God Of Crafting

It wasn't until an hour after breakfast that I finally managed to calm Claire down and excuse my great crime of leaving her in bed alone. A whole damned hour that I could be crafting… but ended up wasting instead.

Or maybe not exactly wasting, given how it contributed to my relationship with the girl, but, at the same time, it didn't contribute to my projects, ideas, or understanding of the world around me in the slightest.

'I guess that's what it means to be in a relationship. And if one wants to keep it well maintained then some effort and dedication is in order, isn't it?' I thought as I rushed back to the workshop…

Only to find a fresh set of what seemed like fifty boxes of various tools and materials already stacked in the very same place that I'd spent over an hour of my life clearing out before breakfast.

"Should I do it again to keep things clean, or…?" I muttered to myself as my eyes hung helplessly over the pile of boxes that contained all sorts of different items… All potentially useful to both my current passion project and a perfectly fine food for my mind to process as I worked on my scythe in hopes of getting an idea of what I could better dedicate my time and attention to.

This felt, looked, sounded, and smelled like a massive pain… And at the same time, it was something that would continue to hang over my head until I finally would get myself to get it done.

"Just like back five years ago, when it took me a damned week to move the vacuum the power cable of made it nearly impossible to close my kitchen's doors, huh?" I mumbled to myself, going back quite some time to the past when I was only beginning my change as a person.

Back to the times when I dreamed about cleaning my place for tens if not a hundred times longer than it finally took me to get my place cleaned roughly a month after I decided it was finally the time to do it.

And so, as annoying as it felt, I breathed out a sigh before shaking my head, standing up, and then getting back to the grind.

Box after box, I would read the label on the box, potentially check the meaning and purpose of the item behind the label on my phone before writing a short note for my own convenience, slapping it atop a single example of the product before adding it to the collection on the floor while moving the box away.

Box after box, item after item, example after example, my floor collection grew wider and longer, soon leaving me with only a narrow corridor through which I could access any of the bigger machines positioned along the main corridor of the workshop.

It wouldn't be until three whole hours later when I finally completed this task and rested my hands down on my hips as I stared up the main corridor of the workshop, now densely decorated with items of all sorts ranging from tiny screwdrivers or machining tools, through all sorts of dusted basic materials like a whole array of ingots made with all sorts of different metals, another collection of herbs - both dried and still living potted ones - all the way to some enigmatic crystals and stones.

Even though there was only I've displayed only a single piece, a lone example of all the items I had access to, it still occupied nearly all the free space on the workshop's floor, all conveniently labeled so that I would always know what I was looking at and where to find it within the storage proper where I moved all the barely touched boxes.

"Now then…"

As tiring of a task as it was, by the time I finished it, it felt as if a whole new battery suddenly switched on somewhere inside me. A burst of energy born out of excitement that now, finally, I could get myself to crafting. And as if to validate all of my efforts of today, I didn't even need to think to know where to move and what items to grab.

"Let's start with the handle."

In theory, there was nothing wrong with just building a simple stick that would allow me to hold the scythe's blade at a proper height, distance away from my own body.

But going through with such a simple solution simply didn't fit my vibe, interest, or… well, goals of this project.

'How am I going to learn if I'm going to take the easiest way out? And what is this project if not a learning opportunity?'

No.

What could be solved by simply arranging a stick reaching roughly from the floor to the tip of my shoulders, now turned into a whole-ass schematic in my mind. A schematic that required close to thirty different ingredients for me to turn it from an idea into a real-life item.

And so, without ado, I got to work again.

First came the process extremely similar to all the cleaning and sorting I did before… but one that actually benefited from my earlier efforts.

As it turned out, thanks to all the labeling I did on my own, I only needed to move to where I could see the item I wanted, check the note added to it only to then move directly to where the box filled with a huge quantity of the item in question was stored.

And so, while it took me around thirty minutes to gather everything in the separate storage area lifted off the floor and posed just outside of the main machining table of the whole workshop, by the time I was done, I'd created a pile of all sorts of expensive ingredients nicely piled up on the elevated surface.

A pile the worth of which could easily pay off someone's mortgage… or serve as pieces of the toy I was crafting just for the sake of going through the process.

"To start with the handle, I need to prepare its parts," I spoke to myself as I separated the special wood grown in the gardens of the spiritual world and thus perfectly capable of conducting spiritual energy to a limited degree.

It wasn't the most expensive ingredient, even though it had to be important all the way from the spiritual world, but just like all the useless orders Claire made back at the merchant's place, it would do a great job at masking the true ideas I had for the structure of the handle.

Next came quite the arduous process of measuring each of the wooden blocks before slowly and carefully carving out the channels on what would be the inner side of the scythe's handle in the future, channels that were anything but a straight line.

"Now, to infuse the runes into the very wood to make sure it works as intended…" I mumbled as I continued to deduce from the wooden blocks, carving out a rift just big enough to fit the very end of the tip of my finger.

Then, I did it again, copying the exact shape of the carved channel, a shape that already formed a distant reflection of one of the simplest runest I could still remember from the books I read back when my crafting career started.

Then, I poured some isolating agent all over the channel of the two pieces of the carved-out wood before putting the two pieces together, so that the rifts in each of the wooden blocks would face the other, turning into a proper channel.

"Next," I mumbled as I put the bound piece aside…

Only to grab two more blocks of wood and start the process all over again.

After all, if the handle was to be roughly a meter and a half long, I would need, at the very least, fourteen more of those ten-centimeters long pieces to construct it!

And in all honesty, just thinking about it was enough to make me feel overwhelmed, tired, and outright lazy.

'Am I seriously going to replicate the process fourteen more times before I even move to the next step?' I asked myself while looking down at my already slightly tired hands.

The excitement-born energy was already drying up, leaving me with nothing but the raw, annoying process ahead. And if not for my experience of dealing with this kind of feeling for over five years of my life...

'Wait a second,' I suddenly thought when I realized that I'd worked all this time without using the one thing that I could call my personal cheat. The one energy that I've somehow gained without much training or effort, the energy that helped to drive my hands in just the right way while holding the exhaustion and boredom at bay.

And so, I grabbed two more pieces of wood, moved them to the machining table, picked out the chiseling knife... And then took a deep breath before infusing the spiritual energy I've already grown so familiar with into my brain, my eyes, and my hands.