The Mech Touch novel Chapter 799

Someone engineered an exobeast species that could replace the role of mechs!

There had to be a reason for this effort! Both Ves and Dr. Tillman determined that the wild god’s genome had been a product of a cross-disciplinary team that consisted of both mech designers and exobiologists.

Those professions ordinarily never came into contact with each other. Their fields of expertise almost never intersected with each other.

In the rare cases that they did, their combined efforts usually produced atrocities such as organic mechs!

In a way, the god species of Aeon Corona VIII should be an offshoot to the early research to design an organic mech. Instead of starting from scratch and attempt to create a perverse form of life from nothing, the exobiologists and mech designers who presumably survived the Starlight Megalodon’s crash had taken an existing species and messed with their genes so much that they didn’t resemble their predecessors at all!

What Dr. Tillman couldn’t wrap her head around was why the exobiologists and mech designers would be so bored to make such an effort. "It takes a lot of research, experimentation and iteration to implement so many modifications. The larger the species, the more resources and time you need to make sure the modifications haven’t resulted in any adverse effects."

Ves couldn’t supply her with any answers. Other than guesses, they had nothing to go on. All they knew was that it took decades to perfect the modifications. The god species that emerged from the fruit of their labor eventually went on to spread across the planet as the absolute apex predators of the changing ecosystem.

The engineered exobeasts dominated to such an extent that they even prevented the human descendants from taking over the entire planet!

The god species as well as the blessed and cursed people all came about through the intervention of the exobiologists stationed on the Starlight Megalodon. Over thousands of years of degeneration and decay, only their work withstood the test of time.

Where were the mechs?

Why hadn’t the blessed people maintained the technological standards of their forefathers?

Why did the blessed people get to rule over the city while the cursed people had to fend for themselves in the wild?

All of these consequences sounded like a mad scientist’s dream. It was as if the exobiologists who survived the crash worked for the Five Scrolls Compact instead of the CFA!

Ves could never imagine the sober scientists and researchers in the employ of one of the Big Two to be so unrestrained.

The worst part was that the captain or the admiral aboard the battleship must have approved such a drastic intervention. The exobiologists and mech designers could have never completed such a massive project without the full support of the rest of the survivors.

As Ves tentatively identified all of the aspects about the exobeast’s biology related to mech design, it became clear that the wild god had been explicitly designed to facilitate control.

One strange gap in the center of the brains puzzled him however. "I don’t know much about the brains, but shouldn’t there something be inside this cavity?"

"About that.." Dr. Tillman said as she adopted a careful expression. "We’ve encountered the means to which a wild god supplied the energy to call down those tremors."

The doctor switched the projection to an image captured as a handful of men in hazard suits retrieved a murky crystal the size of a human child from the giant brains.

"Is that one of those fancy god crystals!?" Ketis uttered from behind.

Tillman shook her head. "Not quite. It’s an inferior copy of the so-called god crystals. Chief Dakkon is researching it right now at the mobile labs, but so far we’ve been able to determine that it is a lot cruder than the god crystals embedded into the hides of the sacred gods. As far as we know, it doesn’t have the ability to call down an energy tornado, nor is it able to store any pure higher-dimensional energies."

"Then what is it?" Ves asked.

"As far as we can tell, it stores an intermediary form of energy derived from the higher-dimensional energies when they devolve into something simpler when they spill over into the material dimensions. It’s the process of accumulation that is particularly interesting."

"How so, doctor?"

"Chief Dakkon and I developed a theory about this as soon as we identified the properties of the murky crystals as we are referring them to. While the higher-dimensional energies are largely contained in the astral winds that blow at least a hundred kilometers over the surface of the planet, a miniscule amount of spillage still occurs. Nothing is ever perfect, and even the astral winds deviate from the rule from time to time."

"You believe that the higher-dimensional energy that escapes from the astral winds devolves into a lesser form of energy once it descends on the planet?"

"Exactly. More than that, the native wildlife is somehow capable of absorbing them into their bodies. The energy slowly lands on the grass, which gets grazed by herbivores. Those herbivores gets eaten by predators, who continue to eat prey who are contaminating with a miniscule amount of intermediary energy. The predators continue to accumulate more of this contaminant as time goes on until they die and get eaten by other predators."

What Dr. Tillman described was the process of bioaccumulation of substances. Even if the astral winds only release a minute amount of intermediate energy, they eventually concentrate into greater amounts as the plans and animals get eaten by other animals.

"And in this engineered ecosystem, the god species sit at the top of the food chain." Ves stated. "These wild gods and sacred gods grow so large and live such long lives that they are probably able to accumulate a scary amount of intermediate energy!"

Dr. Tillman mentioned another revelation. "The murky crystals themselves aren’t exactly mundane either. According to Chief Dakkon, the crystals themselves are formed from intermediate energy! This is why we’re experiencing many difficulties in analyzing them. Our equipment and scanners aren’t able to cope with something so advanced!"

Both Ves and Ketis widened their eyes. They knew the implications of this revelation. Energy and mass were related to each other. In the right circumstances, mass turned into energy and vica versa. However, such a transformation often came pared with a huge release or consumption of energy!

The most typical example of this phenomenon was the ubiquitous nuclear weapon. Both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion involved tiny reactions that released a tiny amount of energy.