Eisen smiled as he looked at the finished item in his hands, flipping through it a few times to make sure that everything really was fine with it, before handing it over to Komer.
"Here you go, you can have the first one if you want." The old man smiled, and Komer looked at him in surprise.
"Really? Thanks! I guess I'll really start taking notes from now on, then…" Komer chuckled lowly as he greatfully received the small book.
Eisen laughed lightly at Komer's expression and nodded as he leaned back against the wall. "Yeah, since you'll be making basically all of our purchases from now on." He explained to the young Merchant, who then looked back blankly. "Wait, I'll be making all the purchases? What do you mean?"
"It makes sense, right? Your Trading skill goes up the more you buy and sell things, so in order to make sure you get as much proficiency as possible, we should leave it all to you. Of course you won't be paying for it yourself, don't worry. If it's crafting material or the like, then you just need to get a receipt for the exact price you bought something for write it down somewhere yourself, whatever is easier for you. I'll give you back whatever you paid for. And I suggest that you note everything down in your notebook as well, since it can't hurt to get bookmaking experience." Eisen explained while Komer was listening intensely, nodding at Eisen's suggestion.
"Alright, let's do it that way. And… thanks for trusting me like that, Eisen. I know I don't really deserve it." Komer said in a low voice while scratching the back of his head, and Eisen began to chuckle.
"Don't worry about it. I'm sure you won't try and scam me again. Anyway, I'll continue making some books now to get proficiency in the skill, go ahead and stay to watch if you want, but you don't have to." Eisen explained as he sat down in front of the worktable again, grabbing some more piles of paper before assembling them into piles of six sheets again, before Komer and Bree looked at each other for a second to see what the other one wants to do.
"I think we'll be on our way now~!" Bree exclaimed with a happy smile as she opened the Carriage's door and was just about to step through while closely being followed by Komer.
But before the two of them left, Eisen yelled after them. "Ah, can you take Aulu with you? She's only really been lying in the Carriage for quite some time, so I'm sure she could use some exercise."
"Of course~!" The Fey-Kin smiled before the Wolf Automaton stood up with her joints slightly creaking, so Eisen handed a bottle of oil over to Bree as well that she could feed Aulu if she needed it.
"Have fun!" Eisen then told them before they waved back at him and made their way out of the stables, leaving the old man to sit in the Carriage alone.
"Now then, let's get to work!" He exclaimed as he was smiling while looking at Caria and Melissa who were sitting on the bench next to the worktable.
Now, once more, Eisen repeated the same process as before and made another small leatherbound notebook, then again, and then again. He basically created three notebooks that were exactly the same as the one that he gave Komer, using the same types of paper and leather for every step of the process as before.
The regular Cow's Leather that Eisen was using so far was the best choice in Eisen's opinion, since he didn't want to use the more expensive leather from different monsters without knowing whether it would even make a difference.
So for now, Eisen wanted to continue crafting regular books until he reached a higher rank and got some sort of new information that would give him at least a hint toward what you could make out of books in this game.
And maybe the book that he bought that also included combining magic with crafting skills would give him a hint as well. Either way, at Rank 0 most of the things that could be carfted were regular items without any sort of special effect, at least from what Eisen could tell so far.
Eisen only needed to make one more book in order to rank up to 1, and for that, he had an idea that he wanted to at least try out. He wanted to see if he could make an enchantment book, with each page being a different enchantment. Regular paper was too thin to carve things like that into, though, so Eisen especially bought some at the bookstore that was just barely thick enough. He already confirmed that it was possible to carve enchantments onto a single sheet of paper that ended up working like normal, but Eisen didn't know how well it would work out with dozens and dozens of enchantments compacted into a single book.
The enchantments that Eisen would put into this book were of course not the types of enchantments that you would see on something like a weapon or tool that would do something to the object they were placed on, but rather those that would end up creating something.
Eisen had been playing around with this for a while now, and as long as they were relatively small items, it wasn't even all that mana-inefficient anymore to create small objects or parts for larger objects.
So, with this book Eisen would basically create something like a 'part catalogue' that would include things like dice or small decorational items such as marbles for example, most of them being made out of materials like crystal that would allow them to rather easily be enchanted further.
Of course this wouldn't really be used all that often, but it would at least give Eisen somewhere to collect some different enchantments that he had been playing around with. At the same time, this would obviously give Eisen a reason to create many different enchantments to fill out the book, which would in the end allow Eisen to gain more proficiency in the enchanting skill as well.
