God Of Crafting

"So this is a bus-glider…" I moaned in a weird way when the vehicle finally came into view.

As much as I wanted to just throw all of our baggage inside and go get some rest for the first leg of the journey, I simply couldn't help but freeze in place as I stared silently at what had to be the manifestation of the magical car a toddler could draw.

A bus-glider was… pretty much, as the name suggested, a typical city bus outfitted with a set of ridiculously long and thin wings.

Sure, there were some elements of decor all around said wings that made it clear this vehicle was nowhere near as simple as it appeared to be at first glance…

But still, it was a bus with some ridiculous wings.

And somehow, I was expected to accept it as a traditional vehicle for all those going through the initiation ceremony, like Chihiro, to cross into the spiritual world.

As Chihiro's wards and ceremony witnesses, we were obviously going to come with him.

There were simply too many benefits of us coming along for anyone to ever seriously debate this issue. In fact, the benefits of this trip were so damn obvious, it would be weird and questionable if we found some excuse not to go!

'And with the inquisition running all around to find any clue… rather than poking their eyes with our unexplainable presence, it's best if we remove ourselves from the picture for a while, just how everyone expects us to do so.'

It was with a heavy heart that I prepared myself to leave the modern world. Even here, in the very heart of the clan's city, the influence of technology was on a level incomparable to the influence of cultivation. For the few days that I'd spent here, I didn't really feel all that different than I would by working and living back at our mansion.

Investigation of the inquisition aside… this was still one of the most crucial moments for the development of my device and its shift from just a fancy toy to the one thing the modern world did best—introducing my concept through the lenses of an economy of scale.

This was the most important step in the whole process of my device starting as a prototype, turning into the first model that not only worked at a much larger scale than before but could also be replicated… and now, becoming the backbone of a whole state-sponsored industry.

And while I couldn't really grasp the emotional weight of what the introduction of this device of mine was going to do to the country and the modern world as a whole… I was more than aware that this was the exact thing that the government was looking for.

A new branch of technology that could pull everyone from the quagmire of insanely oversaturated growth of the existing industries. This was just the thing that could start a new financial bubble, the growth of which could easily pay off the dividends necessary to manage the fallout of the existing bubbles.

Right now, the world as a whole stood on the precipice of yet another kind of industrial revolution that not only introduced a whole new kind of energy, the industry's fuel, into the mix but also allowed mortals of the modern world to easily bridge the gap of personal strength between themselves and the cultivators from the spiritual world…

And I was expected to just ditch it all, ditch my very child, leaving it in the hands of some government officials while I happily went away for a vacation to a foreign, exotic place?!

"Are you alright?" Claire asked, slowly approaching my side before gently wrapping her hands over my wrist as she looked up to my lowered head.

At some point, while drowning in my thoughts, I went from staring at the ridiculous vehicle ahead to digging with my eyes at the ground, completely lost in the realm of my own imagination.

"Yeah, this vehicle," I prodded my head toward the bus-glider, "it made me question everything for a bit."

Claire smiled, like a child whose prank went perfectly well.

Regretfully, she didn't proclaim this all to be just a joke, with the real bus-glider hidden somewhere out of sight.

"Having second thoughts?" she asked instead, backing off a few steps before resting her hands down on her hips and smiling cheekily.

I took a deep breath before stealing a glance at the pocket on my chest.

In there lay one of the main reasons why I ignored all the reasons for me to stay and decided to just go with the flow.

"Not really," I shook my head before raising it up and grabbing the handle for my baggage case before picking up the pace. "Between the device and the entity…" I hesitated for a second, only a second too late to stop this word from leaving my mouth.

Even in the clan's town, there was no telling who might be listening. And while entity was a word cryptic enough…

What was the point of needlessly setting up flags for the future me? .net

"Between what's happening here and the opportunities we can get simply by breathing in the air on the other side of the border," I shook my head right as we approached the cargo hold of the bus, situated just behind the back edge of the wings, right below what would normally be the bus's deck. "Yeah, there's absolutely no way I would hesitate now."

The one and only reason why we could give up on the factory was thanks to the golden orb's ability to leave its birthplace.

To the best of my understanding of its nature, it infused itself into the grid of the modern world, easily able to manifest itself anywhere where there was a proper connection to the global power network.

This allowed us to give up on the factory, starting the process that was about to bloom right as we were departing to the other half of the world. But this new nature of that golden orb, as hard as it was to get into contact with it nowadays, resulted in the small coin-like item resting in my breast pocket.

A passive recorder, or how I came to call it, was the golden orb's gift for this trip, designed to store all kinds of data about the Qi flow and mana circuitry of the spiritual world.

After all, now that this golden orb, a being born out of my constitution, absorbed… no, now that it merged with the power grid of the modern world, the best way to let it grow even further was to feed it all the data the modern world lacked, data from the world where rather than technology, it was spirituality that reigned supreme.

"There," I moaned as I threw in my case into the baggage hold of the bus before repeating this process with Claire's stuff.

"Well, that's good to hear," Claire then smiled, wrapping her hands around my lower arm as soon as I was done with the luggage, only to then bring me over to the sliding doors barring the entrance to this weird vehicle. "Because I really wouldn't want all that I've learned for the coming night to go to waste!"