The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1493

Before Ves took a long rest, he made sure to move the Ancient Sarcophagus back to the vault.

He didn’t dare to let any person approach the dangerous object. While Ves wasn’t sure whether it could affect or threaten anyone else, Ves did not take any chances.

He approached a nearby terminal and began to take control of a number of lifter bots.

Fortunately, the alien spiritual entity residing inside Item #1255 hadn’t messed with the bots. Instead of moving it back to the vault, he instead placed it near the aft of the Barracuda.

The vault was situated in the center of the corvette, allowing it to exert its influence to cover the bulk of the interior of the vessel. By placing it at the very edge of the cargo bay, right against the cargo bay hatch, the Ancient Sarcophagus would have to overcome a lot more distance in order to affect the rest of the ship. _{frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓}

Once he finished moving the red coffin, Ves paused for a few minutes and extended his damaged spiritual senses outward.

He sensed nothing unusual. In fact, he began to breathe a little easier now that the dread weighing on his heart had disappeared. The subtle influence that messed with his judgement and intuition had disappeared!

Ves guessed that the trapped spiritual entity was still roiling in pain. Ves had violently cut out a spiritual fragment from its whole. Unlike the last time where Qilanxo voluntarily donated a spiritual fragment to Ves, this time he took it by force!

"There is an important difference between these two instances!"

Though Ves had the sense that the trapped alien entity was stronger than Qilanxo, the two differed substantially in many ways. Aside from being powerful, they shared nothing in common.

"I have no idea what I’ve tangled with, but I’m pretty sure it’s trapped in place."

As more and more time passed by without anything unusual taking place, Ves began to let down his guard.

Evidently, the wounded alien entity was unable or unwilling to retaliate. Even if it did launch some kind of surprise attack somehow, Ves had already prepared a precaution. He programmed an emergency command on his comm. As long as he pressed the button, the Barracuda’s cargo hatch would instantly open and dump the Ancient Sarcophagus into space!

Of course, Ves really didn’t want to resort to this option. Despite the threat hidden within, the Ancient Sarcophagus was worth around 20 billion bright credits! He hated the thought of throwing away all that money!

"It’s one thing to throw the red coffin away while the ship is in a star system. It’s another thing to throw it out of the cargo bay while we’re in the middle of FTL travel!"

It was still possible to dump something out of the ship while traveling faster than light, but nobody knew whether this posed some risks to the ship.

In any case, once the Barracuda released the Ancient Sarcophagus in higher-dimensional space, it was virtually impossible to get it back! Who knew where it would drift off or whether it would even remain intact!

He was relieved that the Ancient Sarcophagus did not do anything that forced his hand.

As he commanded Nitaa to keep an eye on the object, he wearily dragged his body to his stateroom and fell onto his bed.

"Meow."

Lucky floated above Ves with concern.

"I’m fine. I just need to rest and recover. My mind took an awful beating and I expended a lot of energy trying to defend myself."

The excitement had finished, allowing Ves to take stock of what happened and what he gained from his latest dangerous experience.

First, he managed to understand the nature of the Ancient Sarcophagus. Ves wasn’t even sure if it still deserved to be called as such, though it obviously preserved a seemingly dead alien body.

The formidable spiritual entity trapped within had rested inside for who knew how long. Ves wasn’t sure if it was a spiritual continuation of the alien body trapped within the crystal or if it emerged long after the original body had been entombed.

"Whatever the case, it’s strong and very much alive!"

It also happened to be fairly uncommunicative and extremely violent. Though Ves understood most entities, he failed to interpret the incomprehensible spiritual transmissions of the alien spiritual entity. There was a fundamental mismatch between them that didn’t exist when Ves communicated with other entities!

Just like Zeigra’s spirituality, the alien spiritual entity possessed an irreconcilable hatred towards Ves. Though he didn’t mean to carve out a spiritual fragment, it was too late to make amends now that he did so in an extremely violent fashion.

The overall impression he got from the alien spiritual entity was one that conveyed an immense amount of power and hostility. It was as if Ves was just a mouse before a cat!

Nonetheless, the difference between their situations was that the cat was shackled to the Ancient Sarcophagus while the mouse enjoyed total freedom! This was one of the reasons why Ves shouldn’t have much to fear from the alien spiritual entity he offended!

Unfortunately, their brief moment of contact and conflict didn’t reveal anything more about the entity trapped within.

He did manage to extricate himself from the fight with a spiritual fragment. The P-stone locked inside his B-stone lockbox now held a very violent and uncooperative spiritual fragment.

Ves decided to keep the lockbox close and monitor it for a few days. While there was a risk in keeping it within his reach, he wanted to know immediately if the spiritual fragment managed to muster enough strength to break out of its cage.

"I don’t have a lot of alternatives if my current containment measures aren’t enough."

One of the issues that plagued him right now was the damage inflicted to his mind. The violent attacks against the defenses of his mind had riddled it with cracks and other imperfections. Though his mind was already in the process of healing it, Ves estimated that it would take a fair amount of time for him to recover all of the damage.