God Of Crafting

The journey away from the border city and to the clan's land was much less exciting than I ever expected it to be.

Save for the initial fear of how well I or Claire would take the most likely bumpy drive while we were pretty damn unstable ourselves, the entire trip was so lacking in terms of interesting facts about it, it actually turned boring.

At first, we simply drove out of the city to one of the many fields situated on its other side, compared to the continental barrier that separated the modern world from the spiritual one. We didn't stop there, however, but started to go up the likely single hill in the whole area, given how I couldn't see a single other incline in the ground whenever looking out of the window.

It took me a good ten minutes to realize that what I took for an attempt to climb the hill's side was actually the rising period for the sky-carriage. A process that pretty much explained just how this carriage was different from the ones driven by the roads of the modern world roughly a hundred years prior.

So it works in pretty much the same way as that flying bus, huh? I thought, once I looked out of the window again, only to see nothing but clear skies all around us.

Just like the winged bus produced its own sky path to ride over, the sky-carriage created its very own path for its horses to tread upon and for the carriage itself to ride on.

From there on, however, the rest of the ride turned so unbearably boring, I actually closed my eyes and focused on my inner state. And while I couldn't really cultivate while in this kind of vehicle—lest I wanted for it to malfunction and plummet down from the skies—I could still take my time just observing the flows of spiritual energy within my core.

At its very essence, it wasn't all that much different from what I already figured out back when I was still just a seventh-stage, core-expansion cultivator. My core still existed within every cell, every fiber of my flesh, with seemingly random streaks of spiritual energy discharging from one anchor to the other.

Right now, however, as opposed to how it was back on the sixth stage, every single cell of my body became the chaotic nucleus of cultivation, chaotically driving small bits of my spirituality, only to then shoot it out into one of the many thousands of anchors in my flesh, turning it into just another burning nucleus that would then repeat the process.

In a sense, that was the closest to what I could understand as the condensation of my cultivation, which was the process supposedly taking place during the advancement to the eighth stage of cultivation.

That's how my core was likely supposed to work in theory, yet when it came to practice…

It keeps getting those random injections of spirituality, doesn't it?

No matter how hard I looked, how much I focused, and how deeply I thought, the processes taking place within the core of my entire body simply didn't match the equations I came up with.

The math wasn't mathing. Two plus two no longer made four, but five, six, or a quadrillion. For a hundred discharges happening in a single second, I could observe a thousand or just a few of my anchors turning into the new chaotic nucleus, only for those thousands of nuclei to only create a hundred offshoots, while those few were easily capable of spawning millions of more chaotic cores.

It just… didn't make any sense!

Or maybe… Maybe there's something that I just don't see? I thought, using the prolonged boredom to fall deeper and deeper into my thoughts, fully immersing myself in this curious task.

I tried to look at my cultivation with my eyes closed. Then, I did the same but while keeping them open. Next, I clenched my butt, increasing the flow of blood through my veins, only to then fully relax… And still fail to find a single hint that could clue me in on the actual nature of what was happening in my soul.

"Working hard even when it's our last time to get some rest and partake in some silence?" Claire's voice suddenly pulled my head out of my dream world, just as I confirmed the two hundred fifty-seventh different way in which I tried to peer deeper into my cultivation, as random and outright stupid as most of them were.

"I…" I shook my head to refocus myself back on real life, only to look up to Claire's face before shaking my head and then lowering my eyes. "I just think that figuring out how it all works will make it all the easier for us to actually take advantage of it," I revealed, using just enough cryptic language not to make it obvious what the two of us were talking about.

"So you really are working…" Claire sighed, only to do the unthinkable and actually leave her spot by her father's side and switch over to the seat on the opposite end of the passenger room of the carriage, sitting directly by my right before leaning in to drop her head down on my shoulder. She then slightly angled it, brushing her cheek against the point of my shoulder as she looked up to my face. "You are working, but you are stuck, aren't you?"

Already torn away from the train of my thought, I glanced down and then to the side, catching Claire's smile.

Even now, when it was no longer a feat that was any strange to us, she continued to be clearly amused whenever she could read what was going on in my head without relying on her cultivation to immerse herself into our bond to do so.

So, rather than foolishly denying it, I sighed and nodded my head.

"I can sense that there's something that I can't see, but… I just can't seem to find a way to see it!"

I clenched my hands into fists, pushing away the sudden wave of frustration as I momentarily fell under its influence.

"Wait, for real?" Claire asked, jolting up from my arm as she looked at me with a weird look on her face.

"Yeah, something wrong with it?" I leaned my head over my shoulder, more than happy to accept Claire's help if she wanted to contribute to my thinking, just not if her reaction actually had anything to do with my current train of thought.

Her eyes widened, so she's really surprised, I thought as I made my observations, only to then grit my teeth a tiny little bit, but I didn't say anything that weird, so just what else did she see or hear…

"Is it really necessary for you to see what's going on?" Claire asked, finally hinting me in on what part of what I just said made her react so heavily. "Can't you just accept it as a part of what happens?"

Claire squinted her eyes, only to suddenly relax her entire face as she pulled back, away from my shoulder, and put on a smirk.

"Isn't that what the scientists of the modern world did in the past? Assuming certain principles even if they didn't have enough knowledge to properly explain them? Just like… Ugh, I don't know…"

As Claire hesitated, I recalled a certain, extremely minor detail of some random science-historical show I once watched. A show that I couldn't even tell if it had anything to do with one of history's greatest inventors, or if he was merely brought up as an example for whatever topic they were trying to explore.

Either way, the figure of that scientist of the early modern era appeared in my head along with the conclusion he drew from one of his experiments—experiments that were bound to fail due to the gross imperfection of the measuring tools the man used.

"The light has to move either instantly or at speeds hidden within the margin of a human reaction…" I muttered, too enchanted by this sudden idea to even realize I opened my mouth.

"What's that?" Not missing a single beat, Claire quickly dug deeper into what I just said.

"Just a sentence that's believed to be said some three hundred years before anyone actually ventured to properly study the qualities of light," I answered with a small smile. "A sentence said by someone who lacked the proper instruments to make anything above just an educated guess."

I breathed out, feeling a strange sense of relief overtake my entire mind as I realized that my continued attempts to figure my cultivation out… were all doomed to fail from the very beginning.

Right now, I had no proper instruments to measure just where the error in my equations came from. Yet, rather than just arrogantly assuming it was an error to begin with, all I had to do was step back, put myself at a distance from all that I'd seen, and then just accept whatever behavior I would observe for the one and only thing that actually mattered—the actual results that couldn't care less whether or not I could figure out the rules behind said results!

And just like that, I fucking figured it out.

"All I needed was to take a step back…" I thought while feeling a strange kind of satisfaction well up in my soul… Only to then immediately suppress it, recognizing it for what it truly was.

Another breakthrough?! I thought, holding this sensation down as I held my breath, fully aware that the rapid unleashing of my spiritual energy related to me breaking my current limits would spell doom to the carriage and everyone on it.

After a few moments, I finally managed to suppress the urge to grow even stronger than before, finally able to breathe out before taking a fresh breath in.

"I think I've got it," I allowed myself to utter just those few words as I slid down my seat and heavily breathed out again. "And all I needed to do was to step back and… collapse my entire cultivation from how I'd seen it before, into something I can no longer fully perceive!"