God Of Crafting

BOOM!

There was no explosion. No fires erupted, nor did the whole area around me turn into a burned-out circle.

No rapid and violent chemical reaction took place, nor was there any direct transfer of massive kinetic energy into the static matter.

To put it simply, nothing exploded, nor did anything crash into where I stood. And yet…

The very moment the spark of my cultivation ignited all the leftover mana in the air, a powerful sonic shockwave erupted from my hand, gently washing over my body only to explode outwards.

'Wha…'

Before I could even utter half of a thought in my mind, everything was already over. And the only way to prove that anything had happened at all… was to just take a look around.

The ground directly beneath me was lucky enough to be spared, with the explosion of the suddenly activated spiritual energy somehow opting to omit the areas so close to me—the origin of the spark that ignited it to begin with. But just a single inch away from my feet, the grass was gone, simply removed from existence by the force of the impact, while the soil was tilled as if some farmer had prepared it for sowing.

Roughly a meter away from my feet, there was another circle drawn from an imaginary point right between my legs and marking the distance at which, rather than just removing the grass from existence, the energy of my spiritual release switched over to pressing the grass tightly into the ground, turning it from the world's texture into nothing more than a semblance of what a giant's brushstroke would leave on a world-sized canvas.

The grass was still there… just that, rather than proudly standing in its attempt to reach for the sun and grow higher than all the competing blades of grass around it, it was now nothing more than a shadow of its former self, a green imprint upon the otherwise brownish color of the ground itself.

When it came to the things that were any further away… I couldn't really tell what had happened. And it was only when I actually attempted to look up that I realized my body was now frozen in a strange state of paralysis.

'No, that's not it,' I gulped my saliva down as the reality dawned upon me. 'It's not me that froze,' I thought, only to then gulp my saliva down…

Or, at the very least, attempt to do so, only to find out it was yet another activity I was currently barred from performing.

'It's the time, or, at the very least…'

I attempted to swallow again, only for the results to remain as unsatisfactory as before.

Then, the reality around me started to warp, its very geometry shifting as if some higher being had started to fold the fabric the universe was built upon.

'No…' I thought as I attempted to grit my teeth, to the same effect as my attempts at swallowing my saliva before. 'It's not folding… iittss ssttrrreeecccchhhh…..'

For a moment, I blacked out.

Or rather, my consciousness itself, or whatever physical phenomenon was behind it, stretched out so far, the whole thing lost cohesiveness and thus the ability to conduct complex, biology-based calculations.

For this faintest of moments, my very self expanded so much, it split into a myriad of extremely tiny bits of me, each equally as stupid, ignorant, and incapable of perceiving the reality around itself.

It was but the faintest of moments… but with my consciousness stretching further and further, so did my perception of the passing of time.

But then, things suddenly started to happen in reverse.

Bit by bit, the tiny particles of my being started to converge back together, colliding only to merge with each other, speeding up the reunification process as they did.

The strange force that had stretched my self out now actively worked to put my very own self back together again. And with every passing second—or was there even any meaning behind something as crude as seconds in a dimension where time no longer held the reins over reality?—this process only continued to accelerate, the force that was seemingly trying to put me back together only growing in strength.

At this point, I nearly blacked out again, unable to cope with the endlessly growing complexity of my being.

It was at the very last moment of the whole process that I finally regained the full capability of my brain and my soul. And armed with all the enhancing power my spirituality had over my senses… I saw the very thing that was the likely culprit behind this strange, mystical experience.

The sonic boom of the spiritual energy exploding was nothing more than—yet also nothing less than—a simple shockwave. A shockwave based on spiritual energy rather than physical factors, yet just strong enough to still have profound effects on the material reality around me.

And in this single instant of frozen time, I saw it.

The sonic boom that exploded out of my hand only to expand so fast that, by the time I realized what was going on, it was too far for me to notice.

But precisely in the moment when I regained the reins of my very own self… I saw it returning, bouncing back, imploding.

'It… snapped back?'

Like an outstretched string of rubber, the spirituality affected by the spark of my cultivation expanded well beyond its natural limits, only to reach a point where the natural forces of the universe reversed their vectors, pushing back against it rather than letting it spread freely. And as the wave of spiritual energy rushed at a nearly infinite speed right back toward my hand…

Its effect on the material world also started to reverse.

The grass in the outermost circle of destruction suddenly separated itself from the ground, rapidly regaining its vigor as it stood at attention in a manner that directly called for a perverted comparison to male organs.

A bit closer, within the inner circle around my feet, the grass suddenly manifested itself from what was supposed to be just open, empty space, all the while providing the ground with enough agitation to make it settle back into the very state it was in before the whole ordeal started.

The next thing I knew, I finally managed to take a breath and blink my eyes, all the while still staring directly at the palm of my hand where the founding spark of my cultivation had now settled down, brimming with the power I accidentally absorbed from the air.

There was nothing in the open palm of my hand other than the physical manifestation of the spark of my cultivation. And yet, as opposed to the very nature of nothingness, this sight became an inspiration that allowed me to grasp the one concept I had never actually bothered to think about much.

The idea of what the next, eighth stage of cultivation entailed. A reasonable outcome built from the foundation of all the earlier stages I had managed to conquer.

'So this is what it means for the spiritual energy to condense…'

If the sixth stage of cultivation was all about establishing my spiritual core within my flesh, then the seventh stage of cultivation, the very stage I was supposed to be at right now, was all about expanding it to fill every nook and cranny of my body.

A process designed to turn my cultivation from something I could draw out from the core into something that I could draw out directly from every part of my body as it was now, all in equal degree, a part of my core.

But right now?

Standing right on the edge between the mortal world prompted by technology and the cultivation world prompted by spiritualism, there was more free-floating spiritual energy around me than I could possibly absorb. It was far thinner than what I could make happen in the now-dismantled factory… but when taking the size that my spiritual reach stretched out to, the difference suddenly vanished… before reversing, to the point where the condensed energy I could create within the factory became but a fraction of all the power contained within the overwhelmingly huge area that my very self stretched out to.

And now that all of my spirituality imploded straight back into the area I had already come to regard as my own personal space…

Things simply made a whole new sense to me.

Not on a conscious level, sure, for my whole understanding of what happened was based on just a bunch of feelings and how I instinctively interpreted the weird event that had just happened…

But by now, I was far too deep into cultivation to discount those feelings in favor of attempting to understand how it happened physically, in favor of only accepting things as long as I could reason them out.

And as I looked down at the palm of my hand, at the lone spark of my cultivation…

I just couldn't help but see it differently now. Just like some sages could see a world in a droplet of water, I could now see the entirety of my cultivation within this single, seemingly insignificant fragment of it.

'Wait, fuck, who the fuck cares?!' Suddenly prompted awake, I discarded all those useless thoughts and looked around, fully expecting to see the scene of a bloody carnage that would mark the end of my happy days with Claire and would become the day of my biggest regret…

Only to see Claire, Chihiro, and the two guards all looking at me with perplexed expressions.

'What…'

"What the hell did you do?" Claire mouthed off, her eyes widening as she stared right into my eyes with hints of panic and terror flaring up on her face. "How, just how the hell did you…"

"Young man…" Cutting into Claire's words, Chihiro took a step closer while giving me the most serious look I'd ever seen him make. "Did you just… break into the eighth spiritual realm? Just by trying to display your cultivation?"

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