God Of Crafting

Even though assembling the devices wasn\'t the kind of work I would classify as a hard manual labour, it was so repetetive, so boring, it brought me to my mental limits.

\'If not for Claire being here with me, I would\'ve gone insane…\' I thought as I gently placed the device down before staring at the array of its siblings displayed on the floor in a nice, perfectly well-organized square.

In the end, we\'ve managed to complete just below a hundred of devices, each of which many times more potent than the prototype I was so proud with.

\'They are more potent at a cost, though,\' I thought as I placed the device down and took a step back to take my time adoring the results of our hard work. \'It\'s a good thing I don\'t have to worry about the costs of the electricity.

Knowing how things are, if I tried to run something like this myself, the government would soon raid the facility suspecting it to be a crypto-mining operation,\' I thought, recalling the news of the recent, harsh laws against those who risked the integrity of the normal electricity network by connecting crypto-miners simply through the socket.

"Now that we are done with those," Claire called out after we took our time staring at the results of our hard work, "what do you plan to do next?" she asked while looking to the side and cutely angling her head a bit.

"What, you wanted more than those?" I asked, paraphrasing a quote from a blockbuster movie of the old. I then adored the confused look on Claire\'s face as her thoughts scrambled to come up with a proper way to explain this wasn\'t her intention at all… Only to then shake my head and wave my hand with a slight smile.

"I\'m just joking, dear," I quickly explained before turning my face back to the array of devices on the floor. "Initially, I thought about winging a few more of the air purifiers to further enhance the Qi produced from the electricity, but now that I think about it…"

Whenever I looked at those devices arranged on the floor in the shape of a dot-made square, just one word came to my mind. A word that accurately describes this kind of setting; an array.

But for the quasi-cultivator that I was, this word had another meaning. And it just so happened that, for how little expertise I had within the realm of laying formations and arrays, it honestly sounded like a good idea to utilize!

"You\'ve figured something out, didn\'t you?" Claire sighed as if silently coping with the fact that no matter what I did or how well something went, it was never enough for me, it was never good enough to give up on improving my designs even further.

"Yeah," I nodded my head as I squatted down and rubbed my chin, staring as intensely at our devices as I would at some profound piece of art. "It\'s just a passing thought, but what if we… set all of those up into an actual array?"

Even before I finished speaking, my mind already stirred into action, recalling whatever little I\'ve learned about the art of laying the foundations down and trying to find ways to implement what I had and what I still could get in time into the schematics, formulas, and rules I\'ve learned about.

"I knew it," Claire smiled lightly only to suddenly move over to my front before reaching out and slamming her hands down on my shoulders, forcing me to look up and temporairly put the thoughts of the formations aside as I stared right back into those chamring, deep brown eyes of hers. "But I also know something else."

With the smile bright and wide enough to nearly turn into a word itself, Claire made half of a step closer, sliding her arms over my shoulder only to then lock them up behind my neck, bringing her face as close as if she wanted to celebrate the end of the work with a sloppy make-out session.

Instead of going for the kiss, however, Claire simply stopped her face just ahead of mine, still beaming that lovely, wide smile of hers right at me.

"This is something that I\'ve noticed before, but I really had to take my time thinking about it to confirm. And right now, I\'m nearly certain," she whispered from so close, I could feel her breath hitting my face. "You are thinking about how to make it into an array… by following the cultivator\'s rules, right?"

In the end, Claire leaned her head slightly to the side, once again elevating her charm to the levels I struggled to handle. Which, by all means, was a great thing, given the worry I\'ve recently had over the potentially ill fate of our relationship due to the influence of our intimacy-free dual cultivation.

"You think you are pushing modern ideas onto cultivation, but whenever you did something in the past, it always was an idea born from something of a spiritual nature that you only slightly alter, slightly change to overcome issues you notice."

I squinted my eyes a bit, sensing the kind of profound depth in Claire\'s words that was actually enough to take priority over the effects of having her whispering right into my face from so close and while practically hugging me.

"How about you try to just… let go of the cultivation and do it the way you would if you weren\'t concerned about making it seem like something out of the world you clearly don\'t feel comfortable in?"

In one way, I could take her words for a shot at me still not knowing enough about the cultivation… Or, at the very least, much less than a cultivator of my current level was supposed to know.

