Chapter 6610 Shifting Priorities The Mental Simulation Training System or MSTS would soon become a thing of the past. Ves planned to transform it into the Elemental Universe, which incorporated all of the functions of the MSTS but vastly expanded it into a separate reality. In the Elemental Universe, the users of LMC products would be able to enter a community of like-minded mech pilots and partake in one of the many services that Ves planned to introduce. If not for the fact that mech pilots needed to 'earn' Elemental Credits through regularly piloting their living mechs, the Elemental Universe might actually be able to consume their lives to the point of living permanently in their cockpits! It was just as well that the Elemental Universe possessed this inherent usage restriction. The purpose of making it available to mech pilots was to strengthen them and help them prepare for the very real threats bearing down on red humanity. Ves had to refrain himself from introducing too many predatory practices that people typically encountered in virtual reality games, especially the ones centered around multiplayer sessions. He liked to earn a profit, but he wanted to maintain a win-win relationship with his customers. An enduring business relationship could only withstand the test of time if both sides kept benefiting from each other. If he introduced too many exploitative elements that exerted an undue amount of pressure onto mech pilots, then either the Red Association would forcefully step in, or the demand for an alternative would become so great that a powerful competitor may rise! Instead of letting that happen, Ves felt it was better to maintain a relatively free but limited persistent service and earn a lot of goodwill in the process. Besides, his external incarnation already stood to earn a lot of profit in the form of any surplus income as well as vital data. Vulcan actually needed this a lot. Cultivating the Metal God Method to the 4th stage enabled him to safely and efficiently absorb a lot of high-grade metal energy from the Iron Resonant Crucifix Crown, so his growth was already prodigious. His Heart of Steel had matured to a significant enough extent that he had already developed a domain and gained a few notable traits that surpassed the mundane. However, despite practising an advanced combination of creation cultivation, deity cultivation, artifact cultivation and qi cultivation at the same time, Vulcan mostly saw himself as a divine artisan. His domain reflected this as it mainly strengthened metal, granted strong mental and spiritual resistance at the cost of dampening emotions, empowered dwarves and increased the productivity as well as the creativity of craftsmen. There was no explicit combat focus to Vulcan's power development. The only defensive boost was solely designed to guard against the unwelcome mental contamination from the Iron Resonant Crucifix Crown, and the design spirit wouldn't be completely safe from this threat until he had reached the 7th stage of his cultivation method. Vulcan did not grow stronger by focusing on combat. He grew stronger by becoming a better craftsman. The Iron Resonant Crucifix Crown may satisfy his energy demands, but it did not enrich his knowledge and understanding of products. If Vulcan wanted to meet one of the requirements for advancing to a True God, then he needed to become good enough to craft a grand work by himself! This was a nearly impossible task for any but the best artisans in the Red Ocean. Perhaps Vulcan might be able to polish his skills through persistent practice and study over the span of several hundred or thousand years, but the God of Dwarves, Mechs and Craftsmanship did not have the luxury of time! He had no choice but to resort to shortcuts if he wanted to break through in a hurry. However, unlike Gaia whose foundation was extremely feeble shortly after her birth and immediate ascension into godhood, Vulcan's cultivation was a lot more solid and systematic. His foundation had already become extremely solid, and his domain was gaining more and more resilience with each passing day. If not for siphoning so much juice out of the symbol of authority, it would have literally taken hundreds of years or more of steady practice in a medium-energy environment to achieve similar results! All of this sounded great, but the gap between his energy state and his craftsmanship attainments was constantly growing wider. It couldn't be helped. The deity cultivation aspect of the Metal God Method was meant to help him develop his craftsmanship through receiving the spiritual feedback of many worshipers, but this method had very clear limitations. First, there weren't a lot of pure craftsmen out there. The population of red humanity was just a fraction of the population of original humanity. Artisans who mainly relied on superior craftsmanship to create quality products and sell them at enormous premiums also constituted a tiny minority of the total industrial sector. Most products used by people in modern times consisted of mass produced factory goods! The developments of the Red War also made the situation worse. The demand for consumer goods, especially handmade luxury goods such as designer bags, had plummeted in the past year. As the wartime economy steadily ramped up, more resources and attention shifted to military industries. The civilian economy suffered in every way, especially after states instituted martial law in order to force their citizens to change their spending behavior. One of the obvious consequences of this industrial upheaval was the shuttering of a lot of workshops. Not even brands that had occupied a niche for multiple centuries could keep their businesses running in a society increasingly beginning to deviate from the lost prosperity of the Age of Mechs! Perhaps the only consolation for the many craftsmen that soon found themselves out of a steady job was that the Red Collective quickly picked them up and put them into brand-new training programs. