God Of Crafting

'What?'

There was no convenient world-narration to explain to me what just had happened. And as tiny as the cracks in the floor my unfinished strike left were, I would have to be blind not to notice them.

Pushed by the momentum, my fist came all the way down and conquered the last inch that separated my knuckles from the floor, only for the imprint to perfectly match what I would expect from the strike measured precisely by my fist.

'But…'

I gulped my saliva down, forgetting all about my anger, annoyance, and frustration in light of the new mystery that revealed itself to my eyes.

'But I didn't even use any of my spirituality, though?'

Sure, a cultivator would have the performance of their flesh and bones boosted by the mere fact of reaching certain levels of cultivation, but…

"Unless this difference comes from my recent breakthrough, there has to be something else at play here…"

As much as I wanted to jump out and clap my feet together in the air while stretching my hands up to the sky and shouting "eureka," I couldn't really be sure whether the walls of the training room were thick enough to stop the noise of doing so from reaching the others. And right now, the last thing I wanted was for someone to come check on me and, by doing so, possibly clue themselves in on what happened.

No.

This discovery was something that, at least for now, I had to leave to myself. Silence and solitude were the biggest friends for working out mysteries, after all!

First, I slowly raised my hand up and relaxed my fist, opening my hand as I brought it up to my eyes.

'There's no aura of any kind,' I took a mental note before straining my eyes a bit more, blinking a few times before I could switch over from the normal view to a spiritual one.

Yet, even as I inspected the energies in the air, there was nothing out of the ordinary around my hand that would indicate the possible reason behind what I did just a few moments ago.

"The question is…"

Rather than finishing my thought out loud, I took a deep breath and closed my hand back into a fist before standing in the one stance I knew better than anything else in my life, taking a moment to calm down…

And then struck out with my hand.

This time, I didn't even aim at the floor, the wall, or any of the many targets I could find all over this spacious training room.

No, back when I attacked the floor to vent my emotions, I clearly felt something. Yet, when I compressed my muscles and twisted my body, using the strength of my legs, hips, and the whole upper body to send my fist flying forth… this momentary feeling didn't return.

All I did was strike the air. No gust of wind formed at the culmination point of my strike where, back in my institution days, my knuckles would find the wooden, worn-down target. No ground shook, trembling in fear of my precise strike. No thunder streaked through the vast sky to announce the birth of the divine fist.

None of this happened, just like I couldn't feel that same, strangely familiar sensation as when I attempted to strike the floor, only to do it somewhat remotely and with strength greater than my body was actually capable of.

'This is starting to get annoying again,' I thought, gritting my teeth a bit as the familiar sensation started to well up at the bottom of my stomach.

I didn't come to this room to investigate something new. I came here to check how my breakthrough affected my cultivation, check my cultivation itself, and then try to use the knowledge gained from it to figure out a way to potentially help Claire mirror my achievement and match my cultivation level. And yet, here I was, stuck on yet another mystery, finding yet another avenue for anger to cloud my thinking and throw me down the vicious cycle of losing focus on the task at hand, only to grow more and more emotional about it, which, in turn, made regaining the focus all the harder.

This feeling, however, was just what I needed to connect the first few dots of the greater picture I had in my head. And once it happened, everything started to clarify itself in my head, like a massive knot that would fully unveil itself after tugging on just the right, extremely small part of it.

'Was it my anger that caused it?' I thought, stopping myself from throwing another punch as I, once again, brought my hand up to my eyes to inspect it.

To all that I knew about cultivation, this couldn't be the case. After all, the reason why I lagged behind the rest of the world so much was because I failed to achieve a meditative state!

Ever since the moment I finally managed to overcome this issue, cultivation always remained something that required a calm mind and great focus, something that with time I managed to do without paying it much attention, just by following my mental muscle memory of sorts.

But…

But what if that assumption, that cultivation required focus and a calm mind, was wrong to begin with? What if that requirement was something only applicable to the lower ranks of cultivation, to the time when my spirituality was still so simple and outright crude, this inner peace was like a necessary crutch for me to make it work?

'What if emotions…' I started to form a thought, only to bite down on my bottom lip and shake my head, disregarding the thought and reinforcing this decision with a physical act.

Rather than forming some sort of wild theory, I took a deep breath and forcibly removed all of my emotions, putting myself as close to the state of perfect focus as I could before finally, a lot later than I initially planned to, activating my spirituality as I drove my cultivation up.

Bit by bit, the spiritual energy filled my flesh, filling my veins with liquid fire of pure, unadulterated energy.

Normally, I would cease this sort of ignition as soon as my energy would start to flow in the way I wanted, as soon as my core would grow chaotic and reach the state of near-collapse.

Today, however, was different. And with all of my attention focused on nothing but pushing my cultivation to its limits, I continued to grit my teeth harder and harder as the burden of the unused energy brimming in my flesh continued to skyrocket well beyond any range I'd ever experienced before.

With each passing second—no, fraction of a second—the burden grew greater, making it infinitely harder to maintain this state of artificially perfect focus.

The second I felt I could hold no longer, I breathed out, buying myself just a fraction of a second more, before casting my glance down to my tightened fist…

Only to realize that this entire process, this tough exercise… failed to produce the results I expected.

The feeling from when I wirelessly struck the ground wasn't there. No aura coated my hand, ready to deliver a strike greater than it was supposed to be.

In other words, what I took for a random activation of my cultivation so swift I could hardly register it, simply wasn't it.

"Fuck!" All the anger, all the frustration, all the annoyance I pushed aside, has now all returned, doubling in force. And with my eyes already set on my hand, I would have to be blind to miss what happened next.

For the short moment between those emotions of mine growing in my soul like a rising tide and me realizing the truth of this small mystery, I not only felt but also saw the very thing I was looking for. A thin layer of condensed force forming all over not only my fist but my body as a whole!

A thin layer of energy that dissipated the very moment I forgot all about my anger, turning all the frustration into elation of a job well done.

'So it was all about emotions after all…' I thought, only for my face to instantly twist into an ugly grimace, something I could feel even without looking up to search for a mirror.

Because… how could a modern person like me accept emotions to be the trigger for something? How could something so imprecise and whimsical be the key factor of something as important as cultivation?

"I mean, it only makes sense, given how cultivation was always about using one's will to affect the spiritual energy, but…"

For the third time in a short while, I gritted my teeth as frustration took over, only to quickly give way to a sense of clarity.

'What if it's not emotions?' I asked myself, dropping down to the floor with my ass and crossing my legs before cupping my hands together and leaning forward, so focused on my own thoughts I could hardly even perceive the world around me anymore. 'What if emotions are just like meditation before—nothing more but a crutch for those whose cultivation is still too underdeveloped to figure out the proper way of manipulating it?'

I took in a deep breath, feeling as if every iota of fresh oxygen I supplied to my blood—and through it, to my brain—allowed me to open the eyes of my understanding wider and wider.

'And if that's the case, what if the expansion stage of cultivation… was never about expanding one's core through space or even one's perception of self beyond the limits of their body. What if this stage was always all about… expanding one's ability to cultivate from just the state of meditation, to all emotional states a human can find themselves in?'

I gulped my saliva down, perfectly aware just how big of a deal this theory would be if it not only proved true, but also foreign to the cultivators of this world.

"The better question is," I muttered to myself, breathing out as I leaned with my torso to the back, moving my hands to support myself on the floor behind, "how would that affect the performance of my cultivation?"