The Mech Touch

The Tree of Possibilities seductively dangled its fruits over the heads of Ves and Ketis.

For a long time, Ves enjoyed sole access to the Tree of Possibilities. He had exchanged over a dozen fruits over the years, and each of them had provided lots of direct and indirect benefits.

There was no better and more efficient way for Ves to quickly learn and gain proficiency in all sorts of useful Skills!

The best part was that the reach of the Tree of Possibilities was insanely vast. It was able to produce fruit containing knowledge from all sorts of sources, from the lost repositories of ancient cultivation societies to current native alien technological development.

Ves had no idea how the Tree was able to accumulate so much knowledge. He was pretty sure that a part of the Tree's vast database had yet to be mastered by modern humans.

"This tree…" Ketis gazed up at the fruits in wonderment. "There is so much variety. There is one fruit that claims I can learn how to construct puelmer homeships. There is another fruit that claims it can impart me with the knowledge to mutate into a three-headed beast. Then there is a fruit that can teach me how to design active scanning systems that are good at detecting stealth systems favored by the Red Fleet."

"This is just the tip of the iceberg, Ketis. There are much more outrageous enlightenment fruits available, though they also cost an exponentially greater amount of AP. It is a bit difficult to obtain the better ones. You need to work hard to earn a lot of AP to buy a specific fruit, but if too much time has passed, the Tree of Possibilities has already refreshed its selection with a different rotation. It may take a year or longer before the fruit you have in mind has made a return. This is frankly one of the most frustrating aspects about the Tree of Possibilities."

Just like the Divine Bazaar, the Tree of Possibilities only offered a rotation of a few hundred fruits at a time, but the ones available at the moment already made Ketis excited.

If the descriptions offered by the System were accurate, then she could completely imagine herself becoming much more powerful as a mech designer as well as a swordmaster as long as she ingested much of these fruits!

"No wonder you have improved so quickly despite not spending as much time on studying." Ketis said with clear awe in her tone. "Even a pig can turn into a genius with the help of these fruits. As far as I know, no other learning device or method can equal the effectiveness of eating one of these fruits. I am becoming more and more eager to start earning Ascension Points. Everything good in the Mech Designer System depends on it. My intuition tells me that there are numerous fruits above us that can definitely advance my progression as a mech designer or a swordmaster if I gain access to the knowledge contained within."

She gestured at several different fruits of varying shapes and colors.

One of them was a familiar wood-based fruit that Ves thought about acquiring for himself. Now that he thought about it, Ketis could make much better use of it than himself.

[Evil-Breaking Peach Wood Sword Manual]

Price: 100 Ascension Points

Imparts a method to carve suitable wood into an Evil-Breaking Peach Wood Sword. This is a sword that does not possess a strong cutting edge, but is highly effective when used to fight against negative existences. The Evil-Breaking Peach Sword is also effective when used to fight energy-based lifeforms and other energy constructs.

Evil-Breaking Peach Swords that are excellently carved and made with high-quality materials can be enhanced by lightning. When empowered by any source of lightning energy, the Evil-Breaking Peach Sword not only becomes much more deadly against immaterial enemies, but also receives physical tempering that strengthens its physical properties.

"This is certainly an interesting enlightenment fruit." Ves commented. "It is an especially nice complement to Venerable Lanie's Elegant Rage and other wood-based mechs that I intend to design in the future."

"I do not care too much about using wood to build my mechs, but this is such a completely different approach to sword making that absorbing this fruit will expose me to an entirely different facet to swords."

Another fruit promised to impart her with a completely different style of swordsmanship than she was familiar with. Just the novelty of it along with the use of entirely different cultivation principles was enough to make the swordmaster within herself yearn to master this new kind of fighting approach as soon as possible.

Its description contained familiar concepts and mechanisms that reminded Ves of the cultivation approach of both swordmasters and mech pilots. Ves even developed the suspicion that it may have served as the foundation of human willpower cultivation!

[Seven Emotions Sword Styles - Joy Chapter]

Price: 400 Ascension Points

Bestows the skills and related theory to execute one of the Seven Emotions Sword Styles with a sword or other handheld bladed weapon. The Seven Emotion Sword Styles is an extreme form of swordsmanship that teaches the practitioner how to weaponize one's own emotions and produce extraordinary results.

The Seven Emotions Sword Styles stand out in that they do not require the use of external resources to master. Instead, they impose high requirements on their practitioners, demanding that they seek out a high level of stimulation that can push their emotions to inhuman extremes. Great danger lies in pursuing extreme emotions. If the practitioners lose their self-control, they become slaves to their own swords and emotions, thereby posing a danger to everyone and everything around them. Only by conquering their own extreme emotions and impulses will sword practitioners be able to master their chosen sword styles.

The Joy Chapter of the Seven Emotions Sword Styles centers around using one's own happiness to produce positive outcomes that can generate greater happiness to the sword practitioner. By defeating the opponents that are correlated to happiness, the newly generated joy will feed back into the practitioner, thereby enabling further enemies to be defeated with greater ease.

