God Of Crafting

When cultivating in the one true and tested way, a cultivator would try to advance as soon as they were certain they'd maxed out their current limits. In this way, there would be no time wasted, spent away on dawdling rather than advancing.

Yet, when it came to our quite particular case, we'd already lingered on the fourth stage of flesh-qi balance for quite a while longer than we were originally planning to.

That's why, when we decided to give up on our attempts to refine our bodies even further and just go with the flow, advancing, the step that would usually be the greatest hardship of each rank…

For us, it felt like letting out the fart that we'd held during a several-hours-long visit to an important place. Rather than straining ourselves to do, we acted like a veteran with a missing limb who, by the use of phantom imagining of a fake limb like in a certain, extremely popular medical show on TV, finally managed to mentally relax the hand he'd lost while keeping it tightened.

All in all, rather than a hardship, it was a simple sense of relief when we finally relaxed our guards and allowed nature to take its course, as our spiritual energy swirled up inside our bodies and then collapsed down on itself.

This process was pretty much the very first cultivation event that I could remember, given how now we'd reached the fifth rank—the very same rank I obtained back when boosting my status by accidentally dual-cultivating with Claire.

That's why, rather than resisting this collapse, I simply allowed it to happen.

With no more room in my body to store the power of the spiritual law, it followed pretty much the same phenomenon as what gravity would do to stars when, at a certain part of their life cycle, the outward energy from the fusion reaction within their core would lose the tug-of-war with the gravity of all the mass it was made with.

And just like that, our spiritual energy collapsed in on itself, creating a spot of infinitely more dense energy than what we were dealing with before. A spot with energy so dense, it pretty much made it impossible for either of us to use it directly… while opening up a path for us to make great use of it through indirect means.

"Remember, just like we did it in the past," I called out as all of the energy contained within my flesh now surged to the freshly forming core, an entity that replaced this twirling, minuscule amount of spiritual energy that was at the foundation of my whole cultivation before.

'This feels… quite strange…' I thought, gritting my teeth as I forcibly relaxed myself, lowering my guard against my instincts and allowing all of my energy to flow out from my flesh and into my core.

Normally, once this process would come to an end and my body would end up pretty much mana-free—save for the cultivation core, that is—I would start to work on activating the core—or, as sticklers to the true names would say, I would start working on establishing my core.

Then again, there was absolutely nothing normal about my… No, about our situation. And when it came to establishing our core, we both already knew exactly what to do. Coupling that with just how much more spiritual law energy we'd gathered during the process of repeatedly reinforcing our flesh, rather than stopping at the fifth stage so that we could gather more energy and treat our growth gradually…

Rather than stopping at the fifth cultivation stage, just by the benefit of the insane amount of energy we'd gathered in ourselves, we ignored the pit stop at the fifth stage and shot right for the sixth stage, still pouring more and more of the spiritual law energy into our very core, long past the point where it actually formed.

"Just before we go for the next step…" I suddenly raised my hand before bringing it down on Claire's shoulder and giving her a slight shake, "don't you think we could also improve on the chaotic reaction within our cores?"

We already had the path that we'd tried and tested. The path of creating discharge anchors while allowing our core to reach the level of criticality, basing all of our future cultivation not on the power of the core itself—as all sorts of treatises stipulated one should do—but basing it on this constant flow of energy between the core and the anchors.

But now that we'd both got a closer look at what the original seed of our cultivation looked like, there was still one more thing we could do to ramp our growth even higher.

"You want to introduce the vibration to the core as it goes critical?" Claire asked, as if reading my thoughts.

"Well…" I averted my eyes, struggling to keep a blush off my cheeks with nothing but my sheer willpower. "I originally planned to do it right away, but…" I hesitated one more time before turning my head back only to lean it forward a bit as I rested my forehead against Claire's and closed my eyes. "But your idea certainly seems more reasonable."

I didn't even need to open my eyes to feel the smugness of Claire's smile that blossomed on her lips after I spoke out.

