Chapter 5989 Gloriana's Frustrations While all of the observing mech designers reacted with shock, concern, dismay or resignation towards Ves' antics, the man responsible for causing this distress was having the time of his life! He had purposefully engineered this exceptional situation for multiple reasons. This included ones that he could not properly explain! He just knew that if he arranged stuff in this specific fashion, he would gain a small but important boost to his productivity. So far, the outcome matched his expectations! His recently acquired affinity towards darkness added a very helpful dimension to his work process. By acting according to the concepts represented by darkness, Ves experienced a range of improvements. He became more excited. His passion burned hotter. He became more interested due to the novelty of these unprecedented circumstances. Breaking expectations, raising the stakes, increasing his adversity and putting Tusa in an underdog position all conformed to the darkness in his heart. Even though Ves knew that his outrageous actions wouldn't do his reputation any good, he still chose to act according to his whims because he sincerely believed that he would be able to produce the best iteration of the Dark Zephyr Mark III in these special circumstances! Of course, not everything went well at first. One of the downsides of surprising his wife was that she had been pushed far from her comfort zone. The active design network allowed Ves to clearly sense his wife's frustrations towards him by pulling off this stunt. Combined with the constant pain and resentment generated by Tusa, it did not surprise anyone that Gloriana failed to produce archemetal parts that were up to standard! However, Gloriana was not that weak. She hated it when her husband messed up her carefully laid plans, but she harbored an even stronger hatred towards failure! When two different hatreds assailed her at the same time, Gloriana could only set aside her lesser pet peeves and focus on making sure that she did not end up a loser due to an inability to adapt to changing variables. A perfect mech designer never failed! A perfect mech designer should be able to improvise under any circumstances! A perfect mech designer should never lose control over herself due to encountering setbacks! "Please bless my mind and help me stay in focus." Gloriana softly prayed to the Superior Mother. "Please save my work from your misbehaving son." Whether the Superior Mother responded to her prayers or not, Gloriana did not wallow in her misery, but steeled her mind in order to ensure that she did not fail in this critical upgrade run. Upgrading a living mech was much more challenging than fabricating a new one from scratch! There was only one Dark Zephyr. Any attempt to upgrade his mech frame affected his spiritual foundation. A botched upgrade attempt could actually cause the living mech to regress, thereby becoming weaker instead of the opposite. Even if Gloriana was able to repair the Dark Zephyr and bring him to his intended condition, the damage was already done at that point. Therefore, Gloriana believed that she only had one real chance of upgrading the Dark Zephyr in the most perfect fashion possible. That was not the only concern that weighed on her mind. She briefly glanced in Tusa's direction. After putting Tusa in lethal peril, Ves advised the expert pilot to not call for any medical assistance. This left Tusa to resist the harmful effects of phasewater ingestion by relying on his own limited means! With the help of Alexandria's active design network, Gloriana became much more familiar with Tusa's struggle than she was comfortable with. She sensed his persistent pain. She heard his curses towards Ves. She felt his willpower becoming more worn by the minute. She perceived Blackwing's frantic efforts to employ shadow energy to suppress the spatial activity of phasewater. Above all, she could feel his growing determination and conviction towards beating Ves' game. Tusa had vanquished many mechs, beasts and alien warships! He was not about to let a few drops of Ves' blood break his winning streak! He was stronger than this! He was stronger than Ves! The prospect of passing this test before subsequently teaming up with his new and improved archemech to punch Ves in the face served as a powerful motivator to the struggling expert pilot. Tusa wanted to pay Ves back tenfold for all of the suffering he was forced to endure! All of this activity was distracting to say the least. Even when Alexandria purposefully filtered out the worst of it all, Tusa's thoughts and emotions were still highly incongruent to Gloriana's ideal state of mind. It was as if she was trying to paint Tusa's portrait in the middle of a loud and chaotic dance club! How was she supposed to guarantee high-quality output when the entire workshop tried to disrupt her work rhythm?! "Ves…" Gloriana gnashed her teeth for the umpteenth time. Though she wanted to do nothing more than to walk up to her husband and yell until his ears grew deaf, her work came first. The design network also allowed Gloriana to gain a clear impression on how Ves was faring in a challenging situation of his own making. She grew frustrated when she noticed that Ves did not appear to suffer any significant setbacks. To use the same dance club analogy, Ves embraced the moment and happily danced to the music! Somehow, he was able to dance while making sure to paint his portrait at the same time. There was no apparent conflict between these two activities. Ves acted as if he was completely in his element! Though Gloriana could never bring herself to embrace the moment like her husband, she could still draw strength from his mood, his optimism and his surprising lack of concern towards failure. "Maaaooow." As Alexandria's glowing red form continued to serve as a weak light source in the mech workshop, she was working a lot harder than usual to regulate the design network. She was in full control of all of the connections, and she needed to make a lot of judgment calls