944 Skill 2 (1/2)
Mincar took his hand off the sphere in front of him and put it down, looking at Garen.
”We need to find a way, a way to create cannon fodder that's strong enough but using the least resources, or a way that's useful enough. The one you've chosen now is a Pet Lion's sphere, as a Pet Lion, it's usually reared by humans as pets. It doesn't need sharp teeth and claws with blood grooves, and it looks sweet and adorable on the outside as well. It has a gentle disposition, as well as a pretty and majestic appearance. Of course, this would be different for those people who like ferocious beasts.”
Garen nodded to indicate that he understood.
”Then how should I analyze it? What do I need to use to control the gene chain?”
”This is the little thing we use the most often in this lab.” Mincar walked to the side and took a small white sphere off the window sill, throwing it to Garen directly.
After the white sphere was tossed out, it gradually slowed down, and finally floated in front of Garen.
It was a silver-white sphere, about the size of an egg, and it had something like a camera lens in the middle that was even turning and adjusting slightly.
”Genetic Operators, an extremely precise instrument that can only be used with Energy Machinist Willpower.” Mincar clapped his hands. ”This thing is worth more than a million crystals, remember to be careful with it. There's a computer control panel on it, you can search up the genetic chains of the creatures you're looking for. You'll need to remember a lot of things, so I suggest you choose the simplest one to start with.”
He turned around and left the lab after saying that, leaving Garen there alone.
Garen picked up the sphere and played with it for a bit, but as soon as he touched, he felt his right eye blurring slightly.
He blinked, and instantly felt the field of vision in his right eye expand. Everything had instantly been magnified, as though he had gone through an extremely long tunnel. After the dizziness passed, Garen saw a tiny particle of dust floating in front of his right eye. It had a strange hexagonal hole on it, and a strange-looking little bug had started living in it, constantly poking its black head out of the little hole.
”Is this a magnification effect?” Garen instantly realized that his right eye seemed to have zoomed in a spot in front of him.
Without further hesitation, he used his left eye to lock on to a position, and looked for the Cultivation Sphere as well. Soon enough, he found a small sphere that cultivated a wild wolf imprint.
Wild Wolves were low-practicality creatures among the cannon fodders, since they used up quite a lot of energy but were not all that powerful. Still, since Garen had a Wild Wolf Imprint now, he planned to research the principles behind it properly, to see if there was a simpler, more convenient way to reach the quantity limit.
He tried to release his Willpower threads, and as expected, those threads that used to be as thin as strands of hair, in the extremely magnified vision of his right eye, was made of even more, even thinner strands of threads woven together. Each thinner thread could be controlled, so Garen tried it, and confirmed his suspicions.
He tried to control the threads to approach that mound of grey cotton candy inside the Cultivation Sphere, that was a very primal grey cell. It was oval-shaped, and the cell nucleus looked like a walnut, surrounded by three black dots like satellites.
”How do I operate it?” Garen grabbed his laptop with one hand, there was a lot of internal information there. The Genetic Operator required very powerful computing power to maintain, because it was constantly burning up a lot of the Energy Machinist's computing power. Garen felt as though he was a water tank being filled up, the burden on his computing power was just like the water being poured in. As time went on, he felt heavier and heavier.
After operating the super-thin Willpower threads for some time, Garen had no choice but to stop and rest for a while, giving his burning brain some reprieve. He read the information on the computer carefully, there was several hundred M's worth of words and data on the genetic construct of Wild Wolves, which was equivalent to several hundreds of millions, or even up to a billion characters. These were all words he had to memorize…
”That's why they say Energy Machinists are all monsters!” Garen could not help but swear. ”No wonder I need the Energy Machine Imprint to continue to improve, without the save function of the Energy Machine Imprint, an average person could try for their entire life and it still would not be enough for them to memorize all this information.”
He rested for a while, and then started to let the computer flip the pages quickly, so his eyes could scan the information and save it into the Energy Machine Imprint. But the speed of the page-turning was extremely fast, several pages would have passed before an average person could even register what it was seeing.
This was the part of the Imprint that was responsible for computing power, the Computing Mod had a whole set of functions, including basic ones like saving, computing, and sending information. But just because he saved it, did not mean that it was his now, he still needed to memorize it to properly transfer it into his brain's memory.
Put simply, this so-called Energy Machine Imprint was like a chip in the brain created from Willpower. It could help Energy Machinists perform all sorts of complicated operations.
But to Garen, who was himself an expert in biology, this was nothing. He already had a deep understanding of genetics from the Totem World.
To create an Energy Machine Imprint, he could use the gene fragments that already existed in the creatures, and then he could choose what to take and what to discard. But mostly, it involved him using his understanding of the creature's gene chain to create a new gene fragment on his own, and then splicing it perfectly into the creature.
Cutting it, adding in the necessary features, standardizing the creature while specializing its abilities, and then reducing the energy consumption as well as the production times -- these were all things Energy Machinists needed to do when creating an Energy Machine Imprint.