So instead of the regular paper that he had been using up until now, he instead used some that was about four times thicker. The rest was really the same as it had been before, even using the same amount of sheets of paper so that Eisen would later get a pretty thick book to inscribe the enchantments into.
And as such, soon enough, Eisen finished this book as well.
[Blank Leatherbound Thick-Paged Book]
[Quality – Perfect][Rank – 0]
[Description] A leatherbound book with thick pages created by the Omni Craftsmaster Eisen. Every single page of it is completely blank and yet to be filled.
[Pages] 120
[Bookbinding reached Level 100 in Rank 0, upgrading to Rank 1]
[You can now successfully re-bind books]
[Due to Ranking-up your Bookbinding Skill, you gained +1 AGI and +1 WIS]
"Oh, rebinding books, huh? That's easy enough, yeah, makes sense that it's a thing so early on. Don't need to do that right now, though, so I'll just not." Eisen muttered as he looked at the new book lying on the table in front of him before grabbing his mythril enchanting needle before he began to carve a few simple ones into the first few pages.
They really weren't anything special, just enchantments that would make a few dice or marbles, or other similar structures, made of crystal.
While Eisen was at it, he also created some enchantments that would allow him to make parts for a later project of his that may be slightly hard to complete for now, which was creating small crystal limbs, or at the very least each individual body parts. Back when he made that tiny mock-golem core, he tried it out on that small Health-Doll, and when he was thinking back on that, he wanted to see to what extent it would be possible to actually make tiny golems. A seemingly easy way to do that would probably be to wait until he was able to compress different materials through Alchemy, and since that would still take a little while, Eisen chose to only make the enchantments for the body-parts that would possibly allow something similar to mass-production of tiny crystal soldierr.
But for now, Eisen knew that he could place many different enchantments like this into a single book and sat down on the bench, that could easily be turned into a bed, to relax for a while. After sitting down next to his two tamed monsters, Caria gleefully sat down on his lap and Melissa chose to stick to his shoulder again, while Eisen placed the books that he bought before down on the worktable within reach so that he could start reading through everything.
The first book that Eisen grabbed was the one filled with non-combat uses of magic. The start of it was just a simple introduction to the author and the general theory behind magic and different crafting techniques, before it then actually got to the actual uses.
Then it talked about the different ways magic could influence the crafting process, of which there were three main ways. First, magic was used in a way that changed the material that was being worked with. For example by infusing your mana or magic elements into a metal ingot in a way that it wouldn't dissipate later, and for that there were different methods already. One was to for example simply pour your mana into the metal, and then using certain ways, of which there were a multitude in itself, to make sure the mana wouldn't dissipate.
Another was to use a material that was pure mana in itself and combine it with the base material, such as mana crystals or crystalized mana of the crafter. This could be done through different ways as well, such as simply alloying a metal with these materials or using other magical ways to fuse the magical materials with base materials.
Then there was of course the way to use a purely magical material as the base of the item, which Eisen was already aware of.
Another way of influencing the crafting process was to use magic while actually actively crafting, such as in a way as Eisen did when putting his mana into his Zweihänder while he was creating it. This was the most common and the simplest way, as others usually required certain spells or special techniques that were relatively hard to get a hold of, that would each influence the crafting process in a different and unique way.
And at last, there was the way of using magic on an item after actually finishing the main crafting process. One method to do with was by enchanting the finished item, or once again just using different spells on it that may or may not change parts of the item to be more magical.
Since now Eisen was aware of these techniques, he figured out that he could actually do all three parts of this quite easily. He had ways of acquiring or creating special materials, of infusing his mana into the item while crafting, and then finishing it off by enchanting it. As such, Eisen would try this kind of thing out once he had the chance, especially once he brought Alchemy so far that he could combine different materials into one more easily. Morrom had told him about it before, but the only thing he could imagine at the time was alloying different metals.
But apparently, even if one used the exact same base materials as in making an alloy, the resulting item would be something completely different. And such a combination process would also allow Eisen to for example combine wood or fabrics with metal, which was something that wasn't usually possible. Of course it was possible to make metallic string out of which to create metalic fabrics, but once again, materials that were combined through alchemy weren't always what one would expect.
After reading through the most important parts of this book, Eisen was actually feeling quite pumped up to improve himself further and make sure that he could use all these new techniques and materials that he hadn't ever possibly seen in real life to create amazing and stunning new items!