Inside the Workshop beneath Wasteland Town, Osiris felt a surge of anxiety because his augmentation progress was severely behind his initial perfect plan.
The obstacles didn't stem from a lack of technical understanding or design flaws, but from a cold reality: this Cyberpunk World was not the resource-rich, industrially complete Warhammer Forge World, and he was certainly not in a dedicated Workshop equipped with top-tier facilities and automated servitors.
The pervasive scarcity of key materials severely limited his ability to transform blueprints into reality, becoming an unavoidable impediment in the advancement process.
For this, he had to invest far more time and energy than anticipated.
Bionic components for implants, which should have been produced on standardized assembly lines with extreme precision, now required him to craft them by hand.
He could only use the limited equipment at hand, along with the inconsistent quality of basic materials collected by Maine's crew, to meticulously hand-craft them.
From shaping the basic structure and etching internal microcircuits to spraying and curing biocompatible coatings, every step had to be personally overseen and carefully monitored.
This greatly consumed time he could have otherwise used for core research or integrating more complex systems.
A more serious impact came from the lack of fundamental strategic resources.
Adamantium, Ceramite—these core materials that form the basis of advanced armor and weaponry in the Warhammer Universe were almost entirely absent from the known material database of this world.
Without these ideal materials, possessing special atomic structures capable of efficiently conducting energy or withstanding extreme impacts, many design performance indicators became impossible to achieve, forcing him to compromise on performance at every stage, further increasing the complexity and time consumption of the work.
While Adamantium and Ceramite were considered rare resources in the Warhammer World, for a Tech-Priest of a certain standing, they could be obtained from a Forge World's resource allocation simply by asking.
Even the rarer Auramite was not entirely out of reach for Osiris, thanks to his past achievements and network.
But on this unfamiliar planet with a skewed tech tree, these materials, commonplace in many parts of the galaxy, became extremely rare, or perhaps didn't even exist within the local known tech tree.
Osiris' memory database stored the synthesis formula for Ceramite and the preliminary smelting process for Adamantium.
Ceramite required a specific iron ore base and a series of complex catalysts to react under high temperature and pressure; Adamantium extraction was even more troublesome, needing to be obtained from certain special asteroid minerals, with an exceptionally stable atomic structure and extremely high processing difficulty.
However, knowing the method did not equate to being able to implement it.
Lacking the most basic raw materials, as well as the high-temperature furnaces and gravity field controllers essential for large-scale industrial production, left him like a clever cook without rice.
He tried to substitute with some high-strength local alloys, but the test results were all unsatisfactory; either the density was too high, affecting maneuverability, or the protective performance was far below expectations.
Ultimately, he had to completely revise the design, opting for composite materials with slightly inferior performance but obtainable or synthesizable locally, to replace ideal materials like Adamantium and Ceramite.
For the main structure, he chose a high-density titanium-tantalum polymer as the core framework.
Although this material's energy conduction efficiency was inferior to Adamantium, its strength-to-weight ratio was excellent at the local technological level, providing sturdy yet relatively lightweight support for the body.
To enhance the toughness and fatigue resistance of critical parts, Osiris attempted to incorporate a special biological material, intercepted by the Maine's crew from a Biotechnica transport convoy, into the polymer matrix at specific ratios and weaving methods.
This genetically engineered, high-strength bio-fiber exhibited extraordinary energy damping characteristics and structural stability, compensating to some extent for the main material's deficiencies under extreme loads.
The armor system adopted a more complex multi-layered composite nesting configuration.
The outermost layer was a hardened ceramic coating treated with a special process, primarily responsible for resisting high-speed impacts and direct hits from energy weapons.
The middle layer used depleted uranium armor plates found by Maine's crew at a derelict military base; although Osiris re-melted them to improve structural consistency and reduce toxicity, their inherent radiation properties still required additional processes for effective shielding.
The innermost layer combined self-repairing bioactive gel with shape-memory metal mesh, designed to absorb residual impact, dampen vibrations, and partially self-heal cracks or restore deformation after damage.
While this series of alternative solutions, based on local conditions, barely met basic defense indicators in laboratory simulations, their drawbacks were also evident.
The overall weight of the components exceeded the original design budget, affecting theoretical maximum maneuverability.
Heat dissipation efficiency was greatly reduced due to insufficient material thermal conductivity, posing a potential constraint on sustained high-intensity combat.
More importantly, energy loss significantly increased when passing through these non-ideal materials, causing the power and sustained combat time of weapon systems like the Sonic Blade, which rely on efficient power supply, to be noticeably affected.
This comprehensive technical compromise stirred a nearly sharp irritation within Osiris' precisely operating logical core.
For a Tech-Priest, pure research bottlenecks or experimental failures were not a cause for concern; they were inevitable stepping stones on the path to seeking truth.
However, the current situation was entirely different.
He had clear technical blueprints etched in his mind, knowing the ideal parameters of every component and the perfect form of every energy circuit, yet he was constrained by the primitive obstacle of external resource scarcity.
This sense of powerlessness did not stem from the fog of knowledge, but from material poverty, like a supremely skilled master being deprived of his customary tools and materials, forced to use blunt substitutes to sculpt perfect creations.
A suffocating feeling of being bound by invisible chains, mixed with a profound aversion to states of extremely low efficiency, surged in the depths of his mind, which was usually dominated only by cold data and absolute rationality, like abnormal ripples suddenly rising on a stable data lake, particularly jarring and uncomfortable.
Despite this, the irritating emotion did not shake his resolve to execute the plan.
Osiris suppressed this discordant fluctuation with powerful willpower, forcing himself back into an absolutely rational framework.
Following the adjusted plan, which was full of compromises, he mobilized every available processing unit in the Workshop, operating the less-than-ideal materials with almost harsh precision, steadily advancing the augmentation process for Lieutenant Morris.
Every drive of a micro servo motor, every calibration of a laser welding point, every connection between a neural interface and bionic fibers, he focused intently, striving to achieve the theoretically optimal solution under limited conditions.
When the last piece of biomimetic synthetic skin, identical in texture to human skin, was precisely fitted onto Morris's chest area, perfectly concealing the stable, powerful miniature plasma reactor beneath, this augmentation project, fraught with constraints, was finally declared complete.