God Of Crafting

Chapter 190: Encounter in the white (2)

"Are you the one who guided me?"

The golden figure didn't seem to hear Chihiro's question.

That, or it either didn't want to or simply didn't care to act as if it did. Instead, it just stood in the same weird pose as before, as if Chihiro was merely a fly invading this white space, not worthy of its attention.

"No answer, huh?" Chihiro muttered, only to breathe out and look around, hoping to find something else he could focus his thoughts on.

He wasn't trapped in this weird, white space. It was merely a distant feeling, but he could tell that to escape from this strange place, all he had to do was to… open his eyes.

It was that simple. And yet, at the same time, it made opening his eyes the very last thing Chihiro wanted to do in the moment.

Opening his eyes meant leaving this space. And for as far as he could tell, this wasn't a place he could just enter any time he wanted.

"This is an opportunity…" Chihiro thought as he took a deep breath to calm his thoughts. "And I'm going to make the most out of it!"

Still, just the desire to get all the benefits that being in this white space could offer didn't make it any easier to figure out how to actually do so.

Chihiro wasn't the kind of man who would give up easily, though.

"Maybe I shouldn't try to perceive it with my eyes?" he thought, trying to discard any part of his perception that wasn't beneficial at the moment. "Wait, eyes?"

Suddenly taking note of a certain peculiarity, Chihiro had to take a moment to calm himself down again, worried any sort of agitation could stir his thoughts to the level at which this golden presence would notice him… and likely, expel him from this place.

"How can I talk about eyes when my entire body here is but my own mental projection?"

This world of white was nothing like the world Chihiro knew. And that included how there was no solid matter in it, or any sort of fluid or gas for that matter either. And in a world deprived of all physicality, what was there to say that Chihiro was in it… with his body and all?

"If it's not my eyes that provide me with this sight… then why do I keep trying to see it?"

Baffled by his own naivete, Chihiro rolled his nonexistent eyes before closing them down and immersing himself into the flow of spirituality.

"When in doubt, default to cultivation," he thought, recalling the age-old adage coined all the way back in the mystic era, an adage his late mentor really loved to repeat.

And as it was the case in many of the troubles Chihiro encountered in his past, defaulting back to cultivation quickly proved to be the right choice.

The right choice in terms of finding a better angle to perceive the strange, white space he was in, that is. Yet, the very moment Chihiro did so, looking as deep into his own spirituality and the flow of Qi in this strange subspace, his mind suddenly froze.

Numbers.

Data.

Flows.

Vectors.

Each of those words described just one simple thing. Yet, all of those words could also be used to describe entire groups of something, entire sets of expressions designed to pass on information. And right now, right within the realm of Chihiro's brain, all of those concepts stretched into infinity.

The numbers overflowed Chihiro's head. They made no sense. There was no easily recognizable pattern to them. All that those numbers did was swell into infinity, endlessly changing, endlessly growing, feeding more and more information in its rawest form straight into Chihiro's synapses.

At the same time, with what little numbers his brain could process from the infinity of numbers it was tasked with, a seemingly endless stream of data came out as a result.

Data that made seemingly no sense.

Data that certainly could be applied to something… but was of absolutely no significance for him.

Data on how the particles of nitrogen behaved within the flow of air around his real body.

Data on how the spiritual energy existed within the gaps of matter itself, endlessly weaved into it like the shadow of all being, always there, easily matching the complexity of what it was the derivative of… while also being merely a concept, lacking a proper manifestation of itself in itself.

Data.

Data.

Data.

Endless stream of information that Chihiro couldn't even begin to make the slightest sense of.

Data that began as an infinite set of infinitely growing numbers. Data so rich, it instantly turned into a flow of itself rather than just… well, itself.

The flow was constantly changing. Never staying the same, never staying similar to itself of the last second.

This made whatever data Chihiro's brain could output lose all of its intrinsic meaning, with how just by the slightest fraction of a second passing, all of it would warp, alter, change.

At the same time, however, it was this very flow of data, the way it changed at every tiniest step of its iteration…

"Even if in itself it has no meaning, even if it's only an expression of the change itself… Why do I feel like, down at the very bottom of its existence, there's some sort of a message I simply fail to grasp?"

As if all of this wasn't enough, the flows of data made up from the processed information hidden beneath the surface of all the infinite numbers… wasn't the end of it.

