God Of Crafting

Sitting down on my ass on the cold floor of the garden's second level, I took a deep breath in.

Normally, this motion would allow me to inhale quite a bit of mana, reinforcing my body with energy provided with each breath.

In here, however, there wasn't a single iota of mana hanging out in the air and only waiting for me to consume it.

In theory, this should make cultivating impossible, as there was no fuel to fire the engines of my cultivation. Yet, pretty much as soon as I fell into the state of inner contemplation, the meditative state that I'd coveted so much in the past only to fail to attain it for years… As soon as I'd reached this stage, the world around me… changed.

'So this is how the world itself feels when the image isn't obstructed by all of the flows of the spirituality,' I thought, taking a look at the garden around me with nothing but my spiritual sense.

Yet, as much as I wanted to just sit and wonder over this garden or ponder over just how it was possible to make a place like this, I wasn't here to play around.

I was here to redo my entire cultivation. And now that I'd rid myself of all the spiritual energy I had just at my fingertips but a moment ago, it was finally time to start from scratch.

"Stage one, Qi gathering," I closed my eyes only to then start reciting the passages from the cultivation manual I could still remember.

"The first stage of cultivation is all about one's ability to gather the Qi," I quoted what I could remember, only to cut the passage in half before switching my tone a bit and pressing on, "but what exactly is this step, I wonder?"

To a degree, I allowed the feeling of teaching the material to take over the reins, letting my mind free-float in the ocean of my consciousness, analyzing the ins and outs of what I knew about the first step of cultivation.

"Normally, all we need to do to gather the spiritual Qi is to breathe it in. But is it really all there is to this process?"

I allowed my thoughts to linger in the air, in the form of sound, for a moment, only to then keep releasing whatever my mind would produce from the information I would feed it.

"Is the first stage of cultivation all about breathing the Qi in? Or maybe it's about sensing the flow of the spirituality in the air so that one can grow aware of the inner-makings of the process?"

At this point, I hardly kept track of what I was even saying, merely allowing my thoughts and reasoning to flow freely from my brain, through my throat, and then become the sounds that escaped out into the free world of the endless fields of air.

"If the first stage of cultivation, however, isn't all about breathing or even about sensing the flows of spirituality, what could it really be? What could it be to still work even when mistaken for the assumptions I just brought up? What has the quality of a breath, the profoundness of grasping at the sensation of the Qi… but is more than just those two or their sum?"

This was pretty much the standard way in which I approached the topic of cultivation when I did have some support in the form of prior knowledge about the current cultivation stage.

According to the common knowledge that anyone could find even in the cheapest, most common manuals, the first stage of cultivation was all about breathing.

My most recent thoughts about it, from when I was still trying to get into the meditative state, were all about sensing the spiritual Qi instead, as this exactly was the part of the process that I failed at, thus delaying my cultivation for five years straight.

But what could it be, that required one to absorb spiritual energy, sense its flow… and then some more?n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

"This is just a wild guess, an attempt to match the current issue to the pattern I've observed a lot in the past, but…" I gulped my saliva down. "What if all of cultivation is all about all sorts of creative ways of packing more spiritual energy than before, or expanding the limits of how much one could hold?"

Now that I said it, quite a lot of things started to make sense.

It was as if the world itself was bending to fit the pattern I'd somehow noticed, providing me with more and more reasons to think I actually struck gold the more I thought about the whole issue.

But, as interesting as it might be to find a common point that all the cultivation levels shared… Right now, I couldn't afford to think or talk about any of those higher levels. Right now, it was time for me to find a proper way to cultivate the first stage. To find the truth behind what that first stage was and then use that knowledge to snatch its power for myself.

"What if all of cultivation is all about getting more mana? And what would be the simplest, most straightforward way of doing that?" I continued to speak up as if I was some sort of teacher at a magic academy giving a lecture, rather than just a broke-ass cultivation failure who somehow got sponsored by a rich clan and ended up married into it by snatching the hand of the clan's jade beauty.

Still, the very moment this concept formed in my head as a result of all of those vocal deductions I did, the insides of the second level of Leila's daughter… changed a bit.

It was a minuscule change that would easily escape my attention if I wasn't focusing myself all on the topic of mana.

As weird and fleeting as it felt…

This second-level garden changed. But while I couldn't quite point out the exact way it did or the reason why it happened, I could tell there was now more to its emptiness than what I felt through my mortal senses. As if… lingering remnants of some sort of presence that was way too thin for a cultivator to perceive.

