Blinky visibly grew tired as his Blinkyverse began to grow awfully colder than before.
He eventually reached a limit where it became too detrimental for him to keep spitting fire energies. The companion spirit stopped what he was doing.
Now that the supply of fire energies had ceased, the workshop gradually turned to normal as the illusionary heat dispersed.
"Mrowww..."
"Good work, Blinky. You have done your job. You can go back and recuperate now. Try your best to make up for the lost fire energies first. The Blinkyverse must return to balance before you can fully develop it again."
It was important to bring the Blinkyverse back to equilibrium in case he wanted to pull off this move again in the future.
There were many more luminar crystal weapons that he wanted to augment in a similar manner!
However, the Blinkyverse itself was still a bit too small to withstand the huge expenditure of energy.
The biggest problem was that this hyper material production method was too wasteful and inefficient!
Ves loosely estimated that 99.9999 percent of the fire energies released by Blinky did not do anything useful and spilled into space.
Only 0.0001 percent of the output actually went into transforming the luminar crystal into a fire sympathetic material!
There was clearly a lot of room for improvement. As long as Ves developed a more efficient alternative to the crude and rudimentary method employed by Blinky, it was not out of the question for him to mass produce the sympathetic materials he needed to produce more prime mechs or upgrade his existing ones!
"This is ultimately a much better way to leverage the Blinkyverse to my advantage!"
Ves initially assumed that he would have to wait for Blinky to cultivate all the way to a True God before he could produce large quantities of useful raw materials.
However, if all it took to produce high-quality prime materials was to expose them to a high concentration of spiritual energies, then Ves did not have to wait that long!
"The only issue is Blinky's capacity. He has only completed the first stage of his cultivation method so far, which is far from enough to sustain mass production."
He could only employ this production method on an individual basis, but that was already enough for his current needs.
Once Blinky returned to his head and started to work on solving the deficiency of fire energies in his internal universe, Ves performed a quick examination of the newly transformed luminar crystal.
Though Ves could not make a solid conclusion on whether his theory about luminar crystals was correct, he at least managed to turn the positron beam attack phase crystal into a stronger variant that was more conducive to channeling the power of fire!
Although Ves did not understand much of the physical changes to the crystal, he meticulously recorded it in the faint hope that he could reproduce it in a lab without relying on a flood of fire energies.
Time was short, so he reluctantly suspended his examination when he confirmed that it hadn't changed beyond recognition.
"It should still function as an attack phase crystal more or less."
He quickly put it back into the Ignitron before reassembling the mech rifle.
A short time later, the Promethea reunited with her missing weapon.
The living expert mech immediately sensed a profound change in the Ignitron!
As the Promethea continued to cultivate, both she and Ves noticed that the freshly upgraded weapon began to attract a lot more fire energies than before!
The expert mech could not remain silent after noticing this profound change.
The machine's eyes lit up as her systems powered up a bit. "PROGENITOR. WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY WEAPON?"
Ves replied with a shrug and a sheepish smile. "I don't know myself, actually. You and Isobel will have to explore this by yourselves. If my suspicions are correct, the next time you fire a positron beam at the enemy, it will be much easier to start a wildfire!"
He would have liked to perform a practical test straight away, but this was not possible while the Spirit of Bentheim was engaged in warp travel.
The only way to know whether he succeeded in meaningfully upgrading the Promethea into a stronger prime mech was to witness her performance in the upcoming battle!
Ves had a good feeling about this, though. His design flame burned a little brighter at the prospect of creating yet another way for a mech and a mech pilot to synergize together!
As long as Venerable Isobel was able to maximize the power of Kiroshi through the use of a prime weapon, there was no reason why Ves could apply this new setup to all of his expert mechs!
"The key is energy." He muttered to himself as he reflected on what he had done. "Exotic radiation is a free and ubiquitous source of energy, but it takes a lot of deliberate effort to make use of all of that latent power. None of my mechs have reached their limits in this regard. The best way to strengthen them without actually turning them into proper first-class mechs is to abuse the hell out of prime materials!"