The Mech Touch

6935  Phasewater Organ Cartel

So far, so good.

The implantation surgery proceeded within expectations.

Even if the surgeons encountered a few oddities inside Ves' enormous true body, the deviations did not affect their overall plan.

The only major concern they had to worry about was whether their actions caused so much pain and disruption that Ves lost control over his own body.

After all, the process of cutting open his body, displacing existing organs while trying to put in foreign organs was an inherently traumatic experience for almost every organic life form!

While it was true that phase lords gained inherently stronger compatibility to all of these potentially damaging steps, none of them could become completely immune to these events.

The corpus still needed to retain the sensation of pain and other universal physiological processes in order to sustain and regulate itself.

An organic body would completely lose the spark that made it different from a lifeless mechanical construct if a life form lost all of those physiological processes.

Even phase whales, who the phase lords tried to imitate, could still feel pain and suffer from rejection reactions after implanting foreign organs into their bodies.

While it was known that phase leaders possessed a certain degree of tolerance towards all of the problems that came with directly implanting raw alien organs into their bodies, many problems would definitely ensue as a result.

Only the passage of time or targeted remedies could suppress the sequelae borne from all of these crude and dangerous operations.

This was the situation that many phase lords faced. So long as the rejection reaction from their true bodies was not too violent, they would rather grit their alien teeth and endure the pain for a number of years or decades.

If they did not outright die somehow, their true bodies would eventually assimilate the foreign organs, transforming them while adapting in turn.

This was one of the special qualities of phase lords. Their genetic code was no longer static and absolute. As their bodies transformed due to phasewater into a more multidimensional life form, they gradually transcended the basic concept of race.

Even so, their original racial weaknesses and limitations did not disappear entirely.

The Larkinson Biotech Institute knew this, so its researchers did not directly prepare the original alien phasewater organs for implantation.

Instead, the biotech scientists had grown brand-new phasewater organs. The originals served as both a template and a source of raw materials in order to replicate certain incomprehensible organic designs that possessed unique superdimensional traits.

The new phasewater organs theoretically possessed much higher compatibility with Ves' true body, but because parts of their core structure were directly derived from the original alien organs, that compatibility did not reach 100 percent.

Even if the LBI worked hard to produce the most favorable circumstances for the implantation surgery, there was still a chance of failure.

Ves tried his best to keep his body as still and stable as possible. He repeatedly squashed the instinct to cry out in pain and lash out at his 'attackers'.

Fortunately, his past experiences had already hardened him a lot. He had endured worse pains in the past.

Phase lords also gained a huge bonus in pain tolerance, which also made this experience a little more bearable from his perspective.

The process of acquiring and upgrading phasewater organs was a predominantly physical process to phase leaders. There was very little influence on their minds and spirits.

The incorporeal changes that arose from the addition of powerful new phasewater organs was subtle, at least at first.

As Ves could feel his body changing in real-time, he began to imagine what sort of powers and abilities he could exert after he recovered.

The enhanced Kelsis organ brought about the least disruptive changes. It was simply an upgraded and more advanced version of one of the basic 3 phasewater organs that every phase leader possessed.

Nonetheless, the importance of having stronger spatial barriers could not be overstated.

One of the reasons why it was the first to be put inside his body was not just because it was a familiar phasewater organ, but it was definitely the most essential.

The implantation of the other phasewater organs was not as important in comparison. Ves would suffer a loss if they had to be removed due to unforeseen complications, but it was not that big of a loss in the greater scheme of things.

However, it was much more important that Ves was able to protect himself better. Even if his true body grew larger whenever his phasewater concentration rose, it would only turn him into a bigger target if he did not acquire additional defensive measures!

The upgraded lesser Kelsis organ should last him for a long time.

While it was not as strong and advanced as greater phasewater organs, its size was not as exaggerated.

Even if Ves acquired a greater phasewater organ, it would take a lot more time and effort for the biotech scientists to derive a lesser variant that was compact enough to fit inside Ves' true body.

After all, it was impossible for the current state of his true body to accommodate gigantic phasewater organs that happened to be larger than entire cities!

In any case, as the new Kelsis organ settled in, Ves already began to acclimate himself to it despite his wishes.

He wanted to wait until the surgery had reached its conclusion before he wanted to explore his new capabilities, but his true body did not have the patience to wait.

As his blood flowed through the recently grown veins of the enhanced Kelsis organ, he uncontrollably gained a number of indeterminate impressions. They flitted across his mind at random. They even caused his vision to blur as if he was seeing spots of light.

Ves vaguely felt as if he was able to project a much stronger spatial barrier than before.

He also knew that it could resist physical attacks a lot better than others.

This was a good upgraded phasewater organ for a martial phase lord. The added resistance against physical damage was tailor-made to resist other large melee combatants.

