Chapter 6938 The Contradiction Between Identities Ves understood that he had fallen into a dilemma. In order to resolve this tribulation, he needed to reestablish a connection to his true body. For whatever reason, he had lost touch with reality. His body had transformed too much in a short interval of time and apparently triggered a disaster response without anyone noticing. Whatever the case, Ves had the illusion that his very life might take a very drastic turn if he did not adequately resolve the latest problem. His Spirituality may become completely disconnected from his upgraded true body! To certain people, this sounded like good news. Being able to detach their spirit from their body could be interpreted as ascension into a higher life form. That was not what Ves wanted out of his life. Becoming a pure spiritual life form was great if he could still maintain a solid presence in the material realm. God pilots were pretty fantastic in this way. Star Designers were also able to anchor themselves in realspace. However, becoming a spiritual life form without obtaining the strength of a True God was pure self-sabotage in his opinion. Not only would he become vulnerable to getting eroded by the corrosive winds of the imaginary realm, he would also become completely dependent on his mortal supporters and 'worshipers' to sustain himself! Aside from that, Ves was pretty sure that he could no longer advance as a mech designer once he lost his true body. Possessing a physical body that looked human enough to pass off as one was a vital requirement to maintain a connection to the Red Kingdom. How could a Senior Mech Designer possibly advance to the rank of Master Mech Designer without being able to carve his design philosophy into the Red Kingdom? Ves felt that becoming a pure spiritual life form akin to the Golden Cat or Lufa was incredibly boring. How the hell was he supposed to design his mechs, craft them by hand, interact with his customers and conduct research on interesting new stuff if his presence in the material realm became spotty? There was hardly anything interesting in the imaginary realm. Perhaps a few secret paradises or transcendent islands might exist amidst all of the meaningless emptiness, but Ves did not think he would be able to find any of them. All he ever encountered was erosion interspersed with the occasional lights generated by other nearby people. Maybe he was being unfair to the imaginary realm. He had already noticed that those aforementioned lights grew stronger and more defined after engaging in systematic cultivation. If many of them became as strong as expert pilots and ace pilots in a few decades, then they may just be powerful enough as a collective to completely transform the characteristics of the imaginary realm. However, that was a matter for the future. It was still a dull place in the present time. It was for this reason and more why Ves rejected the option of letting his Spirituality ascend from the physical plane! What he truly desired was to return to his body and continue to lead his clan like before! Yet how could he possibly do so when his attempt to reassert his own humanity produced the opposite reaction? Ves experimentally made another attempt to invest in his identity as a human being. The reflection of his true body immediately began to fade! There was no delay or ambiguity in this reaction! The more Ves insisted he was human, the more he compromised his tether to his true body! What was going on? Why did this strange space reject his attempt to reassert his own humanity? According to the judgment standards of this possible tribulation, claiming to be human was bad. Then what about the opposite? When Ves focused on the form of his true body and imagined how his titanic body could traverse the stars by itself and lift up mechs with its unnaturally reinforced muscles, the reflection grew more solid and real! This was a very simple and direct outcome! The logic became clear from his perspective. If Ves embraced the identity of a phase lord that had transcended the identity as well as the limitations of his original race, he would likely pass this test and survive the tribulation! Ves understood what he needed to do. He should continue what he did earlier and completely embrace his transcendent identity. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂 No, that was too simple of a description. He not only had to divorce himself from his human frailties, but also embrace the reality that he had become a god among mortals! The fact that his cognition already labeled humans and aliens without a significant amount of cultivation as 'mortals' already implied his attitude towards this matter. Even before he initiated this implantation surgery, he already placed himself above the masses. He completely regarded himself as a higher life form that would only move further away from the ordinary folk. How could he possibly treat himself like an ordinary human after how much he had moved apart from the general public? He had advanced so much in both a spiritual and material direction that he had become so much greater than the most excellent first-raters. He was more than an ordinary mech designer. As much as he tried to deny it, he had already started to set himself apart from his peers since his Apprentice days. Even among Senior Mech Designers, Ves outclassed them in almost every way due to his ingenuity and his ability to combine his other strengths into his works. From a more physical perspective, Ves completely exceeded pretty much every infantry soldier and most mech pilots by becoming a formidable phase lord. It did not matter if he lacked serious combat training. Even without the skills and mentality of a professional soldier, Ves was still able to rely on a combination of brute force and shallow manipulation of his various abilities to crush apart armies and tear mechs in half! Could a normal human do all of this? No! No matter whether it was a baseline human or a highly augmented first-rater, so long as they firmly remained in the category of mortals, they were unable to match him in any of his accumulated strengths! It would not be unjust to call him a god in light of all of these indisputable facts. Yet Ves never accepted the identity of a 'god'. As a secularist, he never considered the beings that wore this label on their sleeves as actual