God Of Crafting

Stepping back into the control room, I couldn't help but feel like in the few moments I was gone to deal with the authorities, things changed far more than it should be possible for them to change.

The former peace and quiet necessary for us to conduct the whole process in peace and focus was now completely gone, with Chihiro screaming out obscenities into his phone in the corner of the room while a group of men I've never seen before were trying to make themselves look as small and unimportant as possible.

"WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN, IT BEYOND YOU?! WE ARE MAKING HISTORY HERE!"

Hearing Chihiro so agitated, I instinctively took a step back, as if preparing myself for a retreat.

"Don't mind him too much, dear," Claire whispered as she climbed up on her toes to reach for my ear with her mouth. "Sometimes he gets like this… but just give him a moment and it should all pass."

I took a look at the man, more agitated than I had seen him even before. Heck, he was more agitated than I ever expected him to be able to be!

It just went against his usual calm and dignified persona to be shouting like that, all the more when it was actually a call rather than a face-to-face conversation.

"Fine!" Chihiro screamed out with the same energy one would right before tossing their phone against the nearest wall.

Yet, given his position, experience, and even the cultivation level… He somehow managed to remain calm enough to properly disconnect the call before lowering his hand and taking in a long, deep breath.

"Ha…." Following a deep breath, Chihiro heaved a long sigh as he put the phone away on the console before lowering his head and staying silent for a moment.

It was an image so out of the realm of possibility… that it took me a moment to realize that while Chihiro was fully focused on his call, the men that he invited inside were all fully focused on the orb of gold free-floating right in the middle of the room.

The orb itself didn't seem any different than when I left it, becoming, strangely enough, the only thing that didn't change about the room.

The patterns on its surface continued to change and morph… just at a much, MUCH slower rate than it did when it first came to be.

"I'm sorry for this unsightly display," Chihiro muttered as he finally calmed himself down and turned back to face us. "How did things go on your end?"

Rather than lingering on what was clearly a topic he wasn't all that comfortable talking about, Chihiro quickly turned everyone's attention to something else.

"For now, we should be safe. As requested, I went ham on them, so I don't think they will be able to do anything anytime soon," I explained, fully aware that the exact details of my confrontation weren't something I was bound to share.

There was no need for Chihiro to learn that the very moment I had the opportunity, means and necessary leverage to metaphorically spit in the name of the authorities, I didn't hesitate even for a second before taking this chance.

'I wonder if it's because I used to strictly obey the law in the past that I'm now much more open not to follow it anymore,' I thought, before shaking my head and turning my attention away from the small topic Chihiro suggested as my eyes drew towards the very ball of gold.

Still, as much as I wanted to tackle this topic first…

There were still two things that had to be said.

"It seems like we are left on our own," Chihiro revealed, noticing my expression. He glanced over at where he had dropped his phone off. "Save for the forces within the city, we can't expect any kind of support from my faction colleagues until we provide them with solid results, solid proof that what we claim to have… actually works."

I slightly raised my eyebrow, still taken aback by those results even if it didn't take a genius to tell me the call Chihro was on… didn't exactly go the way he wanted.

"Are they really that dum… Cough, short-sighted?" I asked, barely stopping myself from an unpolitical way of speech in time while leaving just enough of the content said to make it clear what was my general idea of the whole result.

"You look at it the wrong way, boy…" Chihiro muttered while shaking his head, the leniency in his voice turning the normally derogative boy into merely a handle he used to refer back to me. "Rather than asking why won't they take such a good deal, it's better to ask, why would they?"

Chihiro shook his head, implying his contradictory statement wasn't the end of what he had in mind.

And surely enough, after staying silent for just a few moments, he picked up right where he left as he raised his head and locked his eyes right on my face.

"Why would they take a deal that's so out of the norm it can be nothing less than a scam?"

I took in a deep breath as the realization got to me.

The three of us had more than enough time to get used to the fact that whatever it was that I did, it always started on the level of breaking the taboos that people weren't even aware existed. This factory, however, was a result of taking my ideas to their extreme… which ended up with rather extreme results, for how else could one describe an act of creating a consciousness out of nothing, one that could not only exist without any solid body to operate on but one that majorly existed outside of time and could freely do things that anyone else in the world would deem impossible?

"I guess you are right," I admitted before heaving a deep, long sigh. "But if we are too good for them to offer us what we wanted… what do you suggest we do next?"

Right now, we were in a load of trouble.

