God Of Crafting

Chapter 213: To see a world in a drop of water

BOOM!

There was no explosion. No fires erupted, nor did the whole area around me turn into a burned-out circle.

No rapid and violent chemical reaction took place, nor was there any direct transfer of massive kinetic energy into the static matter.

To put it simply, nothing exploded, nor did anything crash into where I stood. And yet...

The very moment the spark of my cultivation ignited all the leftover mana in the air, a powerful sonic shockwave erupted from my hand, gently washing over my body only to explode outwards.

'Wha...'

Before I could even utter half of a thought in my mind, everything was already over. And the only way to prove that anything had happened at all... was to just take a look around.

The ground directly beneath me was lucky enough to be spared, with the explosion of the suddenly activated spiritual energy somehow opting to omit the areas so close to me—the origin of the spark that ignited it to begin with. But just a single inch away from my feet, the grass was gone, simply removed from existence by the force of the impact, while the soil was tilled as if some farmer had prepared it for sowing.

Roughly a meter away from my feet, there was another circle drawn from an imaginary point right between my legs and marking the distance at which, rather than just removing the grass from existence, the energy of my spiritual release switched over to pressing the grass tightly into the ground, turning it from the world's texture into nothing more than a semblance of what a giant's brushstroke would leave on a world-sized canvas.

The grass was still there... just that, rather than proudly standing in its attempt to reach for the sun and grow higher than all the competing blades of grass around it, it was now nothing more than a shadow of its former self, a green imprint upon the otherwise brownish color of the ground itself.

When it came to the things that were any further away... I couldn't really tell what had happened. And it was only when I actually attempted to look up that I realized my body was now frozen in a strange state of paralysis.

'No, that's not it,' I gulped my saliva down as the reality dawned upon me. 'It's not me that froze,' I thought, only to then gulp my saliva down...

Or, at the very least, attempt to do so, only to find out it was yet another activity I was currently barred from performing.

'It's the time, or, at the very least...'

I attempted to swallow again, only for the results to remain as unsatisfactory as before.

Then, the reality around me started to warp, its very geometry shifting as if some higher being had started to fold the fabric the universe was built upon.

'No...' I thought as I attempted to grit my teeth, to the same effect as my attempts at swallowing my saliva before. 'It's not folding... iittss ssttrrreeecccchhhh.....'

For a moment, I blacked out.

There was nothing in the open palm of my hand other than the physical manifestation of the spark of my cultivation. And yet, as opposed to the very nature of nothingness, this sight became an inspiration that allowed me to grasp the one concept I had never actually bothered to think about much.

The idea of what the next, eighth stage of cultivation entailed. A reasonable outcome built from the foundation of all the earlier stages I had managed to conquer.

'So this is what it means for the spiritual energy to condense...'

If the sixth stage of cultivation was all about establishing my spiritual core within my flesh, then the seventh stage of cultivation, the very stage I was supposed to be at right now, was all about expanding it to fill every nook and cranny of my body.

A process designed to turn my cultivation from something I could draw out from the core into something that I could draw out directly from every part of my body as it was now, all in equal degree, a part of my core.

But right now?

Standing right on the edge between the mortal world prompted by technology and the cultivation world prompted by spiritualism, there was more free-floating spiritual energy around me than I could possibly absorb. It was far thinner than what I could make happen in the now-dismantled factory... but when taking the size that my spiritual reach stretched out to, the difference suddenly vanished... before reversing, to the point where the condensed energy I could create within the factory became but a fraction of all the power contained within the overwhelmingly huge area that my very self stretched out to.

And now that all of my spirituality imploded straight back into the area I had already come to regard as my own personal space...

Things simply made a whole new sense to me.

Not on a conscious level, sure, for my whole understanding of what happened was based on just a bunch of feelings and how I instinctively interpreted the weird event that had just happened...

But by now, I was far too deep into cultivation to discount those feelings in favor of attempting to understand how it happened physically, in favor of only accepting things as long as I could reason them out.

And as I looked down at the palm of my hand, at the lone spark of my cultivation...

I just couldn't help but see it differently now. Just like some sages could see a world in a droplet of water, I could now see the entirety of my cultivation within this single, seemingly insignificant fragment of it.

'Wait, fuck, who the fuck cares?!' Suddenly prompted awake, I discarded all those useless thoughts and looked around, fully expecting to see the scene of a bloody carnage that would mark the end of my happy days with Claire and would become the day of my biggest regret...

Only to see Claire, Chihiro, and the two guards all looking at me with perplexed expressions.

'What...'

"What the hell did you do?" Claire mouthed off, her eyes widening as she stared right into my eyes with hints of panic and terror flaring up on her face. "How, just how the hell did you..."

"Young man..." Cutting into Claire's words, Chihiro took a step closer while giving me the most serious look I'd ever seen him make. "Did you just... break into the eighth spiritual realm? Just by trying to display your cultivation?"