4238 New Attack Phase Crystal In the past, Ves engaged in many collaborative design projects. He usually worked with different combinations of lead designers to design a lot of different mechs. The selection and configuration of every design team differed based on the needs of every project. For example, when Ves wanted to update his Transcendent Punisher design to modern standards, there was hardly any point in pulling in melee mech specialists such as Ketis and the Power Pair. The general rule was that up to five mech designers could effectively impart the strength of their design philosophies onto a mech design. Ves usually attempted to fill up all of these slots whenever possible, but it was a lot easier for people like him or other mech designers to make their mark on a mech design if they did not have to share so much. In any case, the new weapon design project that he had spontaneously started was different from all of his previous projects. His express goal was to design a powerful weapon that could expressly unleash pure beams of death without demanding too much from Helena. Though he had witnessed instances in the past where Helena was able to fire a powerful concentrated beam of death in the material realm with the help of her Death Lotus, the efficiency was simply too low under ordinary circumstances! Perhaps she might be able to save a few people in an emergency, but she would only exhaust herself trying to do so over the course of a massive mech battle involving hundreds of thousands of mechs. If Ves wanted to give his clan the ability to repeatedly fire beams of death without squeezing Helena dry or straining her to exhaustion, then he had to create a weapon that could bridge the gap between the material realm and the imaginary realm! Luminar crystals happened to be the key medium that could make this possible. Their reactivity to spirituality at least opened the door to such an application. All Ves had to do was to invent a new kind of attack phase crystal, preferably within a single day! Ves already recognized that he did not have the expertise and understanding to complete this kind of research by himself. This was why he thought about doing something that he had rarely done in the past, but should have done more often due to how useful it was to work in this way. He formed a design team composed of himself and a bunch of design spirits. It was quite difficult to make this team productive at first. "I don't know anything about science and engineering! I'm a goddess! I simply make stuff happen!" Helena complained. "#$&#&$." The Illustrious One silently communicated in a way that only Ves could clearly understand. "That's not the way you should design a mech pistol!" Vulcan complained while swinging his intangible blacksmith's hammer. "It's way too skinny to endure the rigors of battle. If you want to make a relic that lasts forever, then I insist on thickening up its body!" Ves let out a breath in exasperation as he rubbed his palm against his face. An hour hadn't even gone by after he brought all of these design spirits together and already they were bickering with him and each other about countless little details. None of them were on the same page! This wouldn't have happened if he worked with professional mech designers who were accustomed to working alongside their colleagues. "QUIET EVERYONE!" Ves eventually shouted. "This isn't working! Time is short. We need to complete a weapon before our fleet is about to engage the enemy at Pima Prime V. Please bear with me as I try another solution. Blinky! Come out, you lazy cat!" Mrow…? The purple Star Cat floated out of Ves' head while letting out a yawn. It looked as if he had just woken up from a pleasant cat nap. "I need you to form a design network with everyone here. This is the only way we can effectively pool our knowledge and coordinate our design work." Blinky blinked as the companion spirit directed his gaze at Ves, Helena, the Illustrious One and Vulcan in turn. "I'm being serious, Blinky. I know you've never done this with me and a bunch of design spirits before, but there's a first time for everything! Just make sure to limit the connections so that I won't get flooded with too much incomprehensible data." Mrow… Blinky did as instructed, taking extra care to limit the amount of data throughput over the spiritual bonds. Spiritual entities were much different from organic life forms such as Ves. The latter were largely constrained in their thinking by the finite capacities of their brains. The former did not have to deal with those limitations and could easily scale up the magnitude of their thinking processes so long as they had the spiritual energy to spare! What this meant was that it was quite dangerous to form an unregulated spiritual bond between normal people and spiritual entities. So-called 'gods' could quite literally crush mortals to their deaths with the magnitude of their mental activity! At first, Blinky definitely experienced a lot of strain. He actively had to shrink the bonds and implement more filters in order to make the design network bearable to Ves. Once Blinky got everything right, Ves simply sat in his seat and took in all of the new input while actively sharing what he wanted to accomplish with his weapon design. There had been instances in the past when Ves actively embodied a couple of his design spirits by channeling them directly with his mind and spirit. The experiences back then were much different because Ves actively tried to align his thoughts with the spiritual entity in question. This time, Ves tried to maintain his own persona and mental state as a mech designer while opening himself up to other influences to broaden his horizons and recognize new possibilities. It was working. As Ves gathered all of the unique knowledge and perspectives of three different design spirits, everything mashed together in a way that allowed him to notice a lot more details about his weapon