God Of Crafting

"Tell me, what do you know about Vahanea structure?"

This question had two, rather similar answers.

One answer that would come from me all the way up to the day when I looked into my streaming incident and then, another one, that would come from times after it.

Yet, while those two answers would be extremely different… they would also boil down pretty much to the same thing. For an answer before the incident would be absolutely nothing, my current one…

"As much as your average Joe who typed it out into a search engine," I replied with a shrug of my shoulders. "Some sort of device that cultivators all the way from mystic times tried to create, then the guys from the mysticism restoration era tried to replicate."

I sighed before shaking my shoulders again.

"In other words, a myth."

That was the extent of the information I could find on the web. But, as I looked up and stared into Claire's face…

There seemed to be more to the issue than your average netizen was privy to know.

"That's understandable," Claire sighed before shaking her head, "but it's not the full truth either. So, to make it slightly easier, try to forget everything and anything you've read about it because the common knowledge is nothing more but a bunch of lies and misinformation spread by the elites of the cultivation world."

I squinted my eyes.

'No matter how you look at it, this sounds like either tinfoil-hat level of conspiracy… or an actual issue. And given how Claire doesn't strike me as someone who would be into conspiracies…'

It only took a moment of actually leaning over the issue for me to realize just how potentially dramatic of a change this truth could be over what I pictured to be reality.

"Wait, don't tell me it exists…!"

The Vahanea structure was supposed to be this perfectly optimal formation capable of taking even the thinnest Qi from the air and purifying it, condensing, enriching, and reforming it in such a way that what came out was the energy that even immortal cultivators could make great use of.

It was because this formation was never replicated in the mystical reformation era that science ultimately took over the world, pushing the cultivation to the sidelines of history.

In a sense, one could look at it as some sort of a wonder weapon that was supposed to help the cultivators stop the march of the modern armies and give them a fighting chance against the rapidly developing modern weapons. A wonder weapon that the desperate believed in with nothing else to pin their hopes on.

But that was all merely a part of what your average Joe knew or could know if he studied what little about this topic could be found on the web.

'What if none of that is true? What if that structure exists…' I squinted my eyes as I took my time thinking over the issue.

'Then again, it doesn't make practical sense,' I thought as I cast all the random thoughts and doubts aside. 'It's an undeniable fact that the current spiritual world exists within the lands that were devastated in the last great war that the victors haphazardly rebuilt and established as the cultivation-free zone, laying the foundation of what the spiritual world is today.

But if such a thing existed… How could the cultivators lose the great war to begin with?'

"I can see the gears in your mind turning," Claire laughed out a little, her face free of even the faintest hint of mockery or amusement gained at my expense. "But it's nothing all that complicated. In short, it is believed that the Vahanea structure is what modern science would consider a perpetuum mobile… Or rather, its cultivation counterpart or sorts."

With this sentence on her lips, Claire suddenly raised her hips before fully standing up, making me come face to face with her stomach for a second before she walked off the sofa and leaned over the table. She swiped away most of the various snacks and drinks prepared by the house staff before bringing out just the biggest bowl that she could find.

"You see, in everyday life, people use words like formation, array, and structure interchangeably. But if you look closer, those three things are actually all different," she explained while now picking up the smallest items off the table and arranging them in strange, swirling patterns all around the big bowl.

"An array is the name for arranging several commands for spiritual energy on a plane. It's commonly engraved into a single item so that one could infuse it with Qi to bring forth an effect that would otherwise take quite a lot of effort to mold the spiritual energy into.

Ultimately, however, it's still just an item that you need to power up, an item that stops working the moment you stop pouring your spiritual energy into it."

Claire finally turned back only to then point her hand at the bowl.

"Imagine this bowl to be an array designed to simply store spiritual energy, in this case, represented by the fruits, until someone decides to pick it up. But just like you would need to extend the effort of moving your hand to pick fruit, you need to extend spiritual energy to access what's stored in the array."

Claire's hand then moved over to one of the swirling arrangements of cups, shot glasses, and spice bottles.

"Those are all arrays as well, with predetermined intent and designation," she explained, only to reach out into the bowl and pick up an apple only to then bring it over to the first of the empty glasses and act as if she was pouring its content over the apple.

She then moved it over to the next step, then the next one, and so on, all the way until she reached the end of the swirling arrangement where she suddenly tossed the apple away only to put down a platter with squares of apple pie in its place.

"You can imagine this whole thing as a formation. A set of smaller arrays, each responsible for but a single task, now arranged in a way that brings forth a result much more complex than what you would be able to ever achieve with an array."

Listening with all the focus and attention I could muster, I squinted my eyes before raising them from the table and onto the girl's face.

"Following this example, a structure would be an arrangement of several formations?" I tried to guess, only to see the corner of Claire's mouth twitch into a small smile.

"Yes but actually no," she said as her smile grew. "Yes, structures are arrangements of formations and arrays that give out more complex results than a formation or an array could bring forth on their own. But that's also what… well, an arrangement of arrays and formations is. In other words…"

"There is some other prerequisite for an arrangement to be considered a proper structure, right?"

Claire nodded her head before sitting down at the edge of the table with the snacks and crossing her hands on her chest before heaving a deep sigh.

"For an arrangement to become a structure, it has to be capable of self-sustaining the task it was designed to perform. And while that's still something that we can do…"

Claire shook her head.

"A Vahanea structure is a structure that takes in any kind of spiritual energy and turns it into true Qi. But while that's still possible even if a rather challenging structure to create…"

A thought flashed in my mind as I connected the dots between what Claire said before and what she was leading to now.

"It's a structure that can use the very true qi it outputs to keep itself running in perpetuity, right?"