God Of Crafting

"Haaa… haaa… haaa…"

I found that breathing heavily was oddly efficient at helping me deal with the overwhelming pain.

It felt as if… the muscle of my brain had to regenerate, forcing me to suffer through the pain of the growth.

Just like a muscle pushed to its limits, my brain now needed time to recover from the damage caused by housing two different personalities.

The original me… and this strange, profound me that had just manifested in my head.

"Tim…!"

Claire's voice was strangely slowed down, stretched in a peculiar manner, as if putting a pause between her words… and her intentions.

'Oh shit…' The moment I focused on anything other than the pain, my vision started to spin, leading me to drop my head back down as I finally managed to vomit up everything in my stomach onto what used to be the pile of documents, which had now turned to mere ashes.

'Shit…'

Throwing up was natural for a human, merely the body's defense mechanism like any other.

But throwing up, and throwing up while my fiancée and her father watched me do it…

'Shit…'

Cursing for the third time, I nearly lost consciousness from the lack of air as the last of what I had eaten finally left my system, allowing me to take a breath.

This had to be the worst I'd ever felt in my entire life.

But we got our answers, even if they came at the price of creating a lot more—and far more important—questions in return.

'The scribe, huh?' I thought as I slowly started to get used to the overwhelming, numbing pain in my head. 'But what the hell is that even supposed to mean?'

It was bad enough to have one presence in my head that I didn't know the origin of. But now that strange presence was addressing… someone else?

And it was all happening within the confines of my head?

'Even this process of invoking this innate ability of mine… How come it was so much harder than before?'

More and more questions swarmed through my aching head, all screaming for attention and urgency.

But at the very least, I could quite easily find the answers to some of them.

'Isn't it because I've not only reached a higher level, but now properly settled into it?'

Breathing heavily over the pile of my own vomit, my mind raced as my head threatened to split in half from the pain.

'So, it's a kind of force that's resonating within my very cultivation core. And it fully permeates through my flesh…'

That would explain how infusing my brain with my spiritual energy led it to gain control over my entire body.

Contrary to how it was before my recent advancement, my cultivation core was now an integral part of every inch of my flesh. As such, while I clearly felt like directing my spiritual energy, due to the nature of my spirituality, the nature of my cultivation…

All of that energy ended up spreading equally through all of my anchor points, effectively connecting every part of my body with all the others.

Then again, that should've lessened the burden I experienced… only for it to grow beyond anything I had ever felt before.

"Haaa… haa… ha…" I continued to breathe heavily, doing my best to stay on the right side of things for as long as I could.

After throwing up right in front of Claire and Chihiro, planting my face into my own filth as my consciousness wavered was the last thing I wanted them to witness!

"Just keep breathing, we are here," Claire now switched to gently rubbing my back while trying to soothe my massive headache with her soft voice.

"I'm t-t-trying to…" I whispered, struggling to do something as simple and straightforward as uttering just a few words.

Bit by bit, with every passing second, however, the pain started to subside.

With the now undirected spiritual energy taking over my spiritual core, it rushed to reinforce all the parts of me that were damaged, including the tissues of my brain.

In a minute, I no longer suffered extreme nausea whenever I moved my head even the tiniest bit. Five minutes later, I could go as far as blinking my eyes. Roughly seven minutes later, I finally managed to lean back and sit down, only for Claire to instantly rush behind me, where she supported my weight while doing her best to make me comfortable.

With every step of recovery, though, it took more and more time for each to complete. And just like how I somehow endured the pain in about ten minutes, it took nearly a full hour before I regained enough of my motor functions to actually move my head and look around.

"It's waiting… we need to turn the factory back on again."

Even though I passed this message about an hour ago already, seeing how none of the three of us had moved from Chihiro's safe place, absolutely nothing had been done to that end.

"How do you know that? What's going on?"

Seeing that I was now in a state to have at least a light conversation, Chihiro hurried to get as much information out of me as he could.

"I just…" I hesitated for a second, gritting my teeth to deal with the pain that reignited the moment I tried to recall any of the details of what I saw and what my strange, other self thought.

"I just know it. Give me a week to heal and process all that I've seen, and I'll give you a proper answer. For now, though…" I shook my head, giving up on even attempting to dig into my memory. "You don't have that kind of time, do you?"

Chihiro squinted his eyes before heaving a deep sigh.

For some reason, it felt as if my words had an even greater impact on him than I believed they would make.

"I... No," he shook his head before putting on a small, thoughtful smile. "We don't have that kind of time indeed."