BXBX NOVEL Chapter 87: Spiritually-boosted crafting
And so, rather than entering a meditative state with just a single thought, I had to actually calm myself down first, then steady my breathing, cease all the unnecessary thoughts…
And then, by the end of it, still hope for the best, given how I've only ever entered the meditative state… without really knowing how it happened.
Thankfully, the thing that my former masters at the institute deemed impossible for me turned out not to be all that hard when I actually put my mind to it. And in all honesty, nearly as soon as I focused on the task, I could once again feel the flow of spiritual energy both inside of my body and in the air around me.
'Why is it so thin?' I thought, surprised when I realized just how diluted the Qi in the air was, making it hard to even imagine using it to grow the power within me.
Then again, right now it wasn't my goal to grow stronger, but to get my spiritual energy moving instead.
And pretty much as soon as I focused and noticed it again, the whole process that I induced in Claire grew more and more apparent as if even this thin amount of QI in the air was enough to raise the instability of my core and thus fire up the process of the spiritual energy radiating out of it only to then snap-discharge to pretty much every single part of my body.
'Wait, how do I limit it to just…'
The thing that I somehow managed to do before with just my will, now I've realized to be impossible.
Before suddenly breaking through all the way to the fifth stage, it wasn't even all that hard for me to limit my spiritual energy just to certain parts of my body, but now?
With my spiritual core on the brink of collapse and constantly oozing spiritual energy only for it to trickle right back down into the core, I could only invoke my power all at once throughout my entire body, rather than precisely controlling where it would manifest.
Then again, given the task at hand, I couldn't really imagine it being that much of a problem at all.
As my awareness of the process grew, the exhaustion in my hands slowly started to vanish, only to soon be but a fleeting memory so distant, that I struggled to believe it was real in the first place.
But it wasn't just my hands, they were simply the first place where I noticed the effects of my Qi activating given just how tired they were after moving around all those boxes full of often heavy ingredients.
Soon, however, the influence of the spiritual energy filled my brain, my legs, and even my eyes and ears, putting me in this weird state of enhanced awareness and readiness.
A state I didn't hesitate to put to use as I picked up the next pair of wooden blocks before putting them down on the table and pressing my chiseling knife right in between the two lines I drew on its surface.
As this wasn't going to be just the base of the handle, the channel that only swirled a bit before, now actually curved in on itself, forcing me to carve some parts of the wood deeper to prepare it for where the channel for the spiritual energy to pass would occupy all three dimensions instead of operating just on the flat plane.
This process, without the spiritual energy in play, would take me half an hour at the very least.
But now that I happily employed this unearned power of mine, with my body seemingly immune to exhaustion and my mind resisting even the tiniest signs of distraction, I've finished the second pair of the wooden blocks in just over five minutes, regardless of just how much more complicated it was than the base one.
From then on, the things moved at an ever-increasing pace, as I placed pair after pair of the blocks aside while always making sure to smear their chiseled-out insides with the isolating agent.
'Given the conductive nature of this wood that I'm using to mask the actual properties of the handle, it would do me no good if the spiritual energy could escape from the channel and infuse itself directly into the handle…' I thought as I paid additional care to this last and seemingly least important step.
In the end, roughly an hour and a half after I've started, I've finally finished chiseling the insides of the last pair of the wooden cubes, only to bind them together with a simple string and put them aside.
Yet, after nearly half a day of tirelessly working, all that I had to show for it was just fifteen pairs of slightly altered wooden blocks…
"No one ever said that crafting is easy," I muttered to myself, trying to put all the lazy and potentially distracting thoughts aside as I grabbed all the prepped wood and moved it over to the table-sized band saw.
'This one I've never used before,' I thought as I started the device with a press of a button only for my eyes to lock on the thin strip of the blade moving at a speed that stopped my spiritually-enhanced eyes from spotting the individual teeth of.
No matter what, however, the process couldn't be all that hard as the idea of how to turn a simple block of wood into a more circular and thus ergonomic shape simply couldn't be all that complex, could it?
Still, with this doubt at my heart, I did take the time to surf the web a bit for all sorts of possible handle designs, ultimately deciding on one that appeared to be quite simple to replicate while retaining the qualities I looking out for.
'I'm not really used to working with those, so…' I thought before taking a deep breath and gathering as much free spiritual energy from the air before pushing it all into my core, accelerating the process of its endless decay.
To say that my spiritual power grew would be… a lie, or a misinformation at the very least. The amount of Qi I could gather from the air without any tools to make it thicker around was too minuscule to affect my core in any real way or form.
What doing so achieved, however, was increasing the rate at which the energy from my endlessly collapsing spiritual core would radiate out and then discharge to one of the thousands of the end-points I've created all over my flesh.
And despite my spiritual power not growing any stronger, with the increased rate of its flow, I could feel my field of perception narrow down as if I've suddenly got a tunnel vision with nothing but the end product of what I wanted to create at the end of it.