God Of Crafting

"Let me indulge you a bit."

Just six words.

Three words if one were to ignore articles and pronouns. A single word if one were to remove the useless descriptor and the basic verb.

To indulge.

'A fitting word for ninth stage cultivator teaching basics to those four whole ranks below him.'

In theory, Claire already gave me the run-down through the cultivation ranks… But what could she, formerly a fifth-stage aspirant and now a fifth-stage practicioner know about the sixth stage?

And while sure, as someone who lived in this community and culture for her entire life, she surely knew more than me… But it was all still but theoretical knowledge, unsupported by hands-on experience.

Chihiro, on the other hand, had not only gone through the whole of the sixth stage already, but he could now look back on it from a much better, much wider perspective of his ninth rank!

"Before that, however," Chihiro said only to then turn over to Claire while resting his hands down on his hips. "Show it off."

There was no need for Claire's dad to elaborate any further. Even though his relationship with his daughter clearly wasn't as normal as they would like it to be and there were some issues… when it came to simple communication like this, they still understood each other without any major issue or need for further clarification.

And so, without any further ado, Claire lowered her eyelids a bit as she focused, only for her flesh to suddenly infuse with her spiritual power that exploded out of her destabilized core only to snap as it shortcircuited thousands upon thousands of times, each time sharing some of its chaotic power with the endpoints scattered all over her flesh.

'When looking at it from the outside,' I thought as I immersed myself in the feeling of the spiritual energy, allowing it to kind of overlay over my normal vision, 'it really does look a lot different than it feels when I do it myself.'

When I pushed my own Qi to bring my core from a semi-stable to an unstable level, my mental perception of what was happening allowed me to keep track of what was actually taking place. As in, even though it felt like no more than an afterthought, I could still tell it wasn't just energy flowing through my veins but snapping in the manner of a corona discharge instead.

As I watched Claire's spiritual energy flow through her flesh, however, it appeared more like a perfectly fluid, continuous process in which her entire body filled with nearly perfectly uniform levels of energy, skipping over the steps of thousands upon thousands of short-circuits as it merged them all together into a flat, ongoing process.

"That's…"

On the other hand, Chihiro was faced with yet another surprise, clearly not expecting to see whatever it was that he saw as he looked at his daughter.

'Poor man,' I thought, allowing but the slightest of smirks to appear on my lips as I amused myself with the scene. 'Ever since he came in, all he does is face one shock after the other, huh?'

"This cultivation manner…" Chihiro muttered, proving my guess about his surprise to be right on the money. "It's… unorthodox for sure, but…" he hesitated for a second, "but I cannot really figure out how you could reach this kind of enlightenment!"

If I were the kind of slacker who liked to take the easy way out, I would assume Chihiro's words to be praise. If I was the kind of a person to allow my intrusive thoughts to fester my mood, I would likely assume those were the words of fear if not terror, warranted by the cultivation of his daughter going in a way he would deem unfit or generally harmful in one way or another.

But I was neither of those two. Instead, after five years of standing in place and moving in a predetermined way to execute the same strike over and over again, if I had the tendency to do anything, it was overthinking things.

Because what better did my mind have to do when all I did for hours upon the time was standing in the exact same position as I did for hours before striking out with my fist in exactly the same way I did over and over again?

And with me overthinking Chihiro's words, I soon arrived at an entirely different conclusion, by catching the one small detail that was so hidden in what the man said, I wouldn't blame anyone, not even myself, if they missed it.

'This kind of enlightenment, he said,' I thought, squinting my eyes just a tiny little bit. 'So, the way one's cultivation works while at any given stage is dependent on the details of their enlightenment?'

For an outsider like me with nothing but sparse bits and pieces of knowledge that others took for the norm, cultivation stages always appeared to be… something normalized? They were nothing more but levels one could achieve with enough time, effort, and resources. And while there were obviously going to be differences between two cultivators of the same stage…

Weren't those differences supposed to be minimal, a surface-level thing?

"Tim helped me out with it," Claire revealed without holding anything back but rather shaking her head instead. "To be perfectly honest, I don't think I would break through to the fifth stage so soon if not for his help."

"That's quite the praise," Chihiro muttered and followed with a small, short whistle as he turned his eyes over to me and nodded his head, in lieu of expressing his respect with words.

Then, before even looking away, his face tensed up as his attention moved somewhere else, somewhere… inside his own mind.

"But with this sort of enlightenment…" Chihiro muttered again only to raise his hand to his chin and rub it a little as he fell deep into his thoughts. "Okay, I've got it," he then added a mere moment later as he raised his eyes and smiled.

"Cultivation stages, in a sense, are all about mastering dimensions."