It turned out there were two main methods of speed reading, and luckily for Grey, he had Barkeep Ji to give him enough clues to nudge him in a certain direction. It was the more expensive method, but it was the only thing Grey could do.
Cyber Warps were a method that Grey had run into before. Essentially, you applied a cyber kinetic patch to your skin, it ingrained itself onto you like a tattoo, and then it would download.
They were ultimately used for the sake of passing down legacies. The one that Grey had used when he first came across this method was the Frame that actually formed the foundation of his current Dark Solveign Frame.
It was a process that should have taken weeks to complete, but Grey only got distracted for a small moment only to find it had already downloaded to 100%.
Clearly, that was related to the so-called "bandwidth" of his neural frame.
There was another form of Cyber Warp that existed. Rather than carrying information on entire Frames, they were simpler and only passed on raw information alone.
Grey felt this made sense. When he formed his Helion Frame back then, long before it became his Solveign Frame, he had done it through what method? Wasn’t it just comprehension of various Abilities and other like-Frames?
What was comprehension if not just a form of information? It just happened to be a deeper form of information, one that came paired with understanding.
Passing on raw information alone was a lot simpler.
It turned out that this was at least half the reason Grey had been able to download that earlier magnetic Frame so quickly. His mind was passively comprehending at such a high rate that it provided shortcuts to the Cyber Warp.
Even so, there was a reason this wasn’t more common.
Cyber Warps were already incredibly rare. Using this extreme technology, which was essentially treating your mind like some sort of hard drive to download things onto, was ridiculously expensive.
It was easier to just read it.
Grey didn’t have the time.
And worse than that, the Cyber Warp’s price scaled proportionally to the value of the book. Unfortunately for Grey, information on mechs were impossibly valuable.
Just a single book on common raw materials of the Proving Class cost 10,000 credits. Even if it scaled by 10x up from there, Grey would be grateful.
He wasn’t so lucky.
By the time he got to Dominion Class, the level of understanding he was pretty sure he’d need to figure all of this out, the price wasn’t even in normal credits anymore.
It was in what Barkeep Ji called "blue credits". Colloquially, blue credits were about 1000x the value of a single normal credit. But it was extremely rare someone would ever make the conversion.
Apparently, the only way to pay for items of the Command Class and higher were through blue credits. No one would accept normal credits.
This was confusing to Grey. To him, credits were just numbers on a screen that appeared at the bottom of his status screen. Why would there be a special delineation to them?
This probably had something to do with the Genesis System, and there was definitely something bigger at play. But he just didn’t have the time for side quests right now.
He needed to figure out how to get himself 70,000 blue credits.
Ironically enough, by strict conversion standards, the Vanguard Class information book was even more expensive. It cost 130 million credits.
And these were just the prices for the booklets. The raw template to convert them to Cyber Warps was a flat rate of 10x on top of that.
All together, he needed 1.5 billion credits and over 800,000 blue credits. The former was to get everything up to the Vanguard Class, and the latter was for the Command and Dominus Classes.
Grey had no choice but to get to work.
The 1.5 billion credits was difficult, but not impossible. For a 30% SA-index, he could get around 20-30,000 credits for a Proving Class blueprint.
Grey could do it to 100%, and that was worth easily 10x. And that was only because of the restraints Barkeep Ji was under. Even though views into the outpost were limited right now, Ji was still restrained by the rules of the Genesis System.
Selling here wasn’t really cost effective. Only auctions could get Grey the maximum prices he deserved.
It had to be remembered that when Elowen saw Grey’s 100% SA-index blueprints, she wasn’t even comfortable setting a price in the first place. That was how valuable they were.
But at that rate, even if Grey pumped out Proving Class blueprints, not only would he not get any blue credits, but he would need to make 5,000 of them to get as much as he needed.
Even for him, that would take weeks, and that was assuming he didn’t have to rest.
However... Grey had more than just Proving Class blueprints.
If he reproduced the Helm Frame blueprint, so long as it wasn’t the Curved Face version, he could do it very quickly and to 100% SA-index as well.
When he asked Barkeep Ji how much the Vector Class blueprint was worth, he said 150 million.
Grey only had to make ten of them.
That left him with the dilemma of all dilemmas.
How was he going to get blue credits?
The only way to do that... seemed to be making a Command Class mech blueprint.
If it was to make an actual mech, there was simply no shot. Grey would burn out before he succeeded. He felt the Vanguard Class, at least for now, was a true limit for him.
The higher up in Classes you went, the more special and specialized they became. The Dominus Class and onward especially. He just couldn’t.
This was a huge part of the reason he didn’t know if he could succeed in doing this in the first place. However, if the question was whether he could make a blueprint...
That... that he could do.
Now, whether it would be 100%.
That was another matter entirely.