God Of Crafting

Chapter 9: Too good for my own good?

"Huh?"

This was the first thought that appeared in my head after only heavens know how long.

I blinked my eyes a few times, trying to remove the film of something sticky that seemed to cover my eyeballs, just like it would after waking up from a night of well-deserved and desired sleep.

'Wait, did I...'

This wasn't my first time, so I didn't need as much time self-reflecting to realize what happened.

And I didn't even need to look down, at what lay right by my hands, to realize the obvious!

I meditated!

I had no idea when I started and could hardly recall anything that happened to me prior... But this fact was undeniable! Not when the air was all the harder for me to move my limbs through!

"Wait, is this how it's supposed to be?" I muttered as I actually had to put quite a lot of strength into my body to move it.

It no longer felt as if I was moving through strangely thick air. Now, the process of moving was as laborious as would be moving through water... without the added benefit of buoyancy!

'Wait, isn't it just like when I stepped into the cultivators' district?' I thought when this worrying level of resistance started to fade... But never to reach the level of air thickness that I was used to.

"Isn't the air here denser... Far denser than it was at the institution?"

As soon as those words left my mouth, I realized the implication behind them... Or rather, a series of implications, one growing from another.

If the air was giving me such a hard time to move through, then it likely wasn't the air's fault... but the fault of just how dense the spiritual energy within my apartment became!

Taking this for a fact as it was the only thing that I could somewhat reliably verify with just how it affected my body, I dived deeper into this line of logic.

As much as I would love it to be the case, this result simply couldn't come from the device I constructed before falling into the meditative state. I was humble... No, self-aware enough to be sure of that. Not to mention, I've already verified the extent of that circuit's potential!

And so, deprived of any further clues, I looked down, at the device resting right between my two, weirdly relaxed hands.

"Oh boy..." I could only release a short sigh. "I did it again, didn't I?"

With the formation plate and the spiracular stone now creating a new, singular entity, the question of connecting it to the electrical circuit remained. And once again, the way I did it with my conscious mind couldn't be any different than the way I did it while meditating.

When attempting it myself... I just attached a single wire to the crystal before smoldering its other end into the board.

But from just a quick look, I could tell that the changes in my second creation were not only qualitative... but also quantitative.

"I used to tape the wire into the stone earlier, but this..." I looked as closely as I could... But I just couldn't figure out what sort of magic I somehow used to attach the wires to the crystal.

Was it glue? Was it heated spiritual powder?

Looking as closely as I could, I noticed another difference.

While, when working on my own, I simply pressed the write against the stone. But in the creation of my Qi-guided craftsmanship, I somehow ended up drilling microscopic holes in it, just big enough for me to force just the tip of the wire in.

How did the wire stick to these less-than-a-millimeter-deep holes, I couldn't tell.

But once again, just like after my first meditation, I just opted to leave this issue aside for later and focus on what I could actually figure out.

Quite honestly, save for whatever miracles there were to discover on the insides of the circuit box, the last difference was how it wasn't just one wire that connected to the circuit... But a bunch of them were so numerous and thick, I couldn't realistically count them without breaking the entire thing apart!

"Now then..." I bit down on my lip as I carefully pieced the thing together again before, just as carefully as I picked it up, and placed it down.

Then, after facing the struggle of freeing my hands from the device given how thick the air around it was...

I've realized the truth that I would have to be either extremely naive or even worse, outright mentally challenged to ignore.

The device that I've crafted while in the state of meditation... Wasn't it a bit too powerful? Wasn't it too good... for my own good?

Burdened by this thought, I took a deep breath and looked down...

Only to realize that I've missed just one more thing. Just one more, tiny detail.

I've missed the fact that save for the elegant, completed device right on the table, there was another one, much more crude-looking, resting right by the only free power socket I had left in my apartment!

A device that looked just like the first one I'd made... with the one difference of replacing the Qi-gathering array and the first Spricur crystal with a set of thick cords, several parts I couldn't readily recognize and then pretty much a copy of what I did in my first proper project.

What was worrying, though, was how this design, although crude... Took the very idea that I thought about so much just moments before falling into the meditative state... to a whole new level!