"Huh?"
This was the first thought that appeared in my head after only heavens know how long.
I blinked my eyes a few times, trying to remove the film of something sticky that seemed to cover my eyeballs, just like it would after waking up from a night of well-deserved and desired sleep.
'Wait, did I…'
This wasn't my first time, so I didn't need as much time self-reflecting to realize what happened.
And I didn't even need to look down, at what lay right by my hands, to realize the obvious!
I meditated!
I had no idea when I started and could hardly recall anything that happened to me prior… But this fact was undeniable! Not when the air was all the harder for me to move my limbs through!
"Wait, is this how it's supposed to be?" I muttered as I actually had to put quite a lot of strength into my body to move it.
It no longer felt as if I was moving through strangely thick air. Now, the process of moving was as laborious as would be moving through water… without the added benefit of buoyancy!
'Wait, isn't it just like when I stepped into the cultivators' district?' I thought when this worrying level of resistance started to fade… But never to reach the level of air thickness that I was used to.
"Isn't the air here denser… Far denser than it was at the institution?"
As soon as those words left my mouth, I realized the implication behind them… Or rather, a series of implications, one growing from another.
If the air was giving me such a hard time to move through, then it likely wasn't the air's fault… but the fault of just how dense the spiritual energy within my apartment became!
Taking this for a fact as it was the only thing that I could somewhat reliably verify with just how it affected my body, I dived deeper into this line of logic.
As much as I would love it to be the case, this result simply couldn't come from the device I constructed before falling into the meditative state. I was humble… No, self-aware enough to be sure of that. Not to mention, I've already verified the extent of that circuit's potential!
And so, deprived of any further clues, I looked down, at the device resting right between my two, weirdly relaxed hands.
"Oh boy…" I could only release a short sigh. "I did it again, didn't I?"
The… artifact between my hands didn't look like anything that could be made with those awkward, untrained hands of mine.
It was… a box.
A simple, rectangular box constructed with two full-sized circuit boards for its top and bottom and then two half-sized ones for its sides.
Judging by the lack of soldering marks on the outside of the box, not only were all of the elements of the circuits hidden inside the box but they were also all soldered on the face of the board as opposed to its underside.
To keep the circuitry safe, the whole thing was covered with some sort of material that I didn't recall buying at all… Only to then realize that a small part of my bedsheets were missing, with scraps of material dirtying the recently cleaned-up floor.
As infuriating as it was to see a mess in the room that I've just worked so hard to clear… I was too damn excited to pay it any mind for long.
Turning my eyes back to the device between my hands, I nearly gasped when I realized that the front and the end of the box, its sides that I initially omitted to take a closer look later… It was actually where the magic happened.
Sure, whatever gave the meditating me an idea to use the circuit boards for the walls to construct a box with… had leagues better artistic sense than I could ever hope to have. But with all things considered… it was nothing more but an artistic choice, with no practical benefits that I could figure out.
"Putting that aside, this part here…" muttering to myself, I picked the device up, not without quite the hardship of moving my hands towards it, before bringing it closer to my eyes.
Yet, even with my face nearly touching the artifact, it took me well over five minutes to understand the scale of complexity my unconscious hands conceived.
It was impossible to say what made up the front and the end of the box… Because I couldn't really decide whether it was the Spricur crystal or the formation plates. In fact, it wouldn't be a lie to claim that while meditating, I somehow ended up fusing those two elements together!
'I need to see inside,' this single thought reined uncontested in my mind as I carefully removed the front of the device from the box, pulling it out just far enough to get a look at the face of the formation plate without affecting the wires connecting the Spricur crystal to the electrical circuit inside of the box.
And it was quite the marvel.
The plate itself was different than the ones I bought, with a right rhombus cut straight out of its middle. A hole that served to perfectly house the wider side of the Spricur crystal. What's more, the array on the formation wasn't drawn with just simple paint… but with what looked like a mix of paint, hot glue, and spiritual powder.
But that wasn't the end of it!
With the premade plates housing just a single formation on them, my meditating self couldn't allow such a waste of space! And so, while my first, conscious-made circuit only housed one Qi gathering formation… I could count more than a dozen of them on this product of my meditation-crafting, all of which connected directly, although in quite a meandering way, to the different sides of the Spricur stone.
All the "entry points" of the spiritual paths of the formations into the Spricur stone were spaced perfectly evenly apart, making me wonder just how in all hell my hands achieve this degree of precision!
But this wasn't even the end of it yet!
With the formation plate and the spiracular stone now creating a new, singular entity, the question of connecting it to the electrical circuit remained. And once again, the way I did it with my conscious mind couldn't be any different than the way I did it while meditating.
When attempting it myself… I just attached a single wire to the crystal before smoldering its other end into the board.
But from just a quick look, I could tell that the changes in my second creation were not only qualitative… but also quantitative.
"I used to tape the wire into the stone earlier, but this…" I looked as closely as I could… But I just couldn't figure out what sort of magic I somehow used to attach the wires to the crystal.
Was it glue? Was it heated spiritual powder?
Looking as closely as I could, I noticed another difference.
While, when working on my own, I simply pressed the write against the stone. But in the creation of my Qi-guided craftsmanship, I somehow ended up drilling microscopic holes in it, just big enough for me to force just the tip of the wire in.
How did the wire stick to these less-than-a-millimeter-deep holes, I couldn't tell.
But once again, just like after my first meditation, I just opted to leave this issue aside for later and focus on what I could actually figure out.
Quite honestly, save for whatever miracles there were to discover on the insides of the circuit box, the last difference was how it wasn't just one wire that connected to the circuit… But a bunch of them were so numerous and thick, I couldn't realistically count them without breaking the entire thing apart!
"Now then…" I bit down on my lip as I carefully pieced the thing together again before, just as carefully as I picked it up, and placed it down.
Then, after facing the struggle of freeing my hands from the device given how thick the air around it was…
I've realized the truth that I would have to be either extremely naive or even worse, outright mentally challenged to ignore.
The device that I've crafted while in the state of meditation… Wasn't it a bit too powerful? Wasn't it too good... for my own good?
Burdened by this thought, I took a deep breath and looked down…
Only to realize that I've missed just one more thing. Just one more, tiny detail.
I've missed the fact that save for the elegant, completed device right on the table, there was another one, much more crude-looking, resting right by the only free power socket I had left in my apartment! A device that looked just like the first one I'd made… with the one difference of replacing the Qi-gathering array and the first Spricur crystal with a set of thick cords, several parts I couldn't readily recognize and then pretty much a copy of what I did in my first proper project.
What was worrying, though, was how this design, although crude… Took the very idea that I thought about so much just moments before falling into the meditative state… to a whole new level!