The Mech Touch novel Chapter 690

Ves put off his thoughts on the matter of complicity like he always did. Some day, he’d be confronted by it and have no choice but to make a definite choice, but for now the issue had not yet become too pertinent.

Besides, the Skull Architect may not have any intentions of commercializing his variants. Perhaps the old man only wanted to study Ves’ design philosophy for research purposes.

After all, a sacred design that a sagely Senior had masterfully crafted together would inevitably become spoiled by the crude touch of an immature Apprentice.

It was as if an expert painter finished ninety-five percent of his painting, but left the last five percent to a three-year old kid who drooled onto his shirt. No matter how prodigious the kid was in painting the gaps, unless he was some freak reincarnated master painter, the quality of that five percent was assuredly abysmal in the eyes of the original artist.

So Ves still held out hope that the Skull Architect valued his pride and reputation too much to rely on the work of an Apprentice to earn some extra K-coins.

"Though if the sales potential of my variant is too promising, I don’t know if it will stoke his greed."

Mech designers never had enough money! Developing mechs and running an industry constantly demanded more funds to sustain.

A Novice might get by with a couple of hundred million bright credits that they could gain from a loan.

Apprentice almost always required an investment of several billion credits.

As for Journeymen, Ves had no idea how much they needed, but he believed even 100 billion credits might not be enough.

Seniors on the other hand... their vast research projects and huge business enterprises could only be sustained by an uncountable sum of money!

Ves could not even fathom the exact sum, but he knew that this was one of the reasons why Seniors based in the Bright Republic almost never succeeded in advancing to Master!

"When the Skull Architect used to be a respected Senior in the Vermeer Group, money is the one resource he must be lacking the least."

From extreme abundance to extreme poverty, the shift in earnings must have represented such a shock to the man that he might have suffered lingering trauma from that event!

"Damn.. Seniors can’t be money grubbers. They can’t. It’s undignified!"

Would a pirate designer who already became disgraced even care about dignity anymore?

Ves grew pensive at the thought, because he knew what his decision would be when put on the same spot. "Dignity is not the same as reputation. The Skull Architect is playing by different rules now, otherwise he’d go by his real name and not this nickname. Selling some lesser quality mechs under your name is more than worth it if you can rake in the K-coins and spend them on furthering your research or strengthening your position in the frontier."

To mech designers, gathering K-coins was not an end in itself. It represented future benefits in a universal form. While it required time and effort to convert K-coins into something useful, he vastly preferred being able to spend some at all rather than none.

In conclusion, a mech designer that wanted to more than sit on their laurels had to spend lots of money to progress. Someone as ambitious as the Skull Architect once ordered the deaths of more than a thousand mech designers including an expert in order to further their research. Would who was willing to ignore the basic rules of morality really be bothered by lesser desires?

Ves grimaced even further. It was rather eerie to be able to predict the Skull Architect’s thought process and logic to such a deep degree.

"We are kindred mech designers."

The statement rang false, yet contained enough truth to stick in his mind.

The root of it lay in the fact that mech design was an art as well as a science. The science provided the building blocks on how to design a mech, but art provided the creativity that connected the blocks into unique and original structures.

A normal artist produced boring, normal art. A maddened, tortured or insane artist produced extreme works of art.

Somehow, the benign intent behind the advancement ladder of mech designers from Novice Mech Designer to Star Designer began to fade away. Left in its place was a vortex of madness, a hungry maw that called out a siren song seducing trillions of naive mech designers to sacrifice pieces of their sanity in exchange for power.

"This is madness!" He spoke, though whether he referred to the trap that lay behind the advancement ladder or what his overactive imagination cooked up wasn’t clear. "Mech designers are not sacrificial lambs who willingly lead themselves over to the altar to be butchered!"

Ves forcefully discarded this entire train of thought before it led him deeper into lurid figments of his imagination. Even though all of his spurious deductions sounded compellingly truthful in a horribly morbid fashion, it didn’t change the fact that he had no solid proof to substantiate any of these fantasies!

He frowned as he sat behind his desk in his empty office. Paranoia always lingered in his mind ever since his father became a fugitive of some secretive trans-galactic organization that rivalled the MTA and CFA in influence. Yet lately these outbursts of spinning conspiracy theories on the fly was plainly out of the norm for a rational mind that dismissed any claims that lacked solid proof.

"My mentality is.. degenerating? Cracking? Becoming less stable?"

He palmed his forehead, trying to look into his mind. Sadly, his thoughts bounced everywhere except where he wanted them to be. He never possessed the most orderly mind.

"That time when I ate a completely alien exoplant also didn’t do my mind any favors. I still don’t know what that so-called Heavenly Flower exactly did that makes Dr. Jutland so obsessed about nurturing it. I have a feeling it’s not supposed to be eaten raw at all..."