Then again, feeling her smile so proudly wasn't all that bad in its own right.

"That would be too risky," perfectly happy to accept my praise, Claire hurried to elaborate on her train of thought. "If we do it right away, we would only destabilize our core. And while sure, it would make it easier to make it critical, if we do it at the end of the process instead…"

Claire put a pause in her words, while our link provided me with all the clues on what she wanted me to do next.

And her desire wasn't for me to just sit and wait for her to explain her thoughts in full but for me to actively take part in figuring the mystery of the cultivation out with her instead.

"If we do it at the end, right before our core reaches criticality…" I muttered, just to give myself some time to think things through.

My eyes then twitched when I connected the dots.

"Then, rather than keeping our cores at the edge between stable operation and criticality, we would permanently force it into an overcritical state, wouldn't we?"

That certainly did sound promising. And with a proper, robust, and logical network of discharge anchors set out throughout our flesh, it was certainly something we could easily deal with…

"But aren't you worried about the strain we would have to endure until the end of our days? I mean, with our cores constantly in a supercritical state…"

"It will only be a problem while we remain at the sixth stage," Claire shrugged her shoulders only to then shift her head off to the side a bit before falling deep into my arms as she wrapped her hands behind my back and hugged me closely. "Once we reach the seventh stage, which seems like something we can do with an outright unfair ease, this kind of strain should be nothing to us."

Hearing this, I couldn't help but stare off into the distance, ignoring the fact that the meandering ways of the garden's labyrinth pretty much limited my view to just a few steps back the way we came from.
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"Don't you feel quite weird saying something like this?" I asked, genuinely curious.

For me, jumping through the cultivation ranks became pretty much a norm, something I pretty much expected from life rather than treating as an odd, uncommon case.

Claire, on the other hand, was born and brought up with the proper common sense according to which, moving up by just a single rank over a year of concentrated effort was an actual, pride-worthy achievement! And yet, here she was now, talking about jumping literally from the bottom to the seventh rank in what could only be called in one go as if it were the most natural thing in the world!

'That pretty much proves just how little all those high and mighty cultivators know about their craft,' I thought, shaking my head before taking in a deep breath… And putting my focus right back to the cultivation.

From there on, things progressed quite smoothly.

Founding our core was something I hardly even noticed. Filling it up to the brim with the power of the spiritual law was just as easy, making me question whether or not we were missing some sort of a crucial element.

Yet, with how smoothly everything went, this clearly wasn't the case!

And so, without a single obstruction to slow our growth, we compressed more and more of the spiritual law energy into our cores, bringing them all the way to the limit of what they could endure. Then, however, rather than just keeping up with the process to make it go critical, we rounded up all the energy that we had left…

Before agitating our very cores, aiming to make them just… vibrate.

'It's… working…?' I thought as I felt the birth of several anchor points from where my core first discharged, creating paths of least resistance ending at where I then infused some of my spiritual energy to root the new anchors in.

This process, however, continued to speed up as more and more of the spiritual law energy leaked out from my supercritical core, forcing me to speed up my attempts at founding more and more of the anchors.

Soon, every limb of mine, my whole torso, even Claire herself ended up covered in those, all the while I had to bear the burden of a multitude of Claire's own anchors, binding the two of us even stronger.

"Haaa…." Claire breathed out a long sigh, her body relaxing as the wild energies of our cores finally started to stabilize, indicating that we'd finally reached the point where the whole, ongoing process became stable.

Claire then moved her hands to the back of my neck only to lean back and give me an adorable, albeit exhausted smile.

"To think we would be back to the earliest part of the core expansion stage…" she muttered while shaking her head with disbelief.

"Do you want us to go even further?" I asked, glancing up the garden's path, quite curious whether or not we could actually reach that third floor Claire's mom talked about.

"Actually, no," Claire shook her head. "I think we should head back for now. Because as fun as it would be to match Dad's level before leaving," Claire's smile faded slightly, mixing in with a troubled expression in her eyes. "I don't think either of us would want the bother of dealing with the fallout of that."