Grey’s heart sank again. He could immediately feel just how slow the download process was.
This was almost certainly because May’s Nexis Suit didn’t have perfect compatibility with him. He had to squint to see the things it wanted to show him properly, and now this.
However, just as Grey was about to resolve himself to sit in the same spot for as long as it took, the download began to speed up. It happened quickly before calming again. But then it suddenly sped up again.
It felt like it was quickly hitting an acceleration curve and then slowing, only to hit a similar curve again.
’The Looping Necklace,’ Grey concluded, his eyes brightening.
He had only just finished the thought when he got a new notification. It was still blurry, but Grey would take it.
—
[Download Completed]
—
[Lesson One: Vessel Construction and Preparation]
—
Grey’s heart lurched. Vessel construction? That sounded a lot like what he needed to do for Prometheus, no?
Excitement bubbled up in his chest. He had been right.
Slowly, Grey made his way through the material. A lot of it was blurred and difficult to sift through. It took a lot of guessing to decipher what was being said. Often, large segments of words would be cut out, so he had to make his best attempt to fill them in himself.
That worked when it was obvious filler words like "and" or "the," but the more complex, the more difficult it was—especially when it started to get into the nitty-gritty details.
After a read-through that took Grey about three hours, though, he understood the gist of what the lineage wanted of him. Some of it was fine. Some of it, though, was unhinged.
The general path to forming a vessel was, obviously, building a jaw. The unexpected part was that the vessel needed something to, well, make it a vessel.
What was stored within the jaw was a "Spirit."
Grey was immediately excited by the prospect. This was in line with the Titanframe. It said it had a Prometheus Spirit that he needed to form a vessel for.
The Mechanical Jaw Lineage didn’t come with a ready-made Spirit, though. He had to go and find one.
Or, he could just use the Spirit he already had—that being the Prometheus Spirit.
The trouble was that there were a lot of details here about compatibility and such. Those details came with a list of rules and requirements, but the information was too complex for Grey to make out completely.
From what he gathered, the best Jaw Spirits were usually animals—namely those that had powerful jaws—duh. But Prometheus didn’t sound like it fell into this category at all.
’But even if Prometheus isn’t perfectly compatible, so long as it works I can always make a new vessel at some other point later on. I hope.’
Unlike with everything else, Grey could see everything that came from the pinky ring with perfect clarity. Meaning, if he could just clear the mission, he could get an introduction he could actually understand completely out of it.
Grey leapt up to his feet. Taking the tome with him, he raced to the other side of the cabin, leaping through the furnace and appearing in the cockpit of the dead witch.
’There has to be something here... I remember seeing it... there it is!’
Between the materials Grey had stolen from the gnome and the remnants of the witch, he felt that he should probably be able to cobble everything he needed together.
But what Grey was missing was one very important thing:
Energy.
Grey held a core in his hand. Had he ripped it out of the back of the witch’s corpse? Maybe.
’Details, details.’
He didn’t care about respecting the dead body of an old hag anyway. This energy crystal, known as a Cyber Core, was the linkage one needed to take an idea from the Cyber State into the real world.
Otherwise, you’d just be burning mental energy on creating something that could never take true form.
After making sure he had this, Grey stripped off a ton more material from the witch’s mech and pulled out some more stuff from the pile he had snatched from the gnome just in case.
’Okay. Analyze.’
Grey sat across from the Cyber Mat and placed the first material down, holding the Cyber Core in his hands.
He closed his eyes, and a projected image of a piece of scrap metal appeared.
Information about its shape, volume, weight, and most importantly, its Faces appeared in Grey’s mind.
Back on Earth, graphic designers used "polygons" as a count of how complex an image was. This was the same concept, but more complex.
A single Face was almost like the basic unit of an item. Different items would have different forms of a basic unit, and it was the job of a technician to understand the variations.
Still, the rule of thumb was: the more Faces, the more complex an item, and the more difficult it was to break down and reform into something else.
This piece of scrap metal was quite straightforward.
—
Object: Tempered Brass Steel
Weight: 0.13kg
Faces: 7
—
There was more information below that, but Grey couldn’t quite grasp it.
What he did know was that if he wanted to successfully form the lowest-level Mechanical Jaw, he needed...
—
Vessel: Tuned Jaw 0BJ37
Weight: 2.7kg
Faces: 207
Raw Materials:
Tempered Steel (any kind): 99 Faces
Flexweave Mesh: 99 Faces
Aurum Nullite: 9 Faces
—
Grey didn’t even seem to consciously grasp what he was doing. When he started, his mind went into autopilot.
It all just made perfect sense. The blueprint was already made for him.
All he needed to do was find the raw material in the scrap piles, gather them until he had enough Faces, and when he had enough raw materials, form them into Tuned Jaw 0BJ37.
’Form. Load. Intent.’
The three steps of forging came so naturally to Grey, as though he had already done it for a lifetime.
Form the raw material using the blueprint.
Load it with its software, its function, its uses.
Give it life through your intent and the Spirit.