But now that I'd formed a theorem in my head, my habits kicked in and tried to, just like I'd done many times before, draw in the energy from the air to fill my soul with it and then build up some practice over the theoretical foundation I'd just come up with.

'If cultivation is all about harnessing spirituality and doing it better, faster, and more precisely than one would do it in the former stage, then it all starts with something as simple as…'

I squinted my eyes… only for my face to freeze as I finally connected the answer to the question I'd just posed in my mind to another question, one that had plagued my mind for quite a little longer.

To be specific, a question that I'd had in my mind ever since we left the staircase and stepped into the second floor of Leila's garden.

"That might be the reason why this room is so devoid of any spirituality," I said, only to then recall that now, with my link with Claire broken, the chances of her just catching my idea from the few disjointed words I said were a lot less than they would have been in the past. And just to be courteous and not let her be plagued with questions over how I'd arrived at such a conclusion…

"If the first stage is all about gathering the energy and then condensing it inside oneself to make it something else, then isn't this place just the perfect training stage?" I suggested out loud, right as I straightened my back and fixed every tiniest flaw in my position, knowing full well the burden of what I was embarking upon. "In here, with no energy to actually respond to our call, we are in the perfect position to investigate how the process of absorbing the spirituality into ourselves really works!"

This sentence, as short as it could be, couldn't bear more weight. Because just like in swordsmanship, one's footwork was pretty much the basis for all of the combat styles that came in later, in cultivation, laying down a solid foundation for one's strength to grow from was just as important.

And just like I pointed out, with no spiritual energy to obscure our views, we could easily pinpoint everything our body went through in an attempt to absorb the spiritual energy from the air, even though there was nothing for it to absorb. Just like scientists would observe how the severed arm of an animal would react to stimulating various nerve endings with electricity, just like one could feel how their muscles moved underneath their skin as they attempted to lift something… We could now observe how our bodies performed the very act of absorbing the spiritual energy simply because there was no actual flow of spirituality to obscure our view!

'I see…' I thought, after calming all of my thoughts and putting them all aside as I grew silent and still in my perfect position, doing nothing but just inspecting my inner state as I continued to try to consciously do something I'd long since learned to do without thinking.

And there it was. A process I had absolutely no clue about in the past, currently working in overdrive in its desperate attempts to do something that was so easy before, only to prove nigh impossible right now.

It was a small, minuscule amount of what felt like a hint of spirituality, stuck deep at the bottom of nothing else but my heart, stirring up whenever I would take a breath and tense up, attempting to use the air to reinforce my insides with it.

'Is it its movements that attract spiritual energy into our flesh? Or maybe it's all about spiritual energy vibrating that lets it etch itself into one's physicality?'

Seeing the likely cause behind the secrets of the first stage of cultivation was one thing; understanding what and how it did things, however, was an entirely different field of expertise. An entirely different question I had no answers for yet.

But having no answers didn't mean having no means to test the few guesses I came up with pretty much on the spot, once again, by simply throwing the laws of physics that I knew at this phenomenon and seeing what stuck, seeing what part of the pattern appeared to apply.

Yet, the very moment I attempted to push this minuscule amount of spirituality—something I commanded at will with close to no effort on my end—right now, it proved to be weirdly resistant to my calls.

Was it refusing to obey my will? Or maybe it was never intended to do so? Or maybe…

'Or maybe, it's not about stirring or accelerating it,' I thought, taking another deep breath as I prepared my focus for the second attempt.

'Back at the very bottom of things, everything in physics is about movement. Temperature is the movement of particles making up the thing in question. Speed is all about movement by its very definition. And as far as I remember, even qualities like size, force of the atomic bindings, or even all the laws of the universe…'

I gulped my saliva down, sensing as if I suddenly found myself on the precipice of an enormous cliff, with wondrous sights for all to see… But only if they were brave enough to take a step and look over its edge and into the abyss.

'Even all the quantum laws and qualities are all about movement, given how everything can be ultimately displayed as but the vibrations of the fabric of the space itself.'

I gulped my saliva down again, this time as I finally gathered the courage and approached the edge of that mind-cliff with my thoughts.

'Then, what if I tried to make this minuscule amount of spiritual energy… vibrate just a little bit harder?'