The issue concerning the increasing rate of breakdowns and mechanical failures threatened to derail the entire expedition. While the engineers only made an uncertain prediction what might happen if they came close to the elusive battleship, Ves believed that this might very well become a serious problem!

He sought of Chief Dakkon to discuss the issue. They met at the workshop.

"Ves. What did you call me for?"

"Is it true that the rate of breakdowns will increase to such an extent that it's impossible to operate a mech near the Starlight Megalodon?"

The chief's face grew serious. "That's a possible outcome. We've extrapolated this possibility from the existing data. It's not entirely set in stone that mechs won't work in the vicinity. After all, hasn't the battleship herself shown signs of life?"

That was true. Otherwise, how could she have been functional enough to detect something going on in orbit and launch an antimatter torpedo straight in the middle of a fleet in the midst of bombarding the surface?

"Still, that's the Starlight Megalodon you're talking about." Ves retorted. "As the source of all the unnatural phenomena around Seven, I'm sure she's an exception to the rule. It would have been a very bad thing if she became affected by the same technology-corroding effects from the astral winds that is spewing out of her leaking FTL drives."

"This is also why I don't dare to take too much stock in this prediction yet. The situation near the site might be very different from our calculations."

If the Starlight Megalodon became subjected to this very same effect, then how could her FTL drives still be releasing gouts of astral winds? They had to remain somewhat functional, and they did indeed for an extremely lengthy amount of time.

Therefore, the clues pointed out that even if various pieces of technology would stop working if they came close, some people developed a means to circumvent this effect.

Ves hummed in thought. "I wonder how the battleship managed to stay working. There has to be a way for us to shield our mechs and machinery from the breakdown effect."

Both of them brainstormed for a few minutes, but neither Ves or Dakkon could come up with an answer.

However, Ves did come up with a possible alternative. "Only machines are affected, right? So far, none of the doctors or exobiologists ever gave out an alert concerning the dangers to our health. What if this extends to the god species as well?"

"You mean…"

"Maybe this is intentional. Haven't you ever thought about the absence of any functional technology among the natives? Why did they voluntarily return to the stone age or bronze age? Why haven't the natives inherited any of the advantaged knowledge of their ancestors?"

"This is still a far-fetched idea, Ves."

"Yet out of all the possibilities, it makes the most sense!" Ves declared with fervor. "Why turn Aeon Corona VII into a giant experiment? Why engineer the god species into organic mechs analogues and why modify the genes of the blessed and cursed people into organic mech pilots? It's because only non-mechanical entities are able to get close to the Starlight Megalodon!"

"You know what this theory implies, right? Those who terraformed this planet and seeded it with the god species and the natives likely come from a different faction that the one who is still in control of the Starlight Megalodon!"

A great story must be behind this separation, if it existed at all. Ves strongly believed in his intuition, which told him something like this must have happened. This might not have been the only division among the original crew.

So many contradictions must have emerged after the crash. Officers against enlisted. Researchers against soldiers. Those who gave up and wanted to settle against those who wanted to work on towards an escape.

The Flagrant Swordmaidens only gathered fragmented clues during their travels so far, but this revelation may have been the first big secret they might have stumbled upon. It made too much sense to Ves!

However, Chief Dakkon didn't entirely seem willing to abandon everything they brought to complete the mission. "Even if the Starlight Megalodon is hard to get at, I don't believe it's impossible for us to develop a solution. Before we go all gung-ho on taming sacred gods and raise a beast rider regiment, we should conduct an extensive investigation."

"I agree." Ves nodded. After all, they couldn't completely put their faith in the data they gathered so far. "However, we shouldn't be too complacent either. Now that we know that we might need to depend on taming the god species, we should place more emphasis on the beast rider project. If possible, we should contemplate on adding other sacred gods to our roster."

"Do you think sacred gods are so easy to obtain?" Chief Dakkon snorted. "We've traveled very far these last two months. We'll almost be passing by the last ancient city before we cross into the storm lands. We don't know what's hidden there, but the odds of encountering sacred gods for us to subdue is rather low. So if we want to obtain more god beasts, we either have to lower our standards and go for the wild gods, or go attack an ancient city."

Ves grimaced. "I don't think Captain Byrd or any of the other mech officers will be eager to attack an ancient city. It's a politically sensitive matter."

No matter how far removed they were from the CFA, the blessed people that inhabited the ancient city still shared an undeniable heritage from the formidable organization. They had the blood of CFA officers running through their veins!

Even if more than a hundred generations went past, the CFA still took care of their own! They were notoriously famous for protecting the families and dependents of their active servicemen.

While the Vandals had the right to protect themselves if the natives came looking for trouble, hence why they dared to defend against Pairixan and his goons, it would be a different matter entirely if they barged into an ancient city!