A company that took a massive debt for their investment would on the day the debtors came to collect both what they borrowed and all the interest.

In our case, rather than borrowing money, we were borrowing the trust of my uncle and all those who he himself had to convince to work with us to make this entire plan work. And while no one expected us to now come up with some sort of payment for that debt of trust… We still had to produce the results.

Locally, everything was fine. Judging by the faces of the men in the room, they were terrified enough to make it clear they understood the importance of the floating golden orb and the weight of the changes it would bring throughout the world.

But those men consisted of mostly Chihiro's bodyguards and one singular point of contact with my uncle, the one and only man I recognized in their group.

In other words, while we could count on my uncle to understand the implications of what we did, the weight of what we could make happen next, and the value in this research of ours… He could only afford us as much protection as a city governor could.

And now that I quite openly went against the force directly related not to the city, but the country's central government… A protection a city governor could afford suddenly didn't feel all that … capable?

"Honestly?" Chihiro gave me a sideways look before shaking his head moving all the way to the back of the room and sitting down on the sofa before hiding his face in his hands.

For a moment, I thought he was simply trying to sort his thoughts out, but as his silence grew longer and, strangely enough, louder…

"You should know that it's not the best idea to have me come up with our plan of action for the future," I pointed out once I could no longer handle the silence.

"What do you mean?" Chihiro asked in an exhausted voice, raising his now empty face from his looks as he gave me a tired stare.

"My ideas tend to be… quite unorthodox?" I tried to find the political, diplomatic words for it. "Or, to say it bluntly…" I started, only to then hesitate again.

"Just go on," Claire whispered from the side while grasping my arm a little tighter. "There's no such thing as a bad plan while we are still in the stage of deciding what to do. Worst case scenario, we just… won't put it into action."

I turned my head to look at Claire, finally allowing my mind to get some rest as just the sight of her calm, elegant, and somewhat regal beauty soothed my heart and then my mind.

"The easiest way to go about it is to go absolute bonkers and put ourselves in a setting of us versus the world. It's a scenario that would usually lead to nothing but ruin, but with the golden boy over here…" I turned my eyes toward the orb as I mentioned it…

Only for my consciousness to waver as the sight of the room suddenly vanished from before my eyes, replaced by the misty, low-quality sight of some ants… No, some dark-clan men sneaked along the street's side.

As the vision clarified, I could now see they weren't just wearing black clothes but some sort of tactical gear. And while some of them came armed with long guns… It wasn't the concerning part.

The alarming part of this sight was the tools that the other few of them carried, tools that I then saw them using to pry open what looked like a canal's lid on the street before one of them jumped inside with massive, heavy-duty cutters.

The next thing I knew, all the lights vanished from the street, leaving it as dark as it would be before the invention of electricity. Only the distant hue of the city lights shed some lights on the street, just enough of it for me to watch them all gather up and then quickly leave, but not before dropping some sort of packages into the hole they just… left open.

'Don't they know this is a big safety hazard for any car that would try to pass?' I thought, right as my vision faltered again, only for the control room of the factory to come into my view again with its electrical lights working perfectly fine.

"Tim?" Claire asked, clearly being the only one who noticed the slight, momentary gap in my stance.

My eyes, however, rather than move to the girl, landed on the golden orb. The surface of which suddenly came alive as its patterns started to morph and change at a much greater speed than before… Only to then settle right back down, as it reverted to the slow pace of the change it displayed ever since its formation process came to an end.

"Tim?" Claire asked again, her concern and worry growing as she noticed more and more signs of my shooting anxiety and the sense of urgency flashing in my eyes.

"They are trying to cut the power off this whole district. And judging from what I saw, that's not going to be the end of it either."

"Huh?"

Hearing me suddenly bring up a seemingly random topic as a sure-fire statement rather than a guess of what the forces opposing us could try to do to hamper our progress… Chihiro failed to process my words on the spot.

Once again, only Claire was quick with her wits and observant enough to connect the dots on the spot and even move a step ahead, all to get a better look on my face.

"So it has powers like that too…" she muttered, her eyes opening up wide as she glanced over at the orb…

Only to then turn on her heel and straighten her back, suddenly gaining the level of aura I've never seen her with before.

"Didn't you hear him?!" she shouted as she turned towards Chihiro's bodyguards. "They are trying to cut us off! Go and get them, now!"

"Look for a canal's entrance in the middle of the street. There's going to be about ten of them…" I quickly added whatever details I could remember. "Oh, and it seems that they brought big guns with them, so be careful!"