God Of Crafting

At the very beginning, there was but a catalyst, a spiritual stone the earliest of cultivators would either hold directly in their hand or attach to some sort of pedestal to make it look all fancy.

At its core, however, the idea of using the catalyst was simple—by using one's mana through a medium that could hold a certain amount of mana on its own, one could execute spells and structures they wouldn't otherwise be capable of.

In a way, using a catalyst could be said to be the very first development in mana manipulation that allowed its users to manipulate it outside of the limits of their body, a crucial step necessary for all those who wanted to go beyond the very initial levels of cultivation.

Of course, there was a plethora of other benefits to using an external catalyst, but when compared to the main perk of doing so, they only amounted to no more than a statistical error.

Ages later, when the concept of magic already started to collapse under the growing influence of cultivation, in their bid to retain some of their influence, the mages came up with an ingenious design: a magical staff.

As opposed to just a catalyst mounted atop a stick for purely presentation purposes, staffs were just as magical as the catalyst itself, often woven from all sorts of precious, mana-related materials.

It was a step that allowed the mages of the first mystical age to retain their influence for a few hundred more years. Yet, once the cultivators started to make use of all the secondary industries that staff-making gave birth to… the fall of mages turned inevitable.

Still, by using spiritual herbs, mana-rich wood, or all sorts of other artifacts, the magic craftsmen managed to add structure to the mana catalyst, allowing one better control over the flow of their own magic.

From the moment the first staff was created, one could directly connect to the catalyst through their staff, eliminating the wasteful process of pouring one's energy through the air just to reach the catalyst. And with all sorts of different structures to the staffs, it was only a matter of time before the craftsmen learned how to infuse them with various effects.

And so, the golden era of magic began, with staffs of all kinds and sorts popping up all over the world, from ones capable of increasing one's affinity to certain elements, others imbued with the structures of spells in them, limiting the job of the mage to just supplying mana for the spells to manifest, to the mystical staffs—ones too damn rare for me to have a single clue what they were capable of.

Yet, with the cultivators catching up on the use of external tools to boost their own cultivation, the era of mages came to a definitive end, replaced by a path of mana-use that was simply more pragmatic and efficient for people to follow… A path that not only gave one power, but also elongated their lives, delivering on the greatest wish humans ever had.

But as this process never took the form of an armed conflict or any sort of conflict to begin with, even while the influence of the mages continued to fade into obscurity, there were some people who still worked their asses off to improve on the existing designs and innovate.

Which is exactly how magical wands came to be—an evolution of a magical staff of the time, that due to the importance all the mages of the era put on them, has long since reached the point where rather than a simple tool it became a symbol of a mage's status.

To combat the overly complex designs of the temporary magic staffs and go back to the root of what it was supposed to be, someone came up with the design of the first-ever magic wand—a design that remained in use amidst the craft enthusiasts all the way to the modern day, millennia after the ultimate downfall of the mages.

A design that consisted of just three elements.

First, there was obviously the catalyst, still serving the exact same purpose as it did centuries, no, millennia in the past. Then, there was the pathway, a line through which the mana could flow while surrounded by non-magic material to isolate it from the outside's influence.

The third and last element of the design was just the ending of the pathway, designed to connect with the mage's hand at specific points, as far away from each other as possible, to allow as many different streams of spiritual energy to flow into the wand as possible, each of them aimed at the different openings of the wand's magic pathway.

'And that's all I could find from the manuals,' I thought as I put my pen aside, done drafting the full blueprint of my design on a table-sized piece of paper, a design three times bigger than the intended finished product.

The wand's one and only purpose was to help the cultivator draw energy from their palm, then let the inner pathways of the wand gather it, no, funnel it down to just one point that then connected to the catalyst—a magic stone of some kind, either holding pure spiritual energy or one already infused with some sort of effect. Read new chapters at My Virtual Library Empire

When it came to my project, however, things were slightly different. After all, I just couldn't leave those ideas the same if I decided to change the wand's shape from a simple stick to a relatively simple ring that was on the slightly bigger end!

And so, I started the whole process by redesigning how to lay down the magic pathways to make them as long as they supposedly had to be for one's qi to flow through them uninterrupted.

Apparently, it had something to do with those pathways flattening, equalizing the flow, rendering the infused magic a bit easier for the catalyst to absorb.

In the process of doing so, as my design dictated, I ended up fully giving up on the idea of creating multiple entry points for the spiritual energy to flow into the ring-wand, opting to craft all of the inner surface of it from the magic-conductive material to simplify the use of the tool instead. Then, after creating a complicated weave from the root of a divine herb, I would encase it within an isolating material, leaving nothing but one particular spot where my design would greatly stray from the originals.

Because rather than going for a single-purpose wand, my goal was to create something that, according to what Claire was already trying to program into the Djenga stone, would allow us to cast a total of three functions.

To connect, to draw, and then to push away. All three of which could be done with as little as the push of a small button positioned in the one spot I planned to leave open.

An ultimate tool for a slacker who didn't want to stand up from their chair to close the door, turn the lights down, or grab the remote… Or, in a more practical meaning, an ultimate tool for a crafter like me who often couldn't afford to move away from active project but needed something that was beyond their hands' reach.

"All that's left now," staring down at the completed design, I couldn't help but sigh, suddenly questioning whether or not Claire wouldn't actually be the first to complete her assignment, "is for me to craft the shit out of it, huh?"