to interrupt his forward momentum and push him back on an uncontrollable trajectory! While he quickly arrested his flight, he cautiously tried to figure out what just happened. "Did the Ixith Goliath self-destruct?!" "No." Ves decisively responded. "It is very much alive, but... it has diminished itself somehow. It has managed to restore its vitality at the cost of sacrificing much of the parts of its body that have become compromised. Like a serpent cutting off its own tail, this Goliath has managed to rejuvenate itself by decisively excising all of its deadweight and hidden dangers!" The Goliath that emerged from all of the drained and withered biomass was roughly half as large, yet seemed just as menacing as before. It was... as if its lethality had become a lot more condensed than before. Though the strange Goliath had lost much of its sentient organic components, what was left only had to cover a body that was a fraction of its previous size. This meant that its stolen resonance was just as strong as before! The shrunken and transformed Goliath not only managed to make itself smaller. It had also made a number of adaptations to its body. Its exoskeleton did not appear as thick as before. Its overall body shape had grown slender and shorter. It lost a number of limbs, but the ones that remained had become proportionately longer and more complex. What concerned the remaining combatants a lot was the fact that some of its limbs had turned into claws that could grip and potentially trap its enemies! "Its afflictions are gone!" Ves warned. "It has shed my curse and all of the other stuff that I used to weaken it from the inside!" This was bad! Just as everyone tried to figure out the implications behind all of the physical changes, the now-healthy and unbothered Goliath quickly took action! It zipped across space and arrived in front of an Ur-Titan in no time! While the former human soldier possessed solid reflexes and quickly raised his superdimensional halberd in to block the incoming claw, the transformed Goliath abruptly used one of its clawed limbs to grip the weapon and utilized its powerful physical might to wrench the armament from the giant’s hand! "What?!" Now bereft of his weapon, the Ur-Titan could do nothing to stop a pair of claws stab through the damaged and weakened torso plating of his raiment! "No!"