Rather than the flow of the data, it was its vector that crowned and concluded the whole process, somehow taking this infinitely long, infinitely dense, and infinitely changing flow… and assigning it a proper meaning.

A meaning that continued to elude Chihiro's brain, yet a meaning nonetheless.

"Just what the hell is it all about?" Chihiro thought, gritting his teeth as he opened his nonexistent eyes in a bid to save himself from this brain-frying amount of information. Yet, the very moment he did so, all of the white of the space around him suddenly vanished…

No.

It was still there.

He simply learned how to properly perceive it for what it was.

Just like a human brain could not perceive certain colors, right now, Chihiro developed the necessary gray matter to do so anyway. And the white of the space around him, rather than vanishing, simply revealed itself to be nothing more and nothing less but an infinitely complex lattice of those vectors, adding yet another dimension to the depth of the infinity this whole place was all about.

"Haaaa…" breathing out an exhausted sigh, Chihiro… fell down to his knees, shutting his eyes closed while cutting off his very own spiritual sense.

In this world, there was no matter.

With no matter, Chihiro's own brain itself turned into merely a concept.

And a concept simply could not feel pain, for pain was nothing else but yet another concept. An idea that, for some reason, refused to mix with the idea of his brain, the idea of a biological computer capable of innate calculations so complex, they became what people called consciousness.

Consciousness which, just like the shadow, just like the spiritual energy, was merely an artificial concept for a derivative of what actually existed.

Still, in the world without pain, Chihiro's head couldn't hurt. Yet, with the years he spent mastering the inward look into his own constitution so that he could better advance through the tiers of cultivation, he learned how to perceive all that he could about himself.

And right now, beyond any reasonable doubt, Chihiro could tell his brain was about to be fried, for it was never designed to handle this degree of static information.

"Even if I don't know it… I can somehow tell that having my brain fried here is not the best of ideas…" Chihiro thought… only to realize that even the spiritual energy, the Qi that he spent his entire life cultivating… It was nothing more than just another artificial concept, an expression created for human imperfect brains to grasp the very idea of the force of concepts they were tapping into.

"The Qi itself doesn't exist. It's just a shadow of reality… a shadow of reality that we can somehow transpose upon reality itself…" he muttered to himself, only to realize that the vectors… no, the white of the weird space he was in, suddenly attained a different hue.

The white… looked different. More wholesome. More complete. More…

Yellow?

"No, it's not yellow," Chihiro thought, only to gulp his saliva down as the realization struck his already weary brain. "It's golden," he thought, only to raise his eyes, and see the very golden figure that appeared to have been ignoring him thus far, suddenly stand right in front of him, with its head lowered just enough to impose a sensation of being closely looked at.

A sensation that instantly caused the chills to move both up and down Chihiro's spine, nearly making him gasp for air and open his actual eyes in a bid to escape the sense of dread…

No, the sense of impending doom, doom that was free of ill intent, free of ill will.

The sense of doom that just… was.

"What is this place?"

Refusing to follow his instincts for the very second time in his life after he decided to defy the odds and marry his wife, Chihiro looked up, straight into the golden shine of this strange being that continued to remain unaffected by the endless complexity of the space around them consisting of infinitely packed and infinitely changing information.

A thin line appeared on the golden bulb that was where a human head should be on the golden figure. A thin line that soon split into two that moved separately, just like a mouth that was about to open…

An entire conversation happened in a single instant, despite never taking place at all.

It happened… and it didn't happen at the same time, remaining in a state of superposition Chihiro's brain simply failed to comprehend.

Normally, in a physical world, it was impossible for something to both be and not be at the same time. According to physics, at most, its true state could be undefined, undetermined.

But this conversation… in this world deprived of physicality, it somehow both happened and never took place at the same time, leaving Chihiro's brain in a state of perpetual confusion that only ended when he suddenly realized that this strange, vectored white space was no more, and his state of shock was merely an aftereffect of him waking up.

"Huh?" Chihiro muttered, struggling to comprehend what just happened… Yet, despite not being able to recall a single word of the conversation that both did and didn't happen, he could still vaguely sense the exact inference he arrived at by the end of the conversation that never was.

A fleeting feeling that soon came to pass, finally freeing the man's brain from the prison of infinite data, and leaving him sweaty and shocked as he sat down on the factory floor surrounded by nothing but the dim, red lighting of the emergency lights.