God Of Crafting

This wall… wasn't a wall per se.

In my attempt to spread the range of my anchors outside of my flesh, I unknowingly attempted to infuse Claire with them instead! And while sure, when it came to the area around the two of us, I managed to achieve exactly what I wanted with even less effort than I both expected and calculated for it to take, when it came to the space in front of me…

'Shit…'

Scared shitless of messing with Claire's cultivation by a total accident, I nigh instantly pulled out…

Only for the sense of dread and torture unlike any other to take over my mind in a storm.

'IT BURNS!'

I wished to scream out. I wished to cry out!

But now that I dissolved even a few of the newly made anchors, the burden they were meant to share came crashing down back on my core, only further enhancing the strain I was already feeling from pulling back my strands.

'And it's still merely the beginning stage!'

Gritting my teeth, I internalized my pain, lived through it, and then… simply accepted it as just another venue of my life, just another aspect of what it felt like to be a cultivator… No, to be a human.

This effort opened but the smallest window of opportunity; an opportunity I wasn't willing to let go to waste.

"Run…" I squeezed through my teeth, finding my very own flesh to be strangely unwieldy, as if the current state of enhanced brain operations came at the cost of losing my right to use my body as I wished.

With my eyes still slightly open, I still could get a single, short look ahead.

But, rather than seeing Claire follow my warning and get away before I could hurt her, she, for some reason, decided to go against my desperate wish.

No. Going against is not the right way to put it.

Instead of ignoring my wish and staying as she was, she opted to… close in on me instead!

-chapter

'Shit, this girl…'

Even though I couldn't really control my flesh, I could still perfectly feel everything about it. Heck, I was now even more sensitive to all the changes than before, given just how vivid my torture of the spiritual energy burning my flesh inside and out felt.

That's why, when Claire moved forth and took over her preferred spot right atop my lap, now using both her hands and her hands to hold me tightly as if refusing to let me go and run herself…

Sure, there was an element of pleasure in having her soft body squeeze against my skin as she bore down on me. Sure, there was even an element of excitement born from how her mounting me like that usually ended up with the two of us losing some clothes in favor of gaining a lot of sweat and feverish looks on our faces.

But this time, it wasn't those two things that my weary mind focused on.

This time, it was the sense of endless relaxation, comfort, and support that Claire's closeness offered that my mind latched on, nearly missing how her closeness somehow…

How her closeness somehow lifted just a sliver of my burden off my core!

'What the hell is going on?!'

Even in my enlightened state, I couldn't peer through the inner workings responsible for this effect. It was as much of a wonder as it was a miracle. Yet, what this enhanced brainpower stopped me from accepting, was the kind of explanation that equaled to the power of friendship in children's stories or the outright plotarmor of young adult fiction.

Yet, when offered such relief, as marginal as it was, my devastated brain could do nothing but latch onto the opportunity in a bid to make the most out of it!

*****

"Haaaaah!"

Claire released a long cry? Shout? Moan?

Looking down on his daughter from just a few steps away, Chihiro couldn't really tell.

'She looks just like her mom,' he thought, the look of distress and worry on his daughter's face making the man lower his guard, even if for the tiniest of bits.

In theory, this was an opening that Javier could use, given how even beyond the death of his flesh, his spirituality proved strong enough to linger in the area, as if just waiting for the opportunity to rush back to his corpse and heal whatever the damage Chihiro did, allowing the man to return to the ranks of living, even if at the cost of the greater part of his cultivation.

In reality, however, the opening Chihiro showed was something only his equal… No, only those even stronger than him could both notice and exploit. It was a feat simply unachievable by a peak seventh-stage cultivator who has yet to start condensing his core.

Right now, however, Chihiro was as far from caring about the desperate attempts of Javier's soul to return to its body. And how could he, given the dire straits not only his very own daughter, but her extremely promising partner were in?

"Run…" Tim, with the same, absent look on his face, somehow managed to squeeze from between his still lips. Yet, while it was already a point of wonder just how he managed to pronounce this single word while failing to articulate it through his lips, just like Javier's attempts at survival, it wasn't something Chihiro had any spare room in his mind to care for.

What he did care for, instead, was how upon hearing Tim's desperate warning, Claire, rather than doing the smart thing and giving him the room to do whatever he was doing to cope with the overwhelmingly massive amount of spiritual energy that kept rushing straight at him…

She opted to sneak out from underneath him… only to then quickly climb up on his thighs and straddle him down like an oversized plushie, a comparison she quickly moved to make even more real when she wrapped both her arms and her legs around him.

'She isn't going to let him go, huh?' Chihiro thought, calmly observing how the situation progressed.

He went through enough dangers, enough close-calls, and enough battles to know the importance of keeping his mind calm and heart beating steady… even if not especially when it involved people he cared about.

While he still didn't like that kid enough to actually grieve his death, just the thought of how Claire would turn if that kid were to die on her was enough to nearly shatter the inner peace Chihiro managed to cultivate.

And so, despite all the power that was at his fingertips, Chihiro could do nothing but watch how more and more of Qi rushed from all over the place and sank into Tim's flesh, only for him to somehow distribute it not only all over his own body… but do so all over the area around him, Claire's very own flesh included.

Normally, this wouldn't be any different from a spiritual attack in its rawest form of a cultivator using its spiritual energy itself to exert pressure or outright wound the other. In a sense, it encroached on the level of the forbidden techniques of infusing one's own Qi into another being's body in a bid to gain control over its cultivation and, by extension, the entirety of its being.

But as Claire's cheeks grew redder, as her breathing grew more haggard, and laboured, Chichiro couldn't help but grimace as he realized just one more situation in which this kind of spiritual energy infusion would take place.

'Are they trying to dual cultivate without having sex or something?'