The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1195

To personify an image was a surreal experience to Ves. His distinctive personality traits momentarily faded away. In its place sat the personality traits that Ves ascribed to the Grey Martyr.

Old. Calm. Devout. Inquisitive. Gentle. Hopeful.

It was as if he donned a spiritual mask that completely transformed him into another being.

"It’s too bad that it’s fake."

Ves quickly reasserted his true personality. The disparity in strength between the image of the Grey Martyr and himself was far too great.

It was like he was surrounding his Spirituality with a fragile water bubble. Just a single poke broke the illusion.

Even though the experience didn’t impress him very much, he knew that there were a lot of potential applications for this technique.

"I’ve developed so many new spiritual techniques in a short amount of time." He sighed with awe.

His visit to the Ylvaine Protectorate already paid dividends on that account. Ves started to understand why Master Olson advised him to travel to different places.

Different cultures and customs forced him to move beyond his usual approach to mech design.

Different problems that he never faced before encouraged him to find new solutions that he would have never come up before.

He gained a sense of how a Journeyman should proceed after advancing from a lowly Apprentice. Their mech design abilities may have matured, but that didn’t mean they became capable of solving every problem.

An Apprentice only possessed a small number of tools in their toolbox. Advancing to Journeyman didn’t change that. If they wanted to become as formidable as a Senior, then they needed to climb upwards step by step, and one of the ways to do so was to increase the amount of tools in their toolbox.

Ves faintly had a premonition that the techniques he developed recently conformed to this process!

"Let’s see if this latest technique is useful for my purposes."

After he recollected his composure, he began to don the mask once again. It took a lot of effort to subsume his old personality with another one. One of the biggest problems he faced right now was that the image of the Grey Martyr was far from complete.

"There are too many holes!"

Ves never really paid too much attention to the gaps in his construction, thinking of them as trivial, but only now did he feel how much he missed. His image of the Grey Martyr was only a superficial caricature that encompassed only a small portion of the real figure!

Nonetheless, he at least managed to include all the most important aspects. As long as no one looked too close, he at least possessed the surface demeanor of the Grey Martyr.

"Let’s see if this masquerade can fool the spiritual imprint of the real person."

He focused his attention back on the preserved seed. It was difficult for him to do so because the real Grey Martyr would never do such a thing.

Ves faced an inherent contradiction. On one hand, he needed to personify the Grey Martyr. One the other hand, he needed to make use of his fake identity to perform the action his original self desired.

Trying to juggle between these two priorities took a lot of mental acrobatics.

Eventually, he managed to extend his spiritual senses to the preserved seed. He first identified the cloud of ownerless spiritual accumulation and pierced through it. Within the center of the cloud rested a tiny cloud of imprinted spiritual energy.

Ves did not reach out with his own spiritual energy this time. He knew that it was completely useless to do so because the mask he wore did not transform his Spirituality at all. It still carried his own spiritual imprint no matter how well he disguised it. Its essence hadn’t changed.

However, what did change was his thoughts and emotions. He developed an inexplicable devotion to Prophet Ylvaine and his wild beliefs. These un-Ves-like thoughts polluted his mind and clashed against his own self-identity.

It wasn’t good for his mental health to maintain this state for long.

He didn’t dally around and poured out his thoughts and emotions towards the original sentiment of the Grey Martyr.

Something amazing occurred.

The original sentiment was like a puppy who lost its master. It was a remnant of a dead person, and therefore didn’t possess much life. It was akin to a weak and miniscule spiritual fragment that didn’t even have the strength to recognize the flaws in the mask that Ves currently wore!

His thoughts and emotions caressed the original sentiment and seemed to revitalize it a bit. The spiritual imprint gained life as well as it fed on the sustenance that Ves provided it. The original sentiment and the spiritual imprint began to grow stronger and livelier!

The only problem was that Ves felt as if he was draining a part of himself! While the expenditure wasn’t very large, that was only because the original sentiment wasn’t that big in the first place.

As the revitalization process continued, the original sentiment somehow noticed the spiritual accumulation around it and noticed that it was free for the taking!

The change happened quickly. Fueled by a boundless desire to live and grow stronger, the original sentiment began to assimilate the spiritual accumulation! Ves didn’t fully understand the merging process, but he noticed that the drain on his thoughts and emotions increased!

"The spiritual imprint is expanding!"

The increased drain on Ves caused the spiritual imprint to grow and expand. It faced no resistance as it began to mark the free-floating cloud of ownerless spiritual accumulation as its own!

However, this process didn’t proceed smoothly!

The cloud of spiritual accumulation encompassed spiritual energy with many different attributes.

Only some was to the spiritual imprint’s liking.

A process of separation occurred. The spiritual energy that agreed with the spiritual imprint merged with the original sentiment while the spiritual energy with incompatible attributes were being pushed away.

A few minutes later, the process came to an end. The miniscule original sentiment had ballooned in size and became at least an order of magnitude stronger! Surrounding it was an expanding cloud of ownerless spiritual energy that was no longer bound in place. After being pushed away by the spiritual imprint, the worthless spiritual energy kept drifting away as if it had been evicted from its own home.

Ves wondered if he should absorb it for himself. After all, he still suffered from a deficit of spiritual energy.

He quickly shook his head. "I’m not sure whether any of its attributes are compatible to me. It would be a disaster if I try to assimilate the wrong type of spiritual energy."