"I've already designed a custom tiger mech." Ves mentally murmured. "I should design a mass market tiger mech to round out my experience. This gem can help me build another masterwork mech if my first production attempt is good enough."
He was slightly more hopeful that he would be able to get within reach of the masterwork threshold in his next attempts.
An increase in mech affinity always enabled a mech designer to persistently raise the quality of his work. This effectively meant that masterwork mech designers like Ves entered into a virtuous cycle.
The quality of his mechs increased, so the chance of creating a masterwork increased.
Each successful masterwork mech improved his mech affinity further, thereby raising the quality of his mechs even further!
Though it was a lot harder than it sounded, many Masters managed to repeat this cycle to the point where making masterwork mechs was no longer an exception!
Of course, Ves was far from reaching this point. He had no clue if he could ever take advantage of Bastet's Whisper when he wouldn't have many opportunities to design a tiger mech.
As for the other gem…
Why did its description sound so personal? How the hell did Lucky manage to create this gem?!
Was his hypothesis wrong? Were the attributes of his gem not affected by external stimuli?
Maybe it wasn't just himself who determined the properties of his gems. Perhaps the people around him played a role as well!
"LUUCKKYYY! How the hell did you produce the Whipping Boy?! What's with this name, anyway?!"
"Meow!"
Lucky immediately took back the gems and phased through the bed and deck in order to make himself scarce!
After Ves vented his frustrations, he mentally sighed and blanked out for a few minutes.
With Lucky running off to parts unknown, Ves was growing bored.
"Maybe I should plant my consciousness back into its proper place. There's no telling what kind of harm I'm doing to my body and mind if my spirit remains absent."
He inspected his mind and body carefully. Aside from their abnormally low levels of activity, Ves didn't see anything wrong.
Perhaps he could continue to take advantage of his abnormal state to experiment a bit further.
First, he needed to do something about his limited observation range.
One way to stave off his boredom was to extend his projection distance.
After ten minutes of fumbling and trying to push his spiritual projections further, Ves gave up. His consciousness had become very burdened by his fruitless attempt and he didn't feel he could make any progress.
"Perhaps my projection range is a function of my spiritual strength. I should test this out when my Spirituality grows stronger. Perhaps my range will balloon once I advance to Senior."
Since he couldn't increase his detection range, he tried to do something else. He wanted to see if he could move his consciousness or some kind of sensory node in order to move his omnidirectional projection away from his body.
"It's like building a drone." Ves imagined. "I can just build the spiritual equivalent of a very simple spy drone. It has to be able to see and hear the material realm while also possessing the capability to move semi-autonomously. Furthermore, it has to maintain an active spiritual connection with my Spirituality. Otherwise, how can I receive all of the input?"
This was an interesting exercise to Ves. He soon began to put his engineering knowledge to use and attempted to design a very basic spiritual observation drone.
He failed.
"What?"
It was not that difficult for him to create a spiritual eye. It was no problem for him to conjure up a spiritual ear.
Yet putting them together in a drone-like construction was a step too far!
One of the main issues he faced was his inability to keep track of all of the parts, dimensions and other parameters of the drone!
Its complexity reached a point where Ves could no longer concentrate on keeping every single aspect together!
The Archimedes Rubal was supposed to solve this problem. However, Ves only had access to his consciousness and parts of his dormant mind and Spirituality!
The bioimplant was still in the process of integrating with his brain tissue. Until this process finished, its systems were not allowed to come online!
As a result, Ves could only limit his spiritual manipulations to basic applications.
Though he found it a bummer that he was unable to create a sophisticated spiritual 'machine', he took what he could get and started to pass the time by creating all sorts of simple creations.
Inspired by his ability to reproduce some of the components of a mech with his mind, he created various other useful parts.
He attempted but failed to find a way to replicate his sense of smell and touch.
He succeeded in his attempt to create a life detector.
He managed to create a very simple alarm that would warn him if a spiritual entity was approaching.
He developed slightly more sophisticated spiritual shields that responded to spiritual attacks a bit better. Just like with his other attempts, he did so by borrowing some of the principles related to mechs.
While he failed too many times to count, his rare successes brought some joy in his life. He felt as if he was making constant progress in spiritual engineering.
What used to be a mysterious and unfathomable field to Ves turned out to be a lot less convoluted than he thought!
As long as Ves slowly delved into the rules that governed spiritual creations, he would definitely be able to build an imaginary mech some day!