God Of Crafting

'This feels really comfortable...' Chihiro thought as the constant gust of warm, mana-rich air continued to blow right into and past him, constantly providing him with much more spiritual energy than he could ever hope the artifacts back at his cultivation garden would produce.

Just by the amount of spiritual energy alone, the core of this factory—even though it was far from running at full power—was better than anything he had ever encountered, including the cultivation pods back in the spiritual realm.

But this place... it was much more than just rich with Qi. By every possible judgment criterion that Chihiro could come up with, his cultivation garden, which he had spent years building, decorating, purifying, and equipping, was... inferior.

Be it the amount of Qi he could absorb, the purity of said Qi, or the density of the spiritual energy that only made it easier to absorb swiftly as opposed to the trace amounts he could get back at his retreat...

'Heck, I have no idea how, but this place seems to be even quieter than my garden...' Chihiro thought, not exactly sure how he was supposed to feel about it all.

Whatever the correct feeling was for the moment, however, Chihiro couldn't care less. Or rather, to be more precise, he couldn't afford to distract himself thinking about it.

No.

'Don't let those thoughts distract you. Right now, if you want to honor all the effort the kids put into this place, you need to focus!'

This factory wasn't something that Chihiro had simply received. It was the result of long, combined efforts by his daughter, his son-in-law, and himself, along with a considerable financial investment to make it all happen.

It didn't matter who was the biggest contributor nor what the most important part was. All that mattered was for Chihiro to pull his weight and successfully advance, so that he could become a rock that would break the waves of trouble the world was bound to throw at his small clan now that it had taken its first step towards greatness.

Now that it had taken its first step… towards true, proper, and wholesome freedom.

A freedom that could only ever be obtained when one secured political, social, financial, physical, and mental independence from others. And while Chihiro did well enough already in terms of social, financial, physical, and mental departments…

For him to secure political freedom for his clan, for his daughter, son-in-law, and all the retainers that put their trust in him, he absolutely had to advance to the next stage; he had to break past the bottleneck he had already failed to shatter once.

'Calm down, focus, and…'

Chihiro took a deep breath.

'And just do it!'

Gathering all the spiritual energy he managed to amass thus far, Chihiro took another deep breath before pushing it all into the plane of his two-dimensional core.

From establishing his core throughout his body, he then expanded it into every part of himself, only to then condense it all the way back into a singularity, a single point at the center of his weight while forcing it to retain all the qualities it had developed in the earlier cultivation stages.

During his former breakthrough, he managed to then stretch the core from a single, surface-less point into a plane, an area that stretched from where his core used to be into every nook and cranny of his flesh, like a foil designed to mimic his build.

Now, however, it was time for the exponentially more difficult step. Now, it was time for Chihiro to stretch this plane… and once again, turn it from a two-dimensional cut of his body into a proper, three-dimensional figure of it.

'Let's go!'

Removing all doubt and hesitation from his mind, Chihiro gritted his teeth, using the slight pain caused by doing so as an anchor that rooted him in reality. Then, as if it were all part of just one fluid motion, he pushed all of the spiritual energy he could control into his core, bloating it way beyond its current, well-defined limits.

This process continued for quite some time, soon drying the last of Chihiro's personal reserves and forcing him to rely on nothing more than the spiritual energy provided by the factory.

Thankfully, as if sensing his slight distress, Tim—or whoever else was in control right now—amped up the output of the devices, soon flooding the center of the funnel where Chihiro sat with more than enough energy to compensate for what he could no longer provide with his strained cultivation.

'Now then…'

Feeling how his cultivation continued to swell, grow, and develop… Chihiro suddenly froze as the memory of his failure resurfaced in his thoughts, causing him to nearly lose his grip over his focus as doubt infested his otherwise calm mind.

This doubt quickly grew in strength, soon flooding the man's thoughts with endless questions that only someone born in a modern world could ask.

'What if it doesn't work?'

'How can you add a whole dimension to something that already exists within fewer dimensions than what you desire?'

'Shouldn't you just… start from scratch and do it all anew?'

One by one, Chihiro's doubts and lack of ability to reconcile his scientific view of the world with the spiritual nature of cultivation broke his confidence, leaving him unable to control the process that he formerly grasped merely by his instincts and something as crude as… the feel of it.

It was at this point, however, that the spiritual energy seemingly gained a consciousness of its own, flooding just the right points, just the right places within the man's cultivation to perfectly sustain his growth process, helping him weather through this attack of inner demons.

Bit by bit, Chihiro's core bloated, grew thicker, and almost more tangible…

Only for the man to suddenly realize that what was happening right now wasn't an attempted breakthrough at all.

That, he had done at some point in the past, failing to even take notice.

No.

Right now, what this strange guide of Qi that he had never encountered before was doing, was helping him reinforce his increased cultivation, feeding right into the parts of it that Chihiro, inevitably, had failed to cultivate as much as he had the others.

'What the…' Chihiro gulped his saliva down, fighting off his desire to just forget about everything and focus on this feeling of guidance, hoping to obtain greater enlightenment by studying it than he could ever achieve by just cultivating.

And just like that, as if the desire to do so were a key that unlocked doors Chihiro had never known existed, he suddenly found himself stranded in a sea of white.

'A subspace of sorts?' Chihiro thought, eager to learn from this weird, unexpected experience.

There was nothing but white. He stood in a sea of white, the sky was nothing but endless white, even the horizon itself was just more of the white.

It was all white… with the exception of a golden, vaguely humanoid figure standing just a bit ahead with its head angled slightly back… and with its missing face making it impossible to tell whether it was looking down and in Chihiro's direction, or up and away from him.

A figure that Chihiro could vaguely recall from the events that had transpired back before his attempt at the breakthrough, back when Tim tried to birth the divinity.

'Could it be…'

Chihiro gulped his saliva down, sensing a distant yet extremely oppressive aura from this golden, faceless being.

Thus, having no better idea of what he was supposed to do, Chihiro took a step forward, raised his chin, and asked.

"Are you the one who guided me?"