design that he had previously missed! Ves concentrated on the attack phase crystal that he wanted to make. The biggest problem with it was that no matter what kind of materials he used to synthesize a new luminar crystal, it probably wouldn't be capable of effectively channeling death energy. What he needed was a spiritually-reactive material that was compatible enough to Helena that it could impart this key quality to an attack phase crystal. "Wait a second…" He paused for a moment before a black alloy bar 'spontaneously' appeared on the work table in front of his seat. Helena immediately perked up when she felt an instinctive affinity for the new object. She hovered closer and experimentally poked it with her finger. Much to her surprise, it easily sucked in and stored her death energy! With the help of the design network, Helena already had a good idea on what it was and what Ves had in mind for this material. "Can you truly combine this 'Black Demon Steel' into the right crystal?" "It's worth a try." Ves responded. "I will have to experiment and develop the right combination and proportions of different materials. I'm not starting from scratch, though. The light beam attack phase crystal most closely resembles what I am looking for. If I take it as my starting point and swap out one material for Black Demon Steel, I can probably make a working crystal. After that, I just have to keep adjusting the proportions and such until I end up with the most efficient implementation." This was exactly what he proceeded to do in the following two hours. Blinky kept up the design network in order to keep the design spirits engaged and invested in the weapon design project. The first-class lab machines that he had acquired a while ago facilitated his work enormously. He had also spent a bit of his MTA merits to acquire additional lab and workshop equipment that were specifically developed to produce crystals. This allowed him to produce dozens of different samples that slightly differed from each other. Ves' approach towards this exploration process was fairly simple. He made a minor change to a single variable, and if that caused the next crystal to perform better than before, then he would make the change more drastic and see if that led to further improvements in performance. Once that stopped happening, Ves knew that he had hit a sweet spot and proceed to change another variable and start the process anew. This was hardly the most ideal and effective process to be honest. Ves might have been able to find an adequate sweet spot the first time, but overlook a superior one if he had just pushed through! There were also instances where he could create a more perfect sweet spot if he made a lot of changes that did not seem beneficial at first. However, all of that took a lot of time and calculation work. For now, Ves would be happy with a quick and dirty solution as long as he ended with a weapon that was strong enough to change the course of the upcoming battle. "Alright, I think I have found a good-enough crystal formula!" Ves announced as he held a small gray crystal in his palm. Based on the principles that allowed his luminar crystal weapons to fire light beams that dealt a lot of damage to spiritual targets, his new attack phase crystal successfully channeled and fired Helena's death energy in a way that was practical enough for his needs! Ves glanced at the large amount of lab mice and other test animals that the Design Department routinely kept in stock. Each of the unfortunate creatures were technically still alive, but all fell into a coma as their spirits had all been wiped away by the tiny crystal! "That's interesting." Helena remarked. "The crystal itself has actually harvested small fragments of the spirits of those poor animals. I think that might be useful." Ves nodded in agreement. "I think I have a few ideas on how I can leverage that, but I don't have the time to explore any further. I need to complete the design of the mech pistol and fabricate it. I want to complete a basic product first. I can think about upgrading it later on when I am not so pressed for time." He proceeded to do just that. Blinky no longer maintained the design network as Ves finalized his black pistol design. He had gotten what he wanted from the design spirits, and none of them were needed anymore after the end of the design stage. Helena, the Illustrious One and Vulcan still stuck around, though. They were incredibly curious to see what their collective efforts had yielded. While this was not the first time that Ves had blended obscure forms of spiritual engineering with conventional engineering, it was probably the more extensive hybrid development project he worked on up to this point outside of mechs! Ves hardly even paid attention to the news that the combined attack fleet had successfully arrived at the edge of the Pima Prime System. General Alisky Victrix, General Verle and all of the other military higher-ups had everything in hand! Since it took a decent amount of time to enter the inner system, sweep up the outlying settlements and shoot down isolated space stations, Ves still had enough time to fabricate a working mech pistol and test out its performance. "I have a feeling that this weapon is worthy to be called a relic." Ves stated to his fellow 'collaborators'. "Black Demon Steel is anything but ordinary, and using up 2.5 kilograms is just enough to produce my newly-developed gray beam attack phase crystal that can fit inside a mech pistol!" If he wanted to make a larger weapon such as a luminar crystal rifle or luminar crystal cannon, then he would have been forced to make the attack phase crystal larger, thereby reducing the proportion of Black Demon Steel in the object. This would have caused the larger weapons to perform little better than a pistol! Therefore, Ves might as well settle with the most compact form. This made it smaller, lighter and easy to carry for many different mechs.