The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1374

"You know, there are an endless variety of cats for sale at Felixia." Ves teasingly remarked to Lucky.

"Meow?"

"Some of them are pretty good. There are even geneticists for hire who can customize a brand new kitty to my tastes. Doesn’t that sound great?"

"Meow! Meow!"

"Hahaha, why are you so jealous? You won’t be alone anymore!"

His cat hissed at him. Lucky really didn’t like the competition! He was all the cat that Ves could ask for! No cat could ever surpass a gem cat!

Ves paid Lucky’s irritation no mind. Felixia offered a lot of attractions to both cat lovers and cats alike. He was sure that his pet would quickly change his tune once they arrived on the surface.

"There are twenty exceptional Crown Cats and numerous other cats that are almost as great. Surely one of them ought to have what I need!"

To be honest, Ves did not expect exobeasts to possess a great amount of spirituality. From his current level of understanding, only sentient species generated significant amounts of spiritual energy.

"Are the Crown Cats sentient?"

He looked up their descriptions. The mech hunting community collected a lot of intelligence on the beasts, and a number of them certainly acted smart enough to make people suspicious that they were self-aware.

Other Crown Cats exhibited much more primal and instinctive behavior patterns. Instead of outwitting mech hunting teams through clever positioning and devious ambushes, they wrecked the hunting mechs through overwhelming force and ferocious assaults!

Ves couldn’t tell from the footage whether any of the sentient or non-sentient Crown Cats possessed a usable degree of spirituality.

He risked wasting lots of time he futilely tried to hunt a spiritually-active cat when none actually existed!

None of the cases alluded to anything that came close to matching the god species of Aeon Corona VII. Both the Sacred Gods and the Wild Gods of that heavy gravity planet mainly acquired their powers from exceptional conditions.

Both types of spiritually-powerful exobeasts benefited from extremely radical genetic modifications from researchers secretly aligned to the Compact.

The higher-dimensional particles leaking from the Starlight Megalodon’s FTL drives also provided the essential building blocks that made the god species so exceptional on the spiritual front.

Felixia lacked these conditions! At the very least, Ves could definitely rule out the latter!

As for the former...

A sudden realization came to mind!

"Now that I think about it, Felixia sure engages in a lot of genetic modification."

One of the main areas of interest to the Five Scrolls Compact was their penchant for anything related to biology and living entities. Their understanding of selective breeding, genetic modification, exobeast studies, human augmentation and more was at the forefront in the entire galaxy!

Not even the MTA and CFA could surpass the Compact in these fields!

Knowing that the Compact heavily emphasized genetic modification and knowing that the cultists set up various puppet organizations throughout the star sector did not bode well to Ves.

If Ves applied basic logic to the situation, then chances were high that the Five Scrolls Compact maintained a secret presence on Felixia!

An even worse possibility came to mind. Agents of the Compact may have been involved in the founding of Felixia from the start!

"Goddammit!"

If Felixia really turned out to be a secret playground for the Five Scrolls Compact, then Ves would be jumping straight into the belly of the beast!

However... even if the Five Scrolls Compact maintained a presence on the tourist planet, what were the odds that they discovered something fishy about him? As long as he blended in with the tourists, there shouldn’t be much risk of discovery!

"I’ll have to watch my conduct." He murmured while he tickled Lucky’s ears. "I better get used to eating lots of spicy Nyx dogs!"

If the Five Scrolls Compact really meddled with the biological research taking place on the planet, then Felixia became an even more attractive destination to Ves! The odds that some of the remarkable exobeasts on the planets exhibited a potent degree of spirituality jumped significantly higher if that was the case!

"Risk is often accompanied by reward."

Naturally, the degree of risk and the height of the potential reward varied enormously from instance to instance. Ves did not have the necessary information to make an accurate judgement whether it was worthwhile for him to proceed with visiting Felixia.

He made a decision based on his feelings, which strongly urged him to go through with his plans to visit the Cat Utopia.

"The planet still has a lot to offer." He concluded. "Who knows where I can find what I need from some other place."

His intuition hinted to him that he probably wouldn’t be able to obtain a better spiritual fragment for his Devil Tiger elsewhere. The Planet of Cats was by far the best destination in this region of space for him to secure one of the crucial elements of his upcoming tiger mech design!

Having decided on his course of action, Ves decided to confer with Nitaa about the precautions they needed to take.

When his tall bodyguard entered his stateroom and listened to his speculations, she agreed with some of his concerns.