The only problem was that the performance of the upgraded spatial barrier did not offer that much more resistance against high concentration transphasic weapons.

It was also completely useless against superdimensional weapons, but that applied to almost every other defensive measure.

As Ves wondered how he should adjust his fighting approach after initially familiarizing himself with the power of the enhanced Kelsis organ, the second phasewater organ linked up with his true body.

The addition of the Dofner organ did not require the removal of any existing organs, but its nature was completely different from the Kelsis, Locos and Maracos organs.

The 3 basic phasewater organs were innately present in the bodies of every phase whale upon birth.

That was not always the case with phase lords.

22:07

Whether their true bodies automatically grew this trinity upon their initial transformation, or had to manually implant phasewater organs acquired from external sources later on, It all depended on their racial characteristics and the rituals used to embark on phase lord body cultivation.

Ves happened to become a phase lords due to experiencing a lightning baptism. For whatever reason, the heavenly authority of the Red Ocean directly transformed him into a phase lord outside of his will.

While the transformation was not fancy, it happened to be correct and complete.

This was also why the Red Association and eventually the Phase Lord Department of the Red Collective treated him as an indispensable research subject.

They all figured out that Ves served as a ready-made blueprint on how to transform humans into phase lords!

The phasewater organs that Ves received in the process were all as standard as far as phase leaders were concerned.

That was not the case for other phasewater organs outside the Phasewater Production System.

Aside from this exception, every other phasewater organ was not standard or native to phase leaders.

The phase whales had to acquire knowledge, conduct research and meticulously develop their own personal phasewater organs.

This was too much to ask for many phase lords, so they relied on mortal scientists to do the work on their behalf.

Over time, a lot of races that were watched over by phase lords tended to develop phasewater organs designed to accommodate an entire group or race.

For example, when orven scientists invested a lot of time, effort and phasewater in the development of a fancy new organ, they wouldn't want their work to benefit only a single individual orven phase lord.

The orvens could save a lot of trouble if they developed more universal phasewater organs that could fit any orven phase lord.

Perhaps the organs needed additional modifications in order to raise their compatibility for each recipient, but this was much less troublesome than developing phasewater organs from scratch.

This was also how phase leaders generally distinguished their allegiances.

A handful or a dozen native gods belonged to a single family, dynasty, club, province or group.

Each of them possessed their own bioresearch institutions that were responsible for developing or personalizing their own catalog of phasewater organs.

It was like a cartel for phasewater organs.

Several groups loosely banded together in a single racial alliance.

Their relationships with each other may vary.

Perhaps they were strong rivals who constantly competed for limited resources.

Perhaps they were so close with each other that they treated each other as brothers.

Whatever the case, these racial alliances usually employed a large number of bioresearchers that developed a much larger and more comprehensive catalog of phasewater organs, each of which was optimized to perform best when used by a single race of phase lords.

In fact, these race-bound catalogs were not entirely different from each other. The intelligence collected by the Red Three made it clear that they frequently came into contact with each other, though rarely did they exchange kind words with each other.

All major races were rivals with each other. This also extended to their native gods. They stole and imitated phasewater organs from each other on a regular basis.

This caused many common phasewater organs to become so ubiquitous among the major races that they could no longer be considered exclusive.

In order to skip the lengthy R&D cycle needed to build up this catalog, humans had taken to stealing the homework of the existing major alien races of the Red Ocean.

The Dofner organ is a very suitable choice.

Phasewater organs that enabled a phase leader to engage in warp travel with their true bodies alone was not particularly rare.

Pretty much every phase whale independently invented this kind of organ early in their life cycle.

Different groups and racial alliances may also have their own reasons to develop their own variation of warp travel organs.

However, the Dofner organ eventually rose up among these common and imperfect variations and cemented its place as the prevailing standard among warp travel organs.

It had several advantages, such as decent efficiency, high scalability and maintaining good stability when implanted into the phase lords of different races.

This was why many racial alliances eventually took it over while making their own race-specific tweaks.

Multiple major races claimed credit for the invention of the original Dofner organ. It was difficult to figure out the truth, but the theory that the Red Collective favored the most was that the jureg race was responsible for its creation.

Did better warp travel organs existed? Yes, but they were mostly exclusive to different groups.

No native organization happened to possess the greatest catalog of phasewater organs than the Red Cabal.

Helmed and dominated by many phase whales, its phasewater organ catalog was massive and contained many high-quality organ designs that earned the envy of grassroots phase lords.

The Red Cabal was therefore able to occupy a similar place in alien society as the Red Three in human society.

The Red Cabal did not entirely control all of the native alien empires, but its ability to reward those it favored with premium phasewater organs as well as the most essential PPS meant that most phase lords had very little else to turn towards if they wanted to become stronger!