deities. As powerful as they may be, they still fell short of what a god must truly be in his opinion. He found it utterly ridiculous that the native aliens directly regarded the weakest phase lords as gods. Sure, the natives of the Red Ocean probably possessed a radically different cultural interpretation of gods, but that did not change his stance towards their ignorant and backward ways! Even the ancient phase whales whose bodies could outmass moons and maybe even planets could not meet his definition of a god. They were just really huge superdimensional organisms, that was all! Just because they had a lot of power did not necessarily mean they deserved to be worshiped by the ignorant population of the Red Ocean! The same went for the admittedly impressive god pilots of red humanity. Despite the word 'god' in their name, Ves did not think that labels alone could justify their deification. The Pantheon of Modern Gods had gained a lot of popularity by turning the worship of god pilots into organized faiths. Yet the success or failure of the PMG had no influence on the actual status of god pilots as deities as far as Ves was concerned. Any being that claimed to be divine and sustained themselves through the worship of the masses was not an actual god in his opinion. The entity was just an energy parasite or symbiote if it happened to be generous. Perhaps a few of them were powerful enough to fool a lot of people into accepting their apparent divinity, but it would take way more to convince Ves that they deserved the mantle of a god! Considering that Ves refused to believe that god pilots, Star Designers, ancient phase lords and even his own mother were actually gods, how could he possibly be arrogant enough to call himself a god? He was weaker than any of them on an individual basis! This irrefutable logic made it impossible for him to pretend he was far enough removed from mortals that he could call himself a god! At most, he regarded himself as a more outstanding mortal, but still fit within the range of humans. This was why he constantly insisted on his identity as a human being. He rejected the arrogance and conceit that came with the delusion that he was a god. Many phase lords and phase whales saw themselves as gods, but that did not help them when they got beat up by ace mechs and god mechs! How could he possibly accept the title of a god when he looked down on phase lord body cultivation? The story might be slightly different if they could turn themselves into true superdimensional beings that could shuttle through the higher dimensions without effort, but that was not the case. Ves firmly believed that phase lords were neither gods nor anything special compared to other cultivators. They were merely big brutes that exploited the power of phasewater to develop limited power over space. Their ability to manipulate space was fairly rare and exotic, but it was not that special in the greater scheme of things. The guns of mechs and warships could easily overpower these fancy spatial abilities as long as their quantity and firepower were sufficient. If mortals could overpower phase lords without relying on any extraordinary power, then these native gods were not worthy of their reputation! The more Ves thought about it, the more he rejected the demands of the tribulation. Yet as he did so, the reflection of his true body kept fading into nihility! This was the trap behind the tribulation! Ves clearly understood that if he continued to cling onto his identity as a human, he would 'fail' the tribulation and possibly get expelled from his true body. The tribulation or rather the heavenly authority responsible for setting it up was coercing him into accepting an inhuman identity! Ves could not accept this obvious lie! He rejected the deification of phase lords, and he refused to sell out his humanity! Yet reaffirming these goals did not help him at all! He stood to lose his body and turn into an unfathomable but undeniably weaker existence if he stubbornly insisted on maintaining his old beliefs. The only obvious way he could break this deadlock was to reverse his opinion and accept his identity as a superhuman phase lord! It sounded too easy to Ves. He couldn't help but suspect it was a trap. However, the more he thought about it, the more he concluded that it was an open conspiracy. There was nothing hidden about this setup. He had tried to break this strange mental state by force, but none of his exertions resulted in anything except tiring him out. If this was truly a tribulation, then it was impossible for a mech designer like himself to break open this cage by force. Ves was still a mortal, if a more powerful one, while the heavenly authority of the Red Ocean was the closest 'thing' to a god in this dwarf galaxy! This put him in a weak position. From what he could gather, the Red Ocean was essentially blackmailing him into embracing a new identity as an inhuman god-like being! This clearly did not align with his goals! The greater his separation from the humans he came from, the more difficult it became to understand their demands and serve their needs! A mech designer must always maintain a solid human connection in order to remain a good service provider. If Ves started to act high and mighty and look down on humans as inconsequential mortals, then he keenly felt that he would turn his back on the central creed of his profession. He recognized that there was a fundamental contradiction between mech designers and phase lords. A mech designer should never obsess about power. He must always accept personal weakness and entrust others with their works. A phase lord on the other hand must rise about the short-lived mortal species and reign over them as a superior being. There can be no hint of parity as phase lords were meant to become the deities of their respective races. Ves had always known that the two different identities did not get along well with each other, but he never paid much attention to this conflict. They did not seem to conflict with each other, so he never put much thought about how to resolve this contradiction. That seemed to bite him in the butt. The tribulation caught him by surprise and exploited this weakness without mercy! Now, it was forcing him to make a decision between two suboptimal options. He could either choose between physical death or craven capitulation!