Once the momentum of the practitioner has exceeded a high level, the sword wielder can generate an expanding field of joy that can impart a fraction of its power to friendly combatants. This will allow them to fight alongside the sword practitioner with greater power, thereby generating greater joy that will feed back into them all, allowing them to overcome any enemy, even those whose strengths exceed their own cultivation.

Requirements: Strength must be 1.7 or higher. Dexterity must be 1.8 or higher. Endurance must be 2.0 or higher. Intelligence must be 1.5 or higher. Concentration must be 3.0 or higher. Spirituality must be 5 or higher.

"These Seven Emotions Sword Styles must be a collection of top-tier sword styles from a time before the founding of the Heavensword Association." Ketis immediately concluded. "The description provided by the System is not too detailed, but there are already enough clues that make me convinced that it is based on different principles than the sword styles that I am familiar with. If I can learn and master this so-called Joy Chapter, I think I may be able to break through to the rank of sword saint!"

A single chapter was worth 400 Ascension Points! With that high of a price tag, the enlightenment fruit definitely contained extremely valuable knowledge!

Ves made another observation. "From what I can surmise, there are seven of these chapters in total. I bet that if you can gather all of the chapters that are based on different emotions and master each of them, you'll be able to combine them and find a way to advance to the mythical rank of sword god."

"I think so as well." Ketis' eyes glowed brighter as she stared hungrily at the 400 AP fruit. "I think I fully understand the value of the Tree of Possibilities now. It gives users like us access to all sorts of forbidden and extremely powerful knowledge. We need to pay a huge amount of Ascension Points for the most desirable fruits, but at least the System offers us a clear and transparent channel to obtain these powerful skills and techniques. That is much easier and more straightforward than trying to convince a Star Designer to give us access to her personal library or hunting down an obscure family that has collected a half-decayed tome in one of its vaults."

She was completely correct. The Tree of Possibilities cut out all of the middlemen and directly made the valuable knowledge accessible to the users of the Mech Designer System so long as they could cough up the required amount of Ascension Points.

"By the way, what are these requirements and what are the numbers based upon?" The female mech designer asked.

"It's just the System's way of quantifying our Attributes. I will take you to the top of the mountain where you can inspect your own Status later. It is not that difficult to raise your lowest Attributes with the help of the System. You can buy certain pills or other powerful reagents down at the Divine Bazaar that can help you meet the requirements of the more powerful enlightenment fruits."

"I will need an AP for that, which I do not have."

"Then you will need to work for it, Ketis. You can still take advantage of a few services offered by the System without spending any AP, but that would be a huge waste of its potential. The System doesn't want to be attached to a bunch of lazy freeloaders. It actively encourages its users to work hard and be as productive as possible. The many incentives offered by the System for becoming a high performer is a big reason why I am so successful and why I tried to impart this attitude towards the Larkinson Clan."

Ketis looked enlightened by this explanation. So much of Ves' actions and decisions suddenly made a lot of sense now that she gained access to a crucial piece of missing context.

The Mech Designer System literally shaped Ves into the mech designer he was today!

The pair spent a few more minutes admiring the many enlightenment fruits that promised to turn Ketis into a much better mech designer or swordmaster.

However, her lack of AP ultimately forced her to turn away from all of the temptation. There was little point in looking at the fruits without having any chance of acquiring them due to her incredible poverty.

Ves actually felt a little sorry for her. While Ketis turned to leave, he moved closer to the Tree of Possibilities.

He briefly studied one of the cheapest fruits before plucking it from its branch. He inwardly winced as he could just feel his stash of AP dwindling even further from its already alarmingly low sum.

"Ves?"

"For you." Ves extended the small black peach-like fruit. "I think it is best if you can experience the effect of ingesting an enlightenment fruit in advance. That way, you will know what you are saving your AP up for. Besides, I have studied your recent works, and I truly think you need to shore up your fundamentals. It takes years of dedicated study for most Journeyman to reach the standard of a Senior in just one of these fields, let alone a dozen. This is one of the reasons why third-class and to a lesser extent second-class Journeymen can take decades if not a century to advance to the next rank."

Ketis curiously took hold of the fruit and briefly read its description.

[Senior-level Mechanics]

Price: 5 Ascension Points

Imparts a comprehensive understanding of the broad field of Mechanics at a level of proficiency that corresponds to a Senior Mech Designer.

Requirements: Journeyman-level Mechanics.

Though she felt a little insulted that Ves thought so little of her mastery in the field of Mechanics, she was honest enough with herself to know that he was not wrong.

If she could solve this shortcoming instantly by ingesting a single fruit, then she was not conceited enough to reject this gift!

"How do I make use of this fruit?"

"Just eat it in a single go. Do not stop until you have finished the entire fruit."

"Good."

Ketis only needed two bites to ingest the entire enlightenment fruit. She then began to freeze as the fruit began to burn a huge amount of knowledge related to Mechanics directly into her mind!

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