In the end, the two hadn't been able to come up with a solution. They parted on uncertain terms, each of them burdened with future troubles.

Ves looked in the direction the expedition traveled towards. As long as they marched for a couple more weeks, they'd cross over the stormy side of the planet, which the men nicknamed the storm lands.

Once they crossed into the storm lands, they'd be completely cut off from the fleet. Not only wouldn't they be able to obtain supplies from the transports and shuttles that periodically descended from orbit, they also wouldn't be able to exchange any news either.

The fleet and their spaceborn mech escorts might be ambushed and destroyed one day, and the ground forces wouldn't even have a single clue!

Ves sighed for the umpteenth time. "If only our quantum entanglement nodes still worked."

That also reminded him of the strange Tzianti crystal he once used. Would alternative means of communication still work?

Several days passed by. After making the rounds in the camp, Ves returned to the test site and continued to supervise the experiments. The beast rider project gathered so much data that they wouldn't know what to do with ninety-five percent of it. That didn't matter though since they had data chips to spare. If they ever ran short, Ves would just visit the workshop and fabricate a batch of hundred chips at a time.

The only problem was that he botched the production several times. The breakdown effect started to take effect on microcomponents as well. When it came to the fabrication of extremely tiny but sophisticated chips, a lot of things had to go right. Even a single minor error could lead to spoiling half a batch!

And in fact, this happened far more often than Ves was comfortable with. What this did mean?

Fabricating replacement parts might take longer and wasted more resources. While the Vandals could still recycle some of their botched parts, it took a lot of time and effort to reclaim the resources, and for some parts such as armor plating it was way too hard to separate all of the substances structured together into extremely resilient forms.

Nonetheless, life went on. As the beast rider project ran through the data chips, the god crystal project got their turn next.

They had a lot of plans in store, the most important of which was to attempt to embed a god crystal into the hide of a beast and see what happened!

Due to the risks involved with this operation, the god crystal project members approached it with an abundant amount of caution. Their slow progress bored Ves to tears, so he quickly left and started to process the data he gathered along with the rest of the beast rider project team.

"Now that we've gathered all the data that we need and more, I hope you can deliver some actual results." Ves stated. "In two weeks, I hope to finish a working prototype of a beast rider neural interface!"

Ves couldn't possibly process the data by himself. Though some of the data was incomprehensible to anyone but him, all the other experts all excelled in some areas. Ves trusted them to analyze certain portions of data and deliver succinct reports to him.

Through reading these condensed results and making use of the key data held within, Ves hoped to progress his stalled project by leaps and bounds!

In fact, in the first couple of days, his progress hadn't been very much. He had to navigate through the data and process them into useful forms.

Only a week after he started with the job did he obtain some progress. With Ves and the other experts delivering their first results, a lot of uncertainties about the project cleared up.

He made use of his gains to complete the so-called translation filter and finish the specifications of his beast rider neural interface.

Over the course of several days, he developed several variations of the neural interface, each of them differing in one vital area or another. Ves wasn't sure which one worked best or at all, so he had no choice but to develop several variants in the hopes of getting it right at least once.

In the meantime, the god crystal project began to show some results as well. While they failed to get a wild god to integrate with any of the god crystals the Vandal researchers embedded them with, they did learn a lot.

For one thing, a grown wild god wouldn't be able to draw any power from the god crystals. For some reason, their godling offspring needed to be embedded with small crystals from young, when their bodies were still relatively uncontaminated by intermediate energies.

Once a young godling began to eat the local meat, they became contaminated by the intermediate energy and matter the animals used to ingest from the environment. This polluted the godling and locked it into the growth path of a wild god.

Ves, Chief Dakkon and Dr. Tillman gathered at the testing site to discuss the results. Due to the invasive experiments, Subject 1 and Subject 2 succumbed. Only Subject 3 remained alive.

As for their dwarf riders? Since the Vandals had no more use for Dwarf 1 and Dwarf 2, they executed the useless bastards and their entire family and dependents. They didn't want the survivors to go on a revenge spree after being let loose. That was just silly.

"Very interesting." Chief Dakkon said. "What does this mean, exactly?"

Dr. Tillman summed up her findings. "It means the sacred gods are the only ones who can birth more sacred gods. A wild god or their offspring are marked with intermediate particles from the start, which is a lower class of energy from higher-dimensional particles. The only sacred gods that emerge are the children their parents decide to invest in. The offspring that fail to meet their criteria are either killed or left abandoned in the wild to take their chances. If they're lucky, they end up growing into wild gods after a century of growth and struggle."

"No wonder the wild gods hate the sacred gods." Ves remarked with a snort.

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