The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1010

Obtaining the first round of life-prolonging treatment may be out of reach for the average people, but a Senior Mech Designer was never hurting for money.

Seniors normally spent an inordinate amount of time, money and resources to progress their research. At this stage in their careers, many Seniors valued their research over their companies. However, it took an extremely long time for them to obtain any breakthroughs.

Most never managed to achieve any breakthroughs in their lifetimes. Therefore, they diverted some of their efforts into earning huge amounts of money to be able to afford the first round of life-prolonging treatment from the MTA.

While expensive, a Senior possessed enough earning power to pay for the treatment within their lifetimes. Such expensive treatments were normally out of reach to Journeymen.

Of course, this situation only applied to third-rate states. In a second-rate state like the Friday Coalition, certain wealthy Journeymen or those who possessed powerful backers got to extend their life by a century without sacrificing too much.

This essential difference in earning power strengthened the mech industry of the Friday Coalition because these Journeymen gained an additional century of lifespan to advance to Senior. This in effect gave second-rate states a much higher proportion of Seniors, so much so that the rate of Masters emerging from the crowd subsequently increased as well!

However, if there was one flaw about Seniors who advanced late, it was that they usually held very little promise. Seniors based in the Republic who advanced through their own hard work under less-than-ideal circumstances were not inferior than the Seniors based in the second-rate states!

Seniors wished above all else to realize their design philosophy and turn the impossible into reality. In pursuit of their advancement to Master, the longer they lived, the greater the chance they accomplished their greatest desire.

Yet to obtain the second round of life-prolonging treatment required them to pay an exponentially greater amount of compensation. In general, no Senior based in a third-rate state would be able to afford the opportunity to live up to three-hundred years!

Even the Seniors of the Friday Coalition encountered many difficulties in trying to pay for such a luxurious privilege. In truth, Ves didn’t fully know what the MTA demanded in exchange for the third round of treatment, but he heard that they didn’t solely ask for a huge bag of money.

"Anyone who wants to obtain the subsequent rounds of life-prolonging treatment has to meet some other conditions."

Everyone figured that the actual supply of life-prolonging treatment was very limited. If the MTA didn’t put up more barriers to halt the influx of requests, they wouldn’t have enough to extend the lives of their own key personnel!

In short, no matter where a Senior based himself, he would easily be able to scrounge up the money to extend his lifespan to up to two-hundred years.

The only two Seniors from the Bright Republic that Ves interacted with was Professor Velten at the Flagrant Vandals and Professor Enoch at Frozen Point Research Base. Both of them differed remarkably as the former had reached a very advanced age.

In fact, Professor Velten was outright senile, and had already resigned most of her former duties. Ves found her life trajectory to be fairly tragic, yet he also knew that most Seniors led similar trajectories in their life.

He hadn’t forgotten her final warning to him back at the Wolf Mother.

"A Senior already enjoys a great status in the Bright Republic and elsewhere in the galaxy. They are flooded with opportunities. Yet compared to advancing to Master, most of those offers are nothing but distractions."

Without advancing to Master, a Senior would always reach the end of their lives filled with regret!

Those who advanced to Master relatively fast like Master Olson were truly fortunate! Even those who advanced well into their second century of life also thanked their luck. Far too many Seniors never found the opportunity to advance and turned into footnotes in the mech industry.

A lot of local mech designers memorized the names of every Master Mech Designers based in the Komodo Star Sector. Yet they never bothered memorizing the names of every Senior except the ones from their own state.

In any case, Professor Ventag that Senator Tovar somehow roped into the peace delegation possessed some hope of advancing to Master.

"Even so, most Seniors who are based in third-rate states never advance to Master." He frowned.

Masters emerged only rarely. Even the Friday Coalition didn’t have enough to go around. It simply came down to lacking enough money to fund their expensive research endeavors.

This was why at some point, some Seniors who still possessed a decent hope of advancing to Master within their lifetimes moved to the Friday Coalition.

Ves didn’t know the exact figures, but the Bright Republic and many other third-rate states actually lost over half of their Seniors this way!

The only problem was that the Seniors who all decided to make the move never received a warm welcome in such a tough and unfamiliar environment. Their status as outsiders always distinguished themselves from the native Seniors.

In practice, the Seniors that decided to move to a more prosperous state hadn’t led to a greater increase in the chance of advancing to Master at all!

People came up with various reasons to explain why. The general consensus was that all the distractions and difficulties surrounding the relocation burdened the foreign Seniors so much that they failed to enter their best state when performing their research.

"That’s probably not the full story, but it’s definitely one of the main factors." Ves silently judged.

Therefore, plenty of Seniors still remained with their current states even if they seem limited. It wasn’t as if they sold their mechs to a single state at this stage. Many companies such as the Kadar-Neyvis Group and NORA Consolidated sold mechs across states and even star sectors!

As long as the reach of their products extended to more and more markets, the amount of money flowing in grew respectfully large. This gave Professor Ventag enough money to fuel his ongoing research.

The Seniors who relocated to the Friday Coalition often faced very steep competition from the large amount of Seniors who already carved out their places in the state’s prosperous mech market. Native Seniors possessed a much stronger foundation into some of the more advanced tech that catered specifically to a second-rate state’s development level. This gave native mech designers an edge and foreign mech designers an inherent disadvantage.