God Of Crafting

From the moment we decided on the course of the future back in the private garden of the cafe's owner, only about an hour passed before we all stood up in a circle around huge stacks of papers, all filled with data the sensors in the factory recorded as the disaster nearly played out.

"Are you ready?" Standing to my right, Claire asked with a worried look on her face. A look of reluctance, guilt, and unwillingness… A look that ended up overshadowed by determination.

A determination born out of the fact that we both shared the same belief that the issue with the factory was simply too big for us to ignore.

Whether it was a disaster in the making, a birth of a god, or merely a bunch of misconceptions that grew on us to the point where our view on the matter turned pretty fatalistic, we simply couldn't stand by and do nothing.

But, in a situation when doing anything to the factory while it operated on forces that weren't researched at all was akin to just probing the snake's nest in hopes no snake would come out…

In this kind of situation, preparing to the best of one's ability was a must. An obligatory step created by our desire to avoid another disaster or simply fueling the flames of the old one.

And we were going to prepare as best as we could, even if the act of preparation in itself was potentially dangerous.

"Yeah, let's get this over with already," I nodded my head before turning my face to the other side and giving Chihiro a look. "How about you?"

Standing with one leg on the anchor of one formation while pressing the other down at the magical center of another formation, Chihiro simply nodded his head.

The process of first coming up with and then drawing those two formations, each of which had the opposite effect of the other while also being constructed with the idea of keeping its center located all the way to its side, was what took pretty much twice as long as we needed to get back from the cafe and to one of Chihiro's estates.

With one formation serving to absorb Chihiro's own power, filter out his will from it, and then diffuse the spiritual energy into the air, he was now ready to support my mental adventure with his own energy.

As for the other leg, it served the exact opposite purpose, with its ability to rapidly drain all the spiritual energy from the air, creating a sort of vortex that allegedly was strong enough to even steal spiritual energy away from those that kept their cores less than properly guarded.

In other words, with nothing but Claire's and Chihiro's observational ability, they were to decide whether to help me out on my adventure by giving me more power… or by putting a stop to the process by removing all the spiritual energy I could use to maintain my inborn state.

"Let's do this, then," I cheerfully called out, as if to cheer myself up for the task, before closing my eyes… and pushing my spiritual energy in a move I'd already practiced quite a lot.

I closed my eyes right before I started the process, only to open them again as I felt all my worries, considerations, and troubles fade away, growing all the more meaningless the higher level my brain reached.

One could argue that closing my eyes wasn't even necessary when using this weird constitution of mine… But for me, it was an important ritual of separating the normal me from the me operating on spiritual energy.

This concern for what really constituted me and what was the influence of my innate ability… was just one of the things I now couldn't care less about, too drawn to the papers in front of me to pay it any mind.

'Let's see…'

Operating with just the sliver of my consciousness necessary to keep my unconscious actions in a process I could actively observe, I allowed my body to move on its own as it reached for the papers before quickly scanning the content of one report…

Only to raise it up and snap my fingers while still holding the paper between them.

Then…

The paper suddenly stood in flames…

No, the flame never appeared. The paper simply… disintegrated from between my fingers, as if scorched and then consumed by a flame not even my eyes could see.

With the sliver of my consciousness still awake, I could tell how this move caught both Claire and Chihiro off-guard… but by the time they could so much as twitch, my hands had already moved on to the next paper.

'No, it doesn't make any sense…' I thought as I looked down at the numbers and graphs describing the fluctuations of static power across the factory's main floor, a courtesy of the sensors that came pre-installed with the factory and that we simply opted not to remove.

'Maybe they were repairing electric appliances here or something?' I thought for a moment before burning the paper again and moving on to the next.

'Why am I burning them, though?' I thought, struggling to figure out every in and out of the process I was more of a witness to than an active participant in.

But then, mere three pages in… My hand suddenly swiped out, as if I wanted to manipulate some sort of massive hologram hanging in the air.

But there was no hologram, projection, or strange visual of any kind. And all that swiping my arm like that accomplished… was burning all of the papers that were before me, an act that couldn't be any more meaningless, given how they were merely printed copies of what Chihiro had safely stored in one of the server farms he was investing in.

"The guess is right," my lips and my throat moved on their own, causing me to produce words without even the hint of a will to do so. "There is a stink of divinity all over the formulas," my body stated as I raised my eyes to Chihiro, acting as if Claire wasn't even in the room.

'What the hell is this me doing?' I thought, suddenly enraged by its lack of courtesy toward mine… our fiancée, partner, lover, and serious marriage candidate.

"You just shut up and enjoy the ride."

My mouth moved again, this time sending both Chihiro and Claire into a small shock, given how there was absolutely no context for me to speak out like that.

Neither of them was speaking, after all!

'Yeah, so who else could I be speaking to but you?'

'Wait, what the fuck?!'

My body trembled as a foreign presence intruded upon my very thoughts.

Did it mean that by now, the integrity of even my mind was following in the footsteps of my flesh and faltering under the influence of my own spirituality?!

'And you, the scribe, don't you dare forget yourself! Do you know for how long…'

"KHHAAAAAA…!!!"

My body convulsed so hard I nearly bent in half as I squeezed out all the air from my lungs, as if trying to vomit it all.

The pain in my head exploded as I fell down first to my knees and then on all fours, struggling to maintain any form of coherent thought with this strange, existential pain rocking my mind to high hell.

And it was all because right at the very moment my spirituality faded and the connection to whatever it was that I connected broke… All the thoughts, calculations, ideas, and full analytical processes that I went through while abusing my constitution… All of it flashed straight through my mind in a single instant.

The way I connected those dots, how I noticed things that were too fine and seemingly natural for anyone else to pay any attention to, even the long and arduous process of slowly thinking everything through…

All of that, condensed into a single instant, was no different from an information bomb that went off in my head and threatened to wipe out all the parts of my brain that served to produce cognitive thought.

"I'm sorry! The flow of your spirituality suddenly grew so erratic, I didn't know what to do but…"

Claire was already down on her knees, awkwardly patting me on the back as if to help me spit out whatever it was I was choking on while trying to support my head from the side with her other hand.

In front of me, Chihiro now raised his foot from the amplification array, breaking its circuit while stepping hard onto the other one and even going as far as to graciously fuel it with loads of his Qi.

And there I was, stuck on all fours, too physically weak to properly form any sort of normal response.

But if there was anything that I learned from it all, it was just one thing.

"It really is a god, b-b-back at the factory…" I muttered, my tongue stumbling in its task to help me pronounce just the right words that would allow me to quickly pass this important message.

"And i-i-i-it's waiting."