On the other hand, however, once I put my pride and other useless feelings aside… then I had no other choice but to admit Claire\'s statement to be perfectly on the point.

"But if I\'m not going to use the spiritual means of laying foundations, then…"

With nothing else to look at besides Claire and our devices in the room, I opted to look at the latter, knowing full well that once I overdosed on her smile, there would be no stopping me from taking her here and now. Yet, what started as an attempt to keep my thoughts on the topic, quickly sprouted into an answer to the question I\'ve just asked.

"A circuit… No, a personal computer!"

I reached up and grabbed Claire\'s elbows… Only to pry her arms off before turning around and dropping to my knees as I put a finger into my mouth, slathered it in saliva before starting to draw simple marks on the floor.

"Using a circuit for the formation\'s baseline is something… That I can do in the future, once we not only confirm it\'s possible to actually do it this way and when I get enough practice at doing so. For now, though, it\'s best to imagine this room to be the computing unit of a personal computer…"

"Tim?" Claire asked, staring down at me with a slight amusement written on her face.

"Yeah?" I asked as I leaned heavily to the side to put my head at an angle from which I could actually see her.

"I don\'t understand a thing you\'ve just said."

"Oh…"

I took in a deep breath, calming myself down while, at the same time, translating what I was thinking about from the jargon Claire wasn\'t familiar with to words simple enough for her to understand while accurate enough to still pass the message.

"You see, when you either set up your own computer or have someone else to do it, one of the main problems that decide how you will do it, is the issue of keeping the air flowing in just the right way," I\'ve explained.

"Sure, it\'s an additional effort you put in after learning how to put all the parts together, which cables should connect to where, what\'s the order of putting the components onto the motherboard…"

I shook my head and waved my hand as if to dismiss the details that were irrelevant to the case at hand.

"What I want to say is, once you get the basics down, you need to figure out the best way to apply the cooling parts to make sure the air is flowing well. As in, if you have fans blowing air inside the case from every direction… where will the hot air leave through?"

Rather than just sticking to the general theory of what I wanted to do, I provided a simple example to let Claire better picture it.

"This is the reason why back in the days when the fan on my processor…." My face twitched a little as I realized I was falling right back into the trap of speaking in jargon, "when the most important fan of all the ones I had in my computer started to fail, I thought about replacing it with a much better one, a fan powerful enough to skip the need for a radiator…"

I shook my head again only to then lean away from the floor where, for just a moment, the wetness of my saliva transferred through my finger turned into a small schematic of how I would arrange all the devices we had on hand along with the purifiers and even some added industrial AC units I saw still lying around the factory in a way that mimicked the airflow in the personal computer I\'ve built for myself in the past.

"The problem was, the entire cooling scheme of my computer back then was about pulling the air from the back of the case and then blowing it all out through the fan at the bottom of the case\'s front," I explained only to then point out at the wet drawing on the concrete floor.

And just like in my personal computer in the past, it would use one AC unit to blow in the air from the outside, straight into the block with all the devices stacked together, working hard to infuse the air with all the QI they could produce.

Then, the QI-rich air would move ahead to where I would stack the qi-purifiers, taking the qi-rich air and removing all the impurities it could from it before finally delivering it to a funnel, where the cultivator would be able to partake in the feast of a dense, purified QI.

Then, just to keep the air flowing, the Qi-exhausted air would be sucked in by the second set of AC units, blowing all the air out of the building for it to mix back into the atmosphere.

A design that pretty much took the parts of my pc, replaced them with the devices I either had at hand or could quickly buy or craft, before scaling the whole thing up to the size of the room we were in.

"Assuming this will actually work…" I muttered, only to suddenly stop when I\'ve suddenly realized two things.

"Hmm?" Claire muttered, leaning her head over to the side, most likely just to showcase she was listening to my drivel with all the attention she could afford.

"Then we will be able to add on to this design as I\'ve figured more ways to enrich the QI in the air, but…"

This time, Claire didn\'t say a word, opting to just come closer and grab my hand before giving it an encouraging squeeze instead.

"But what struck me right now is that…"

I looked down at the wet painting on the floor that was already starting to dry out, removing all the evidence of there ever being anything drawn on the floor in the first place.

"But this just might be the very first time when I\'ve come up with a, quite possibly, brilliant design… without the help of this weird ability of mine!"