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖 The collies recognized the importance of creation cultivators. They were the only individuals who were capable of producing artifacts, especially high-level ones that possessed traits that could never be acquired through mass production. Therefore, a lot of people who previously worked with metal, bone, leather or thread suddenly began to learn a lot of extraordinary methods and techniques that enabled them to imbue special qualities in their handicrafts. The emergence of traditional craftsmanship benefited Vulcan a lot, but the problem was that most trainees still had to go through a few years of focused learning and practice before they became half-decent traditional craftsmen. This left Vulcan with an increasing slowdown in knowledge acquisition. Setting up the Elemental Universe in the next few months should therefore compensate for this development to an extent. Observing how these mech pilots increased their comprehension and ability to harness various E energy attributes did not automatically mean that Vulcan could do the same. However, just watching a lot of people increase their mastery over the classical elements and so on provided Vulcan with a lot of reference data. This would not only help him craft better artifacts that were based on the same E energy attributes, but also help Ves develop better elemental Carmine mechs! In short, the Elemental Universe could prove to become a vital component of Vulcan's growth as a spiritual entity. Since the future cultivation of one of his other selves was at stake, Ves did not dare to neglect the importance of this new priority. Ves added time slots in his schedule that were solely reserved for building up the Elemental Universe. The time detracted from his Mission-clearing activities, but Ves had long given up on maximizing his AP income by this time. He understood Ketis' perspective a lot better now that he was engaging in a similar activity. Some gains were more important than Ascension Points. The greatest value to earning AP was to extend his stay in the System Space. While Ves still wanted to earn enough AP to upgrade the Dimension Observatory and acquire a few juicy enlightenment fruits, it became increasingly more difficult to meet all of his goals for this marathon. "Plans change." Ves shrugged. "I already accumulated plenty of knowledge for the time being. My demand for enlightenment fruits is not particularly great when I am not even close to fully utilizing what I have already learned." Utilization had always been an old problem for Ves. Access to the System had spoiled him in terms of knowledge accumulation. While he was not as bad as the Polymath, he could not resist the opportunity to learn and gain proficiency in exotic new fields if the opportunity presented itself. This caused his head to become increasingly more congested with information, much of which he never utilized all that much. For example, the Introduction to the Withering Curse Enlightenment Fruit had granted him a lot of knowledge related to a curse that was based on the wood element. This opened a lot of new possibilities, but after making initial use of it, he had set it aside as his subsequent projects had very little to do with this valuable knowledge. "Perhaps it is time for me to change that." Ves murmured. The Introduction to the Withering Curse granted him valuable insights related to his upcoming ambition to design a Woodsap mech, but that was still a distant prospect. Ves dug up one of the mech design proposals from the depths of his cranial implant. He remembered that he devised this idea in one of his daydreams. [The Null Project] Just as its name suggested, Ves originally came up with this idea in order to supply the Battle Criers with a signature mech design. The Battle Criers had become his go-to mech legion when it came to countering spiritual shenanigans. While the Battle Criers had lost a bit of relevance after the outbreak of the Red War, the mechs armed with the special Godkiller Heavy Luminar Crystal Rifles became increasingly more relevant as they were quite good at draining azure energy shields. Over time, the Battle Criers would become even more relevant as the native aliens steadily began to implement more hyper technology in their hardware. There were also indications that the native aliens had begun to dabble in cultivation science as well. While they were still far behind red humanity when it came to adopting systematic cultivation, the more clever phase lords already showed signs of harnessing new abilities that were traditionally associated with qi cultivation! That would make them even deadlier than before. Phase lords already possessed amazing physiques. If they could amplify their strengths and mitigate their shortcomings by making use of a completely different power system, then they would definitely pose a greater threat against all human units aside from champions! High-ranking mech pilots would become even more important than before as their extraordinary willpower allowed them to overpower most qi cultivation techniques. "Expert pilots and ace pilots aren't always available in sufficient numbers." Ves determined. "A lot of breakthroughs have occurred in the past half year, but it takes time for them to acclimate to their new strength and obtain the right mechs that can allow them to channel their full power!" There were simply too many battlefields and not enough champions to cover them all. Human High Command had already made the helpless decision to transfer a lot of second-class ace pilots to the Upper Zones in order to bet on winning the most crucial battles of the Red Tide Offensive. Where did that leave the defenders of the Middle Zones? The lack of ace mechs in the Torald Middle Zone and other comparable regions would likely enable the phase lords over there to dominate the battlefield! Was there a way for Ves to inhibit these phase lords from overpowering conventional human defenses? "I am not sure whether the Null Project can affect phase lords, but it should definitely be effective against other threats such as phasefighters and warships, especially if they are reliant on hyper technology." It was a little too premature to introduce the Null Project at this timeframe, but Ves was already thinking about what red humanity might need after successfully withstanding the Red Tide Offensive. "Sooner or later, the native aliens will catch up to red humanity in terms of hyper technology and cultivation science. When they do, my mechs will be ready to ruin their day."