Eisen stayed within the soul realm for quite a while, trying to figure out the general feeling of the space he was in until he thought that he had managed to connect with the soul properly. And when he left the soul realm, his view that he had formed before of what the 'Vessel' for the soul should be, which was quite an unfitting name considering that it didn't actually contain the soul but was simply a reference of what the soul should be like, had only grown stronger.
It wouldn't be anything exciting, but something inconspicuous and hardly noticeable. And what Eisen thought would be great for that was something like a small keychain of sorts. Just something that one may use as a Lucky Charm.
As for the material that Eisen would use, the cave that he was currently in had a metallic smell to it, so it seemed smart to him to use something like iron since that's what the scent seemed to be.
But he couldn't forge a small keychain of course, as that would simply be unnecessary work, but instead, Eisen chose to mold it with his hands after heating it with his flames. Due to his Dwarven ability to ignore heat that comes in contact with his hands, this was quite easy, really. It was somewhat like molding clay, albeit with some noticeable texture differences.
But as he was working the metal with his hands to form something ornamental out of it, this had another benefit. There was a constant soft wind surrounding Eisen that generally couldn't have possibly been inside of that completely sealed-off cave, and as such, the old man wanted to implement that feeling into this item somehow.
So what Eisen did was take a spherical iron bead as a starting point and then shaped it like what he expected hundreds of thousands of years of intense storms and winds to do to a rock formation.
Maybe it wasn't 100% accurate to what it would actually look like, but Eisen thought it was a rather good representation, at least in an artistic sense. With a smile, Eisen nodded as he felt a slight feeling of satisfaction, and after seeing it as finished and waving the notification following this away, Eisen held the small, simple metal ornament against the soul still floating in front of him, before the soul began to react immediately and wrapped itself around the item that Eisen prepared.
[The soul has seen the Vessel as fitting, and will now take up its form for the price of the item offered to it]
[Vessel Rating] High
Eisen placed these notifications to the side for now, as he wanted to watch what was going on in front of him at the moment. Slowly, the metal piece in Eisen's hand fell to dust as the soul took over its shape, and soon enough a ghostly version of the ornament was floating in front of the old man.
Quickly, Eisen checked his status and noticed that his Soul Engineering skill jumped a whole thirty levels, and once he checked his Level-up Quest, he saw that the condition of the soul was now seen as 'finished.'
Happy to see that this was the case, Eisen looked at the Soul Again. It was kind of weird working with this now that he got used to his other crafting skills since he couldn't technically 'finish' it.
But even then, Eisen was curious about what he could now do with this soul, now that he had changed it.
[Blank Soul][Rank - 1]
[Soul Strength - 50]
[Integrity – 1][Mana Generation – 1][Thought - 0]
[Form – Small Iron Ornament]
After the old man looked through this information, he ended up somewhat... sigh, disappointed. He was hoping that the soul type would change so that it wasn't a blank soul anymore, but apparently it wasn't that easy.
As Eisen was thinking just that, some notifications popped up to in front of him.
[Now that this soul has a form, that form will slowly develop further the higher its soul strength grows through refining]
"So it will change after a while then, huh?" Eisen muttered to himself as he tried to think about what that Refining Pot that he required would be made of, before moving on and trying to concentrate on the 'Blank Soul' part of the description to get some information.
[After the soul has been refined sufficiently, it will gain a type. The higher the rank of the soul, the more souls need to be fed to it in order to accomplish this]
Eisen slowly nodded as he waved these notifications away. He would try to refine them at some point, but first, he wanted to spend the rest of the day doing something else.
For now, Eisen fused the remainder of the soul stone with a mana crystal to simply increase its volume, before encapsulating the soul that was floating in the air for safekeeping.
And once that was done, he quickly grabbed the next soul stone and cracked it open similarly. As he looked at the soul, he could see that it was a Rank 2 Blank Soul with currently 180 Soul Strength, around thirty points less than Eisen's current Soul Strength.
"So it's going to be a bit harder to please it now, according to the notification…" He muttered to himself as he quickly activated the option to give the soul a form and agreed to enter its soul realm directly afterward.
The scene that he was in now was quite a bit different to before. Now, Eisen was in a dense jungle with sounds of all kinds of animals around him, although he didn't see any, not even a single bug.
The trees around him seemed unnaturally large, and Eisen couldn't even see the treetops, while the trees themselves looked as if they were melting together in the sky because they were so far away.
When the old man looked down to the ground, he noticed that his body was completely overgrown with moss and vines, and his skin took a bark-like texture. He was unable to move, but when he tried, something else happened. A flower sprouted in front of him. And after a while, Eisen was surrounded by a field of flowers inside of this dense forest, except that each of these flowers seemed large enough to be a tree itself.
