God Of Crafting

All I did was look ahead.

To be more precise, down the room's window and upon the factory floor.

And yet…

Next thing I knew, I stared right into my very own face, frozen still in the space just a few inches ahead.

But it wasn't just my face.

In the moment of time itself freezing, it was a picture-perfect copy of myself now standing a single step away, staring right back at me with what I believed to also be the perfect copy of my frozen expression.

Where time didn't flow, my muscles couldn't turn or twist to reveal the profound sense of shock of just seeing a copy of myself growing out of the desk with the control panel, clipping through it like some sort of miscalculated projection.

In this timeless realm, I couldn't as much as move a single muscle.

And yet, my hand reached out… or merely mirrored the movement of the strange being right in front of my eyes.

I blinked, as if to clear my eyes from the illusion…

Only to suddenly see double!

No, not double.

In this one instant of frozen time, I saw both this weird copy of myself clipping through the console… and my actual self, standing in an absolute yet unexpressed shock while reaching out my hand.

'As if I had two pairs of eyes.'

The next thing I knew, my head exploded with an ocean of constantly ongoing calculations, as if someone tried to mine crypto directly off my physical brain.

An endless, unending stream of constantly changing numbers took over all my thoughts, as if wiping out the bug from the system. At the same time, however, this weird copy of myself… waned.

"AAAAH!" I took in a massive breath as soon as this entire reality vanished into thin air, right as time started to flow again.

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"TIM!" Despite standing just a step away, Claire jumped on me, as if in an attempt to use her physical hands to remove me from where I stood, hoping to break whatever took hold of me.

"I'm…" I raised my hands, less in protest and more to stop Claire's worries. "As surprised as I am, I'm actually fine…"

Contrary to the last time, my world didn't collapse.

Sure, for a moment I was in a weird place… but there was no sign of the heavy side effects of overusing my brain like that.

"But that's weird, with those numbers…" I suddenly fell into a state of deep thought, eager to analyze what had actually happened.

Then again, after having my brain parse as much data as only the most cutting-edge databanks could hold, it…

It just didn't make sense for there to be no adverse effects on the physical state of my brain.

'Last time, I felt like dying for quite some time, but right now…'

Baffled by how easily I got off with it, I shook my head before raising my eyes back to the factory.

And just like in quantum physics, where the mere act of observation affects the results, the moment I laid my eyes upon the walls of the factory core…

The massive ball of energy from several days ago… returned.

Snap!

The perfect sphere of boiling energy suddenly dropped into reality, instantly destroying any semblance of peace in the room.

Without thinking, I kicked the emergency button at the bottom of the control desk, one much more cleverly designed than a simple power cut.

No.

It was a do-it-all switch.

For as long as it was left alone, it did absolutely nothing. The moment I pressed it, however, a whole slew of thus-far-idle machines came to life.

A massive grate opened up right on the side of the original flow, while the blades of the fans on the main airflow suddenly came to a grinding halt while turning in their sockets to create a sort of barrier for the air. At the same time, a whole set of fans sucked the air to the emergency path, pushing the flow of the mana-rich air to the secondary factory building over on the sector's side, where a whole array of emptied-out batteries waited for all of that delicious power.

It was the panic button that Chihiro bragged all about as we set off for this task from our villa.

And for a single moment, it worked.

Then the surface of the whole sphere suddenly lit up, as a thousand sparks appeared all over it, instantly hypercharging it well beyond its current state.

In a single flash, what was merely a nuke before, turned into no less than a continent-buster weapon of doom.

A weapon with a massive flaw of offering absolutely no control to the one that designed it!

And yet…

I continued to breathe.

Time didn't stop. The sparks continued to dance on the sphere's surface, as it only grew to the size that the factory's main building could barely contain.

Everyone who could afford to see such a world-ending sight simply stood there, panting at the marvel unraveling before their eyes.

But the sphere… refused to grow.

And after just standing there threateningly for a few more moments…

It suddenly collapsed on itself, as if an overwhelmingly powerful force suddenly sucked it all out right from its very middle!

But, unlike the last time when such an insane thing happened before my very own eyes, this energy didn't vanish.

It collapsed on itself, rapidly shrinking to a point where the factory's core fully contained it and stopped us from observing it.

ROA…

For a single instant, the sphere exploded again, instantly growing to the same size as before…

Only to then fold down into itself again.

Then again.

And again.

Over and over again, the explosive force of the overwhelmingly powerful spiritual energy continued to reform itself, folding down, up, and in every possible direction at a time… only to then collapse, implode, and invert in ways that looked anything but possible.

An event on the edge of the universal rules that governed everything, stretching some aspects of reality to the point where nothing else made any sense.

And in the end, the sphere of pure energy collapsed, reformed itself for the very last time…

Before pushing the doors of the factory's core open and then walking out, a golden shape of a human made with nothing but raw, raging yet contained energy.

A shape that looked up in the direction of our window and made a single step… and appeared just an inch off my face, its light fading away to reveal uncannily familiar features…

My hand moved up on its own, as if reaching out for the panel of the invisible mirror that had to be responsible for what was before my very own eyes…

And then, everything stopped.

Time stopped. Reality stopped.

Just like before, I sank into the world beyond time or any reason I or any other human could conceive.

A world where nothing was like before… except the perfect replica of myself standing face to face a mere inch away.

My lips moved, both on my real and on my energy-based face.

The sense of double-being returned, as I could once again see both my flesh and energy incarnation at the same time, with the same blank look on my faces.

My lips moved. And then spelled out just two words.

"Not yet."

An aspect of this golden, human-like replica of me… broke, shattered, and dissipated. At the same time, all semblance of a face or humanity washed off the being's surface, replaced with the same golden flow as I witnessed it before.

Time started to flow again.

The being just stood there, radiating its unfathomably deep energy just by existing.

Claire clutched down on my arm, her eyes wide and her knees shaking as she stared right into the abyss of pure, raw, spiritual power.

Chihiro was on his knees, his face with a slightly enchanted and completely lost look as he stared off into the golden abyss.

All the while, I felt one thing that I just couldn't wrap my head around or accept. Because it felt like, even if I called for it… my constitution wouldn't activate anymore.

Because if my feeling was correct, then on the altar of creating this golden unknown that just stood a mere inch off my face… it seems I ended up sacrificing the one part of my cultivation that actually made me special.