BXBX NOVEL Chapter 152: The mistake that made itself
Not even with the last sparks of my spirituality burning in my mind could I take a guess as to what exactly happened.
The expanding ball of chaotic spiritual energy, the reins that I've tried to put on it with Claire, even the natural resistance of the space itself as this ball of energy squeezed it while expanding in every possible direction.
All of it... vanished. Just like that, it was gone, without as much as an explanation, as if it happened only to slap the face of all the physicians who claimed energy could never be lost.
'Was it him?' I thought, turning my head on the spot to Chihiro, only to see him as dumbfounded as he had every right to be.
'If not, then who…' I turned my eyes to where I expected a sudden death to come from… Only to see nothing but the well-lit and slightly messy factory's main floor.
"What the hell happened here?" Chihiro finally managed to force his voice out…
But not a single person in the room was able to give him any sort of productive answer.
The crew foreman had no clue what happened in the first place, only ever noticing the ball of raging spiritual energy as it was about to blow in his face.
The two men of his crew who displayed some hints of cultivation were in pretty much the same position, only able to notice the presence of the excessive spiritual energy when all our attempts at holding it back came to fail.
Even Chihiro, despite having much better senses than Claire or me, only caught a single, instantaneous glimpse of the event before it vanished, leaving only… well, me and Claire.
And yet, even though we both put all of our attention to the event… It only served to make a point about how we knew as much as everyone else, only further highlighting the suddenness of everything that transpired.
"I honestly have no idea," I've managed to produce a slight, low mutter, only for my attention to shift right back to Claire.
The girl was breathing heavily while hanging on to my side for her dear life as if only the bond that we shared allowed her to keep up with the damage she received.
Thankfully, from a quick glance, I judged all of this damage not to be permanent in its nature, with how the boundary of her spirituality was now restored, safely keeping the chaotic reaction of random discharges within her core.
Then again, the fact that there was no direct and immediate threat of her cultivation collapsing, didn't mean she was in a perfect state.
"What did you do?" Chihiro changed his question, keeping the pressure up even though I didn't try to hide how Claire's well-being became my one and only concern for the moment.
"We've tried test-launching it," I revealed as soon as I regained enough energy to speak, only to finally turn my eyes away from the exhausted and pained look on Claire's face and look directly at her father. "But there was nothing to consume the spiritual energy produced, nor did we have any way to measure the rate at which the Qi density grew within the core."
Chihiro squinted his eyes and looked through the window towards the depths of the factory floor, where the thick walls hid the factory's core from view.
Following his eyes with my own, I could see some lingering spiritual energy still hanging up in the air and around those walls.
After containing a core of a sun-like amount of spiritual energy, it was no wonder some of it still remained within the concrete, quite likely altering the very nature of this simple building material.
'Spiritual concrete, huh?' I thought, already seeing a new venue through which we could expand. A venue that allowed us to turn this whole factory from just a spot aimed to help Chihiro break through to the higher rank into a manufactory designed to infuse any material we liked with an excessive amount of spiritual energy and thus forcibly turn it into a spiritual object.
"Oh damn, if that would work…"
"Tim…" Clarie softly called me out right as I was about to start gushing about my new idea. "Hold on. We are struggling to manage what you did, so you don't need to be thinking about how to push the limits even further."
Claire's hands grasped at the thin material of my clothes as she clutched at my chest, as if desperate to stop me from turning whatever crazy idea appeared in my head into reality.
"Ah, don't worry, I'm not stupid enough to make the same mistake again," I ascertained the girl, only to turn to the foreman. "We need to place some limiters on the power module. We will also need some sort of a device to measure…"
With my thoughts already centered on how to counteract the one angle that could turn this place from a quasi-magical factory into a spiritual bomb of a nuclear level, I suddenly came to face… my very own self.
It was as if someone suddenly switched my vision to the camera planted right in front of my face, making me see exactly what kind of expression I made when the shift happened.
"Huh?"
By the time I managed to vocalize the surprise, my vision returned to normal, as if nothing ever happened beyond me imagining something weird.
"What was that?!" despite her exhaustion and pain, Claire jumped up to her feet, her hands only growing more desperate as she clutched on my chest and pressed herself against me.
"I have no…"
"…Idea," I said from so close, the very breath that carried those words struck me right in the nose as I watched the surprise return to my own face from just a few inches ahead.
Just like before, this illusion vanished after a single instant, way too fast for my brain to process whether it was real or just a figment of my imagination…
But I've managed to register the feeling that came with this strange illusion appearing. And now that I knew what I was looking for, I actually sensed yet another mirage coming.
'Tsk…'
Gathering whatever tiny sparks of spiritual energy I had restored in my core, I pushed it all into my brain, determined to crack the mystery of just what the hell was happening right now. Waiting for nothing, I timed the ignition of this leftover Qi to when the feeling grew so strong I could no longer hold it.
'Let's see what the hell is going on!' I thought, hugging Claire for psychical comfort as I opened up my eyes wide, ready to decipher just whatever it was that was messing with my brain…
Only to see my own face once again… However, this time, I did so with the set of my own two eyes. What's more, the face that I saw, while a perfect copy of my physical features, had absolutely no feeling to it. And what's more… It matched the average color of what my brain perceived that mass of spiritual energy to be.
And like a ghost, this face alone with just a fuzzy hint of the upper body just… floated in the air, staring right into my eyes.
The face's eyes… twitched, right as I felt the tiniest tug on my soul, cleaving just a sliver of the spirituality I'd been missing in my brain before infusing it right into where that ephemeral face would have its own brain.
Once again, everything vanished.
The feeling, the face, the strange sense of something stealing a whisker of my soul, it all vanished just like the energy from before.
Yet, the very next moment, the presence this face exuded returned…
Right as it summoned a powerful electric current, only to burn through the space itself of the breaker within the emergency shut-down button, forcefully closing the circuit and starting the unmanageable reaction of the factory all over again!