God Of Crafting

The difference between the two ways of looking at my cultivation were extremely minute, yet carried massive consequences to my understanding of it. Just like a tiny obstacle could cast a great shadow or how a small change to the written statement could twist its meaning into disrepair, just this one mental switch was finally enough for me to connect the dots. Discover more content at empire

'What I can see isn't my whole cultivation… but just the projection of it onto the one dimension I actually can see!'

I clenched my hands into fists and my buttocks down as I attempted to stave off my excitement that nearly made me drop it all and just focus on cultivating again.

"You did it, huh?" Claire commented in a small, silent voice, careful not to let the people outside catch any part of what she said. To that end, she even climbed up over my shoulder and whispered directly into my ear while enclosing it within her hands, all for the sake of keeping her remark private.

"Just one step, but yeah," I nodded my head before offering the girl a small smile as I reached out, grabbed her hand, and then gave it a light squeeze. "Hopefully, however, it will allow me to unveil the rest of it all."

As much as it pained me to leave Claire to be bored alone… if I could figure out the ins and outs of our current cultivation stage, we could pretty much re-cultivate the entire thing once we found the time to do so, as opposed to likely wasting any future opportunity we would get to cultivate not on actually practicing, but trying to figure out the theory necessary for us to properly practice.

'Still, if what I can see is merely the single frame out of a whole movie worth of my cultivation… How do I even affect it? How do I read it? How do I make use of it?'

Some of those questions, I could find the answers to with just a short moment of observing my cultivation.

The patterns were all there for me to see, hidden in plain view and only requiring me to know what I was actually supposed to look out for. And now that I did know… they were so much in my face, I couldn't help but be surprised how I didn't notice them before.

Whenever a myriad of my chaotic parts of the core would discharge to a lesser number of anchors than them, the following discharge coursing through my veins as raw power would be smaller but much denser. As opposed to this scenario, when a few chaotic nuclei would discharge into much more anchors than them, my spirituality would surge, only for said surge to be of much weaker, thinner quality.

'Thinking about it, isn't this kind of thing pretty much the same as we experience everything else in life?' I thought, quickly drawing parallels between my cultivation and life itself, somehow convinced that there were much more connections between the two than anyone gave it credit for.

'We do see the reality around us one frame at a time, hear sounds one note at a time, taste various flavors, one mix of them at a time…'

While this understanding pointed towards quite the worrying possibility of the entirety of life being just an experience locked within time and consisting of endless frames of constant, deterministic states of matter… it did allow me to finally grasp the instinctual understanding of just how to interpret my cultivation through the activity of my spirituality within my core.

'Wait, now that I think about it…'

Before I even noticed, my thoughts suddenly diverted from the topic of the cultivation itself and shifted over to the one moment when I saw the very same thing happening as what I just discovered.

The one time when something only existed as an expression of a flowing state, rather than an innate quality of the matter itself.

'Isn't this how that golden being came to be?'

Whether it was a god of technology, a sentience created from my spirituality and that weird constitution that seemingly abandoned me ever since that being's birth… whatever it was, just like my cultivation right now, it could only exist while the spiritual energy was flowing, rather than existing within the spiritual energy itself!

'Now, the question is, is it just a coincidence, some sort of repetitive pattern I was simply not aware of before, or…'

I gulped my saliva down, suddenly reminded of just how massive of a weight that golden being put on my shoulders by the mere fact of coming to be.

'Or maybe, it's a being that manifested itself because we created the circumstances close enough to a high cultivation rank for it to develop sentience?'

Life and cultivation were intrinsically connected on more levels than one would normally think. How else would cultivation help people deal with the one enemy they've failed to defeat throughout humanity's long history, the process of aging? How else could it give humans a power that could not only reinforce their physicality but, on higher cultivation levels, allow them to wield mystical powers pretty much at will, with no more than their mere thought?

And now, if this guess of mine turned out to be true…

I gulped my saliva down, closing my eyes and forcefully erasing all the thoughts from my head before they would lead me astray to the point beyond any return.

'I better not turn into some maniac obsessed with the idea of creating life or something,' I thought, raising my hand to wipe the sweat off my face. 'God already gave us one way to go around doing so. There's no need for a mere human like me to try to come up with a new way of making living beings!'

It was hypocritical of me to even think this given how I was behind the birth of that golden being… but still, doing something stupid and careless once by no means gave me a proper excuse to do it again!

"You really fell deep into your thoughts."

Hearing Claire's voice, I shook my head… only to realize I couldn't open my eyes!

'Wait, that's not it…' Puzzled by the sudden weird feeling all over my body, I initially was about to jump up in panic… only to recognize this unpleasant and borderline-psychedelic sensation.

'A sleep paralysis?' I thought, baffled by the idea that I ran so deep into the realm of theory-crafting, I didn't even realize when I fell asleep.

The sleep paralysis on its own wasn't a bad thing. It was one of the many tools the human body used to prevent inflicting unintentional self-harm, just like the hard-wired blockade most humans had over using the full extent of their muscles' strength, a lock designed to stop them from tearing their limbs off their bones if not outright shattering the latter into pieces.

Sleep paralysis being necessary was one thing, but it didn't change the fact that experiencing it firsthand… it was by no means pleasant or enjoyable, given how I couldn't do anything with my body, forced to remain still while my brain rushed to produce all sorts of ugly hallucinations…

"Hey, Tim, you need to wake up…" Claire called me out only to then give me a slight shake.

This shake was just the thing I needed to feel the motion in my muscles. Sensing the movement, my brain fired up back into an active state…

But all of it was a process. Claire's shake merely put me on the path to waking up rather than actually waking me up.

"Hey, Tim…?" Claire's voice grew slightly more urgent, pressed. "Tim!"

Finally, by the time her voice reached the level of a scolding shout, the locks on my flesh finally came up, allowing me to open my eyes and push my chest forth a bit as I took in a huge breath designed to provide my drowsy self just enough energy to chase all of the momentary nap-leftover exhaustion away.

"Ah, sorry about that," I apologized as soon as I could move my lips, shaking my head for just one more time before turning my eyes over to Claire. "I really got quite into theory-crafting, didn't I?" I smiled, trying to play it all off with just a bit of humor.

"Don't do that again."

Claire didn't ask. She didn't request. She just… said it like a general would to a soldier, with the very idea of protesting the statement so far removed from the realm of possibility, neither of the two would ever spare it a single thought!

"Yeah, sorry," I lowered my head as I apologized, only to then raise my eyes before looking around. "Were you just worried, or was there…"

"Just look outside," Claire sighed out before sitting back and pointing at the window embedded into the carriage's door.

As she did so, I realized that while we moved at a rather stable speed, we were now clearly descending, already indicating what I was going to see outside.

Still, prompted both by curiosity and eagerness to follow Claire's words, I leaned over to the doors before pushing the window covers aside, taking my first, proper look at how our destination looked.

"Welcome to the province," Chihiro muttered from the other end of the carriage, impassively staring at the window on the carriage's opposing wall, not even bothering to push its covers away to get a proper look.

He then sighed before turning his eyes over to me and giving me an exhausted smile.

"Take that sight in, for it's going to be a while before you will be able to see anything like that again."