After a while, Eisen thought that he managed to figure out this soul's 'personality' well enough, choosing to leave its soul realm again.
What Eisen thought the soul was like was quite simple. It was something small, something that fit in with its surrounding. To Eisen, it seemed quite evident that it was a tree of sorts, considering Eisen himself turned somewhat into one. And so, Eisen thought maybe carving a small tree out of a block of wood may be the best choice.
With that in mind, Eisen grabbed some wood and began to carve into it with swift motions, trying to remember the style that the trees had in the soul realm. And what Eisen wanted to go for was not a fully grown tree necessarily, but rather a sapling for a giant type of tree that would take millennia to grow. That seemed like a plausible explanation for the size difference at least to Eisen himself.
After the old man finished the regular part of the tree, he moved on to the roots, where he was somewhat unsure of what he should do. He could make something like a small platform that the fake tree would practically sit on, but instead, he chose to do something else.
The roots in the soul realm were a lot more intertwined with each other as if they were one large plant, so Eisen wanted to keep that feeling of intertwining somewhat intact. So, he chose to shape the roots in a way that they would 'grasp' Eisen's fingers as he was holding the fake tree on his hand.
And to finish it off, Eisen carved a few small flowers, like the ones that began growing around him before, into the stem of the tree.
Once that was finished, Eisen offered this carving to the soul in front of him.
[The soul has seen the Vessel as fitting, and will now take up its form for the price of the item offered to it]
[Vessel Rating] Average
Eisen looked at these notifications with a displeased expression. "Even worse than before? What's with this?" He muttered to himself, before creating another mana-crystal and soul-stone composite to encapsulate the Ghost-like miniature tree, and then placed that bubble away.
"Hmm, maybe I should try another one?" Eisen asked himself as he grabbed the next soul stone, cracking it open with transmutation to enter this next item's soul realm.
---
A few hours later, Eisen was now in his carriage filled with a total of ten different bubbles, each containing a different Soul that the old man gave a form. The souls each seemed to be quite different in what they wanted, or at least none of the soul realms were like each other in the slightest, but they each had in common that they didn't want to be anything alive.
Eisen managed to rank up his Soul Engineering Skill after finishing the 'vessel' for the third soul. It gave him an ability related to refining, actually making it possible to control which soul was the one being fed and which one was the food. Apparently, there was more to refining than what the shallow information Eisen was given before told him. But right now, Eisen was more curious about something else.
He had just now finished the tenth Vessel, and he got a quite curious notification that he began looking through after bubbling the re-shaped soul.
[Congratulations! In giving shape to 10 different souls, other souls will trust you more! +10 benefit to Soul Strength when Editing, Refining, or Giving A Form to a soul]
"Amazing!" Eisen exclaimed as he looked over toward the crystal-bubbles laying around him with a smile. "So if I continue to give souls a form, I can passively increase the range of souls I can work with, while also increasing my crafting skills since I will use them in the process. Interesting." He muttered to himself while running his fingers through his beard before he heard a knock to the door of the carriage.
"Come in!" The old man exclaimed since he figured it was the person that he invited to come over since Eisen wanted to try something out. With a smile, Jyuuk stepped through the door and sat down on the ground next to Eisen and the different encapsulated souls before he began to look around.
"Is this what you've been doing today?" He asked, and Eisen swiftly nodded.
"Yes, these are some of the blank souls you gave me. I ended up giving forms to these ten, and I was interested to see if you could do anything with these. You can 'equip' souls, right?" Eisen asked before Jyuuk slowly nodded.
"I can do that, yes. Maybe I can do that, not so sure, but I can surely try." The Monkey-Beastperson responded, before Eisen, one after another handed him the 'large' soul stones that he made, and Jyuuk concentrated with each one, trying to 'equip' them.
And it did work, in a very different way than Jyuuk had been using these souls before. Due to the low soul strength of the souls, the effect wasn't significant, but it was still noticeable. Before then, Jyuuk had been using souls that were still imprinted with the characteristics of the animal they came from, but now, all of these were souls with static forms that weren't based off any monster.
The small Iron ornament that Eisen made first gave Jyuuk's skin a light gray tint as his defense passively increased, and the miniature carved tree gave him a bonus to his Plant control while roots grew all around his body together with small flowers.
"This is quite interesting, Eisen. These are somewhat restricting to me at the moment, but if you create anything like this that you think could be helpful to me, please let me know. I'm going to collect a few more soul stones for you as well, if you want." Jyuuk told the old man next to him, who listened carefully before nodding with a smile.
"That would be great, thank you," Eisen responded as he began to reshape the bubbles into cubes so that he could stack them in the carriage more efficiently, while asking Jyuuk a few things he knew about working with souls, specifically soul refining.