Benjamin stepped forward and gave his son a hug, before smiling at the kids and young adult standing next to him. "Hey everyone, great to see all of you." He said, before jerking his head toward the door. "Let's get inside."
After everyone got back inside and set their luggage down, the rest of the greetings began. The first ones to practically assault Benjamin were Sean and Katy who jumped at him with tired eyes.
"Hey Grampa!" They yelled in nearly perfect unison, before Benjamin hugged them back. "Hey there you too, you seem pretty tired! A long trip, huh?" He asked, before Benji spoke up and held up his hand in front of him, "Yeah, we've been driving all day."
Benjaming looked at the hand of his grandson, before he grabbed it and pulled him into a hug. "Oh come here, boy. Congrats on graduating."
"Thank you, Grampa. Great seeing you again." Benji replied with a loud sigh that simply showed how tired he was, and immediately dropped down onto the couch next to them the moment that his grandfather finally let go of him.
"Now then, all of you, want me to bring you to your rooms?" Benjamin suggested, before Tony quickly nodded.
"I think that would be a great idea, yeah. Come on, get off your butts and go brush your teeth." Tony told his kids, and they all stood up from the couch and made their way to the closest bathroom, giving Tony and Benjamin the chance to talk in private a little bit.
"It's really great to see you, Dad. Again, thanks for inviting us, it's a huge help." Tony said with a sigh as he sat down on the couch in exhaustion. "I've missed this place, just the moment that I drove through the streets, I felt at ease again." He admitted as he rolled up his shirt's sleeves, revealing the different types of sleeves underneath, which were all the tattoos that covered Tony's arms.
"This town is great, for sure. Actually, I wanted to talk to you about something, alright? It's about you and this town, to be honest." Benjamin said as he sat down on his armchair across from Tony, who sat up with a frown.
"Is everything alright?" He asked concerned, and Benjamin nodded to calm him down. "Of course it is, it's something positive, actually. You know about the game, and I also told you a bit about the people at Prime Industries, right? One of the people I know there is actually a high executive that's in charge of the whole videogame section and their main HQ that's stationed just 20 to 30 minutes away from here."
With confusion in his voice, Tony then asked, "Okay… And what about them?"
"You see, you told me about the company you're working at right now, and you're shutting down soon, right? So, if you need a new job, my friend Samuel can get you one. It's probably just a simple internship or a low position at first, but-"
"Thank you. It really means a lot to me that you want to help me." Tony interrupted his father with a smile on his face, and Benjamin nodded slowly.
"Of course, don't worry about it. You just need to send him your information, and then he'll call you about everything."
"Alright, I'll do that tomorrow then. I'm really beat right now, I need to sleep." Tony sighed as he stood up, stretching before then leaving toward the hallway.
"Goodnight son." Benjamin said, as he stood up as well and made his way to his room, to start playing the game for tonight.
---
The moment that Eisen started the capsule up and was about to enter the game, a notification popped up in front of his eyes.
[Physical Changes have been detected]
[Do you want to keep your original looks, or change it toward what you look like now?]
Surprised, Eisen tried figuring out what was going on, until he actually remembered that he went to the barber today, and that could be the only possible change that this notification was talking about, so he simply replied with "Yes.".
Immediately afterward, he woke up in the same spot that he went to sleep before, in the corner of the carriage. To see what changed in the game now, Eisen felt his beard and head, and could confirm that his hair was like it was after being cut, but without being bound into a ponytail and without the rings that he bound into his beard.
It seemed like the game would take over raw physical changes, but not things that were changed through different accessories or something like that. But before he then stood up, his companions all looked over at him.
"Ah, Eisen! There you are again!" Komer exclaimed with a smile as he was chewing on some jerky, but then began to frown. "Wait, wasn't your hair different before?"
Eisen then stood up with a nod. "Yes, it seems like this kind of stuff can happen, huh?" He chuckled as he immediately sat back down next to the group and looked behind him at Caria and Melissa who also just woke up again, since they always slept while he did.
"M'Lord, if your hair changed as you were dormant, what if other parts about you do too? Should you not be concerned?" Kiron asked with clear worry in his voice.
"Don't worry, I doubt something like that will happen. If it didn't before, why should it now?" Eisen said quite simply, trying to calm the group down before looking at Sky and Bree, who had been in charge of driving for the past few days.
"Alright, how far along are we toward the Magic city, you two?"
"Hmm, I'm not sure, maybe another five days, six if we're unlucky?" Bree then responded as she looked over to Sky, who nodded. "Mhm, that sounds about right. I grabbed some of the paper you bought before and started drawing some maps to get the cartography skill, and I managed to get a pretty good idea of the distance between us and the city. There seems to be a rough area to travel by carriage at some point, but I think we should be able to handle it with Cabarum." Sky explained, doing the best that he can to be useful to the group.
