God Of Crafting

'It's going to get quite dangerous… No, lethal when it all comes crashing down, won't it?'

In my current state of mind, my thoughts were quite… paradoxical?

I could be thinking about thousands of things, calculating ten thousand things more, and yet feel as if I was just leisurely staring ahead with my head completely empty. Then, I could find myself in a moment of break, where all I had to do was just follow the already thought-off motions while thinking about random stuff, yet feel as if there were myriads of thoughts passing through my head at once.

It felt as if my thoughts simply no longer had any need to follow the usual patterns, with my innate ability somehow freeing them from the restraints of what should be normal… if not what should be possible, to begin with.

And so, while I kept constantly calculating every tiniest detail of my ever-accelerating operation of killing off this foreign intent in all the Qi I could reach, I could still somehow look at the bigger picture and make plans for it.

Right now, however, it was the very end of this whole operation that had me quite worried.

Destroying this deep intent was no longer something I felt concerned with in any way or form. At this point, extending slivers of my spirituality to other thickets of infected QI became pretty much an automatic process that accelerated on its own by using whatever Qi it cleansed for fuel.

And for as long as this process remained stable, for as long as there was still room for this process to grow faster and have its reach grow wider, I couldn't see any problems.

But what would happen once I've cleansed all of the QI in the area? What would happen once my slivers of spirituality would have to move so far away from me, that I could no longer control them properly?

Sadly, the answer was obvious.

All of the energy obtained in this process would suddenly find itself blocked from expanding any further. Normally, I could solve it by just letting go of the particular sliver of my Qi… but even in my current state, doing so for myriads of them all at once was something that went beyond the ability of my boosted brain.

In fact, just calculating whether or not I would be able to manage such an eventuality brought my brain to the limit of what it could process and calculate!

And so, the one danger, the one worry I faced was over what would happen once all of this foreign Qi was cleansed. Or rather, how was I supposed to deal with the onslaught of such a massive amount of energy that would suddenly find itself barred from expanding… and thus would likely rush the other way, pouring right back where it came from.

'I guess there's no other way about it,' I thought with a sense of acceptance so strong, that my body breathed out a long sigh. 'I will have to cultivate through it.'

As simple as this solution sounded… it only served to hide the true, overwhelming difficulty of actually performing this task. And so, I did the next best thing I could and decided to split this one, overwhelmingly massive task into a series of much smaller and thus manageable ones.

'Let's start with the weakest strand of my Qi,' I thought as I recalled the least successful sliver of my consciousness from advancing any further, directing it right back into my core.

It was nothing more but a matter of chance for this tendril of my spirituality to end up the weakest of them all. From the very moment, I programmed this spirituality of mine to just… gravitate towards the nearest thicket of the infected QI, I couldn't really keep direct control over any of them.

It was the drawback of opting to abuse my current mental state and producing more tendrils of spirituality I could actively manage and then burying my grave deeper and deeper as I kept solving minor obstacles on this path rather than finding a better, more efficient, and safer way right off the get-go.

And now, I was stuck in this process, with a constantly growing amount of total-sum of the spiritual energy involved in the task… A sum-total that kept growing with every thicket of infected Qi my spirituality dissolved and then absorbed to fuel its further expansion and multiplication.

'Here it comes,' I thought as I pulled back the tiniest and the least successful of my tendrils back.

Then, right as I took a deep breath to prepare, my core suddenly exploded with energy, nigh instantly reaching the limits of how agitated I'd ever seen it before.

Yet, despite how close it came to breaking past the limits of what energy the core could hold before collapsing in and on itself, the closer it came to it… the lesser the effect any further spiritual energy had on it.

'Just like the limits in math,' I thought, grinning at my own thought when, despite how painful it was, my theory proved to be right. гҽ#а&ժ-&мог%ƹ-+օ*и#-?

My core could forever get closer and closer to the state it could no longer hold any more of my spiritual energy… but it was a point I could never actually reach. Just like the time itself would slow down the closer one got to the speed of light, the weight of the spiritual energy would decrease as it grew heavier and heavier.

'Or maybe it's my core that's expanding to accommodate for more of this power?' I thought, only to quickly move over the topic as I didn't really have any tools or methods to properly measure and thus either confirm or deny this theory.

And so, with the initial success raising my morale a bit, I've recalled the second weakest tendril of my spirituality that just now has advanced to the absolutely lowest spot on the list. Then, I did it again. And again.

Whenever I would tug back on the strand of my Qi, I had to tense my body up and brace myself for the outburst of pain. A pain that made me feel as if every single cell that made up my flesh and bones alike was being torn apart and then remade anew.

I could handle it once. I could handle it ten times. I could handle it a hundred times…

But by now, the number of my tendrils easily grew beyond millions. And for how weak each of them were individually… I only ever had the proper control of the original tendril, rather than all the other ones it spawned from the excessive fuel and to accelerate the process. Yet, whenever I tugged on that original tendril… all of its spawns, clones, and extensions would follow through.

Meaning, that before I repeated the process a mere thousand times, the power of each of the spiritual tentacles I extended grew to be thousands upon thousands of times stronger than the very first one I re-entered into my system!

"Ugh…" A pained groan escaped from my lips when retracting yet another tendril of mana made my entire body and mind scream out in pain in response to my spiritual core reaching ever closer to what it could handle. At this point, the entirety of my body was so full of energy radiating from my core, that the very structure my cultivation was based on was starting to fail from within.

For now that my flesh was so full of energy, the anchor points that the energy from my unstable core would radiate out to… could no longer accept any more of it. And when the difference of potential between the anchors and the core itself practically vanished, the whole scheme, the whole idea of how my cultivation was supposed to work…

It all started to break apart at its core!

'I need to do something, otherwise, this entire thing will be the end of me!' I thought, desperately seeking any kind of idea that could salvage this disaster of a situation…

Only for my hand to nearly follow my instincts and rise up just to slap my own face.

"Who the hell said that the limits of my cultivation cannot be changed? If it's my cultivation that's the limiting factor, why not expand it to begin with?"

Whether I actually said that out loud or only imagined my lips doing so… I couldn't tell. And in all honesty, I couldn't care less either.

Now that I've got the idea, I could actually run a quick fact-check to confirm whether or not it was just a naive stupidity of mine or an actual, genius solution to the problem at hand.

'Yeah, it all seems valid,' I thought as I looked back to the events of the past hour or so and how I pretty much wielded the might of the sixth stage cultivation already, just with the help of my scythe as opposed to doing it with my cultivation alone.

And so, rather than enduring the pain of having my core reach dangerously close to actually breaking past its limits and collapsing, only to result in reducing the capacity of my cultivation which would only make the effects of what I was doing all the more damaging… no, disastrous…

I just did exactly what I did before. And rather than enduring the pain of pushing more and more energy into my flesh and core even though they were already nearing the limits of what they could handle, all I did… was exploit this excessive energy to create new anchors, new spots for my core to discharge into.

This time, however, I made those spots on the periphery of my body as opposed to doing so within my flesh. Yet, right as I started doing so, I met an unexpected wall.

A wall... that was surprisingly soft and, strangely enough, offered absolutely no resistance.

A find that shocked me to the point I actually opened up my eyes, only to see Claire's eyes turn dreamy as she leaned in, as in for a kiss, and with a moist breath, whispered right into my face,

"More..."