The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1221

Ves quickly pushed the incident with Taon Melin to the back of his mind. After making some plans about searching for materials that reacted to spiritual energy, he turned his attention back to his work.

Some time passed until the second prototype completed its barrage of tests. This time, nobody came and stole the mech. The mech endured the last test as best as it could before it broke during the last and most arduous stress test.

The testing ground immediately disassembled the broken prototype and put it through some crushers in order to prevent anyone from reconstructing the mech. Only then did they send it out to a specialized recycling facility in order to extract its valuable materials.

Confidentiality was an important requirement for any testing ground. As the previous prototype went astray, this time the Curins made sure to handle the mech properly.

A courier brought back the data chip with all of the test data to the mech workshop. As Ves and Ketis took in the summaries, they both looked pleased.

"There are less deviations from the simulations." She said. "There aren’t as many flaws either."

Ves smiled at the results. "While not all of the results are good, the second iteration is nonetheless a lot closer to completion than the first one. I don’t think we have to implement too many changes to finalize the third iteration of our mech. It might even be the last one before we finish the design!"

Despite the inherent complexity of hero mechs, Ves knew his limits and hadn’t incorporated any additional gimmicks in his design. The main challenge was to mitigate the severe imbalances in the mech and to make sure that both its ranged and melee combat capabilities remained in harmony.

It took a lot of effort to find the right balance. However, once he found it, he only had to make minor adjustments to keep the mech design in balance.

Everything went so well with the design process that Ves strongly considered whether he should finish his work when he completed the third iteration.

While there was always more optimization work he could do, the law of diminishing returns had already gone into effect. The more he iterated on the design, the less he was able to improve.

If Ves wanted to maintain his high quality standards, then he wanted to be a bit more assured and design a fourth iteration.

Yet that might take too much time. Adjusting the design didn’t take a lot of time, but fabricating the mech and sending it over for testing ate up at least ten days.

Could he afford to delay this much? Maybe not. He reminded himself that he still needed to reserve at least two weeks to fabricate the six copies of his design.

He’d be cutting it awfully close if he delayed the completion of the design project because he wanted to develop a fourth iteration.

After weighing the costs and benefits, he decided to make his next iteration the last one. Even though it will still carry some imperfections that could have been addressed if he put more time into it, he already had another solution in store.

For the second time ever, he planned to make use of the System’s Superpublish function. The comprehensive improvement it bestowed to the Transcendent Messenger should be enough to elevate it above what Ves could achieve with his optimization work.

Superpublishing came at a steep cost. In exchange for improving the overall performance of a mech by ten percent, it stopped him from earning any DP from the Transcendent Messenger.

"So what? It’s not like I intend to mass produce it in the first place."

Only recently did he realize that the Superpublish function was tailor-made for custom mechs. A commission for a custom mech like the one he was currently working on would never earn him a lot of DP.

At most, he received a small lump sum of DP and a handful of DP for each copy he made.

For mech models intended for the mech market, the latter could accumulate to a frightening amount of DP. The Aurora Titan was already a good example of that as its virtual sales flooded him with Design Points before it reached a cap!

The Transcendent Messenger design would never proliferate that much. Ignoring the stolen prototype that didn’t really count, only six physical copies would be made. There were no plans to publish a virtual version of the design. Any virtual versions of his design would only be made available during training simulations, which didn’t earn him any DP at all.

In short, since Ves earned so little DP from the Transcendent Messenger design, he might as well Superpublish it and maximize its impact!

After he made this decision, he became a lot more relaxed. No matter how many flaws and inadequacies he missed, the Superpublish function would definitely sweep over them and smoothen out the wrinkles.

He still felt a little bad about it, though. It was as if he was running a marathon and reached the final stretch, only to step into a shuttle and blaze past the finish line without expending any further effort!

"It’s a bad habit to cheat all the time."

He missed out on the problems he could have solved, thereby depriving him from the experience and lessons that he could have used to design an even better mech next time.

However, the Superpublish function was only available to him once a year. Such a frequency ensured that Ves would be forced to design plenty of mechs without the temptation that he could press a single button and level up his mech design all of a sudden.

"It’s for a good cause as well."

A better mech meant he’d be able to make a greater impact with his work. The more he impressed the Ylvainans, the greater the chance he would be able to tip the momentum back to the reformers.

An entire week went by after Ves received the data chip. Together with Ketis, they processed and analyzed the data. They identified the remaining shortcomings of the mech that had become evident during the testing and addressed them as best as possible.

An invisible momentum built up in Ves. As he came closer and closer to completing the third iteration, he increasingly sensed his mech design possessed the capability to transform the Ylvaine Protectorate.

It was a ridiculous notion! How can a single mech design change the course of history of an entire state?