"Ah, by the way, Cabarum and Aulu are outside drinking right now." He then quickly added, before Eisen smiled and nodded at him.
"Good job, Sky. If you find anything interesting on the maps or if there are any shortcuts that I didn't see, just tell me." Eisen explained, and then looked back at Kiron and Komer.
"And what have you two been up to while I was asleep?" After Eisen asked this, Kiron quickly nodded and began to 'report' what had happened.
"Shortly after you and Komer fell asleep, a few monsters tried attacking the carriage, but with Bree's incredible support magic, I was able to take care of them quite easily. Bree took them apart and chose to store the meat in a way that would make it easy to preserve. The fur was disposed off and the mana crystals, claws and fangs have been added to the others materials. After the fight, Bree's level increased by one, and I was able to increase my strength by one 'point', as you call it." The Half-Dragon swiftly explained, and Eisen listened closely before nodding in satisfaction.
"I see, good job you two. I hope you can properly use the Zweihänder, Kiron. Not everyone can get used to such large weapons."
"Oh, not at all, M'Lord. In the past, I have become accustomed to bearing heavy weaponry, many times greater in size and weight compared to this. Rather, I had to get used to using such a small weapon again." Kiron then explained, and Eisen nodded impressed.
"Huh, I'll see to making you a weapon that you can use more easily then once we reach the Magic City. They should have a few smithies there. What about you, Komer? What did you do?"
The young merchant smiled brightly before crossing his arms in a smug manner. "Well, I learned enchanting yesterday! I basically just copied some of your more simple enchantments that you had in the book, but I feel like I got relatively good at it. Bree showed me what I had to do, since she was there when you learned it. I managed to barely increase it to rank 1, and I thought that was a good place to stop for the day and began to come up with good pricings for your items. The prices before seemed a bit ambiguos, so I thought it would be a good idea to think of proper prices that have a system behind them." After Komer explained this, he grabbed the book lying next to him, the first notebook that Eisen made in the game, which he then handed to Komer.
"You can take a look, I started with the material prices and a good extra depending on how much time you spent on the item, and if it took some preparation and special tools or something like that. That was the base value that I got, that I can then change depending on the rank and quality of the item as well as where we are. As you mentioned before, magic crystal tools would sell far worse, so with a lower price, in the magic city than in a city where magic is super rare."
Eisen gratefully accepted the notebook and flipped through it, surprised at the different notes he took. The start was filled with general information on Starlight, Komer's merchant company, as well as some possible ideas about stores and their location and size. After that came something like a 'Diary', where Komer noted down how much money was spent and earned each day, although the first few days were just estimates, since he had to write them after the fact.
And then, at the last part of the book, were all the lists with different items that Eisen made so far for Komer to sell, the raw materials, and their prices. He even seemed to be working on a small map, that Sky seemed to have helped on, to describe where on the continent what types of items would probably sell best after getting general information through the three NPCs.
"Wow, I'm… wow. Honestly, I didn't expect something to this extent. I thought you would be making a few raw notes, but this is really impressive and detailed. And I can't complain about the numbers either, really, all the calculations are 100% correct, and the factors seem pretty accurate too. Good job!" Eisen praised Komer with a loud laugh, leaving the young man to blush lightly.
"Haha… Thanks Eisen, that's nice of you to say… But actually, I was wondering if I could take more of the notebooks, or if you could make some more? I think it would be better to keep material and product lists separate to the sale and income details. Otherwise, this might seem a bit messy at some point. It's bound to fill up pretty quickly, so I would prefer to be able to keep things proper and neat."
"Of course, I still have a few notebooks left! Go ahead and take them, you can just transfer everything over if you want, and I can help you with that later. But first I want to check up on my wood." Eisen then said while chewing on some jerky to fill up his belly for a bit, before standing up and handing Komer the leftover notebooks he made to reach Rank 1 in bookbinding, and then stepped in front of the large mana crystal tube, reaching his hand inside of it to grab one of the pieces of wood, activating his Truth Seeing Eyes to take a look at its information.
Luckily he managed to figure out that he could activate and deactivate whether or not he wanted to see mana with them active, or else this might annoy him at some point. Either way, Eisen looked at the small symbol floating in front of the wood, before it quickly revealed the information he was looking for.
[Lowest-Grade Wizard's Oak]
[Quality – Above Average][Rank – 1]
[Description] Regular oak wood that has taken in large amounts of pure mana, transforming it into Wizard's Oak.