on what sort of stuff she should pass. Gloriana knew that she would completely lose all of her strengths if she took in everything that was allowing Ves to work at peak efficiency. However, her companion spirit still discovered enough positive aspects about Ves that could enable Gloriana to cope with this abnormal situation. It worked. Her mood grew steadier. Her nerves became less frayed. She oddly felt more comfortable in the darkness. She no longer became bothered by the massive deviations from her plan. Though she hated to admit it, there was no one who could improve better than her husband! As Gloriana continued to borrow from Ves' strengths, she increasingly adapted to the anomalous circumstances. She still felt bothered by Tusa's tortuous experience, but she no longer allowed him to disrupt her rhythm. Instead, she derived a greater sense of urgency from his pain. She knew that the harder she worked, the more she was able to provide relief to Tusa! Gloriana no longer tried to restore her plan at all costs. She became more willing to make adjustments and speed up her work. If she could finish the transformation of the Dark Zephyr a day or half a day earlier, then that could make a real difference for Venerable Tusa! As Gloriana continued to work under pressure, she gradually felt she was on the right track again. Though the archemetal parts she fabricated with the help of the new machines still did not reach an acceptable quality standard, her output slowly improved on this front. She had practiced with fabricating archemetal components in the past, but she never approached this task so seriously until today. The archemetal components that she needed to produce were predominantly difficult and complex to make. Archemetal parts never fulfilled a single defined purpose. They often blended a lot of different functions together in order to achieve greater levels of redundancy. Gloriana had to mix in dozens more materials than usual and also make sure to transform them into a huge number of subcomponents that seamlessly integrated with each other. Archemetal was nothing more than an artificial reproduction of an archeshell. The production method therefore demanded a lot of attention from Gloriana as she needed to form a lot of different integrated parts at the same time. If not for her massive cognitive boost from her recent cranial implant upgrade, Gloriana wouldn't have been able to keep up with all of the critical processes! She didn't have to make the production of archemetal so hard on herself. As long as she activated a few automated settings and drastically slowed down the fabrication rate, she possessed a lot more confidence in her ability to churn out higher-quality parts. However, the additional sources of pressure prevented Gloriana from considering this alternative approach! She needed to complete this project with greater haste than before. Despite feeling frustrated about her inability to choose her approach, she did not remain upset for long. She appreciated Ves' attitude and enjoyment towards fabricating a mech on a tight deadline. Hours into the upgrade process, Gloriana did not need to borrow as much strength from Ves anymore. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎 This was because she had recovered her mood and adapted her mentality just enough to rely on her own motivations to persist in her work! The archemetal components started to get better over time. Their quality gradually improved. Gloriana not only felt more comfortable with the abnormal situation, but she also gained a large amount of practical experience in producing archetech. Her proficiency in operating the archetech fabrication machines rose quickly. Though she had already spent hundreds of hours operating the same kind of machines in virtual reality, none of those practice sessions could match the actual processes in reality! It was the rapid accumulation of practical experience that allowed her to increase her speed while making sure the quality of her output did not deteriorate. Though she still experienced difficulties in her attempts to fabricate the most challenging archemetal components, she did not experience the setbacks that she was afraid of. None of the work intimidated her to the point where she lost her confidence. Part of it came from Ves, but another part of it came from herself. Both Ves and Gloriana possessed an unflinching belief that they could overcome all of the challenges and turn the Dark Zephyr Mark III into an archemech that they could take pride in creating! Gloriana learned a lot of lessons so far, and not even an entire day had passed as of yet! She learned so much more about Ves, herself and Tusa that she felt the urge to spontaneously change the design in order to incorporate her latest insights. She resisted the urge to do so. This was an action that Ves would gladly make, but she was not her husband. She possessed her own style and work approach. At best, she could implement her insights in her subsequent mech design projects. The Dark Zephyr Mark III design already satisfied her expectations. When Gloriana eventually suspended her work and took a scheduled break, she became satisfied when she looked back at her output so far. Their quality might not be the best, but she was confident that they would perform adequately once they were put inside the new and improved expert mech. She supposed she could do better by remaking a lot of inferior archemetal parts, but this would delay the completion of the project far too much. Trying to remake all of the old parts would also disrupt her rhythm and weaken her momentum. She quite liked her current mood to be honest. She knew that this approach suited Ves best, but it was not bad for her to embrace it as well, particularly given the circumstances. She glanced over at Tusa. The expert pilot was not doing much better than before, but he somehow managed to muster up greater strength than before. The phasewater circulating inside his body remained docile enough for the time being. She just hoped that it would last.