"You made a deal with the Kingdom? No, more importantly, how exactly did that guy get all of that Maroon?" Eisen asked, incredibly confused about what exactly he should focus on from the story he was just told.
"Mhm, I made a deal with the kingdom. And I have some ideas about who exactly 'handed' him that Maroon." Komer replied, before he swiftly continued speaking more about the actual deal he himself made. "Anyway, the deals, besides the non-agression treaty, apply at the point at which we actually directly establish our first town, because creating a country requires a 'Country Core', which is apparently quite tough to get. We can request up to a certain amount of materials and workers for a duration of six months after that town is established, and if we want any more than that, or if we want materials or workers after the first six months are over, they will continue supplying us for another six month in return for regular payments. After that, the country itself will stop giving us those benefits. Either way, we won't need to worry." The young merchant explained, mainly to Eisen as the others had already heard the gist of it, while the old man nodded his head. "How much is that set amount exactly?" He asked next, before Komer grabbed his notebook, flipped to the right page, and then handed the book to Eisen, so that he could take a look for himself.
"There, it's calculated through the regular market worth, and split through the type of material. We'll have to let the Kingdom know exactly what we need the materials for though, so we can't just request the max amount of everything all at once. Oh, and the Protection Treaty will be a thing for only a year, because that seemed to be the longest amount of time that the Prince could decide right off the bat. At that point, we'll have established ourselves pretty well anyway, and since we have a great defensive base on the islands anyway, I doubt we'll have that many encounters with different countries." Komer explained, and Eisen nodded his head after looking over the numbers, handing the book back to Komer.
"Alright, got it. And I'd guess the Non-Aggression treaty will be active for longer than that?" The old man asked, before Komer swiftly nodded. "That's a treaty with an indefinite end-date. Basically, if we do anything messed up, they can call the treaty off, and vice versa. But every five years, there's a chance to 'call it off' officially, but otherwise we have protection from the gods that they can't do anything against us." Komer told them, and Eisen replied with a simple grin.
"You've really outdone yourself with this one, Komer. Good job!" Eisen exclaimed with a broad grin, before Komer scratched his cheek with a smirk, and then chose to spoke about the other topic that Eisen asked about.
"And when it comes to who told the other merchant about how to get the Maroon out of the Fairy Forest, I have a clue about who it was. He said an 'Elven Merchant' gave him the tips. In the way that he spoke about him, it seemed to me that he didn't really know him before that… And what kind of Merchant would give another Merchant a tip of that scale without taking advantage of it themselves?" Komer asked with a serious expression and a frown on his forehead, and Eisen nodded his head with a sigh.
"Hastings…" Eisen muttered, before starting to move his fingers through his beard. "It seems like he's doing a lot of things behind the scenes, huh? Let's say it really was him, what benefits would he get from that..?" The old man asked as numerous thoughts went through his brain, before Stahl spoke up.
"Well… The Merchant would owe him one." He said, and the others looked at the young man while prompting him to keep talking. "Let's just think about it this way, Komer said that the Merchant was promised a Noble title, right? That means that he's getting land, which will most likely include a town. He's already controlling Handor, so maybe he's trying to spread out his control to have someone everywhere." Stahl suggested, before Eisen nodded his head. "That does seem right, actually…" The muttered, but Sky seemed to not be completely happy with that explanation.
"Sure, that's probably part of it, but it's more than that… Judging from how much the Maroon was worth, it was probably compressed quite a bit. Yeah, that much Maroon is something at the level that not many countries have, barely any, to be exact, but would a country really spend that much money and give out a Noble title to an exiled noble from another country that was most likely banished for criminal acts?" Sky asked, and while the others thought he was being suspicious about whether those rewards were really the ones that he got, but Sky was trying to get at something else.
"And on top of that… Why would they give such one-sided deals to us? And that with no discussion at all? They just let it happen? And just with a really, really tiny layer of Maroon, it's possible to negate basically all magic. It's a really soft material and basically useless against a child's strength, but that can be fixed by using mythril as a base and then layering it with a tiny bit of Maroon. Listen, what I'm trying to get at is that, from my perspective, they're preparing for War." Sky said quite quickly, and Eisen slowly nodded, not really able to refute that possibility.
"If they are, it's good that we're at least out of range for everything on the islands, and that we hopefully can't be dragged into anything." Eisen answered, before scratching the back of his head. "I hope we'll be able to somehow catch onto what happens on the mainland so that we can see. So, if any of you find out anything important through any means, let everyone know immediately." Eisen said, especially saying certain things in a certain way so that all of the players fully understood what Eisen was talking about, which was that he was asking everyone to make sure to check out any videos, streams, or forum posts that might tell them about anything major that was going on while they couldn't find out anything themselves.
And with that, Eisen stood up, preparing to finish everything up and get things done that he wanted to deal with before everything happened in real life. But before he left, Komer stopped him again.
"Oh, Eisen, wait a second! The Maroon actually isn't the only thing we prepared for you…" Komer explained with a smirk, before he stood up as well and looked over at Xenia, before he nodded at her and let her explain.
"We… we got you elemental mana.." Xenia explained quietly, before Eisen looked at her confused, and then she swiftly continued, as the others were all also looking at her, waiting for her to continue speaking. "Basically, when Komer made the deal with the Lord of the town we were in, he asked him to get crystalized mana from any nearby mines… I made the Mana Batteries, and we saved everything inside of them. We didn't manage to get any Dark and Light elemental mana though, so we need to figure something out for that, but Stahl actually had an idea how we could do that..." She explained, looking at the young green-haired man, who ended up just nodding his head. The others were expecting him to be grinning like a mad-man, as he always was, but he really wasn't in the mood for that, which was only understood by the originals at the moment.
"Huh? Oh, right. Erm, I looked through the 'Mana Spectacles' you gave Xenia a little bit, and I noticed that the light you see through it is actually infused with mana. But because light-elemental mana is just white, it's pretty tough to notice. It's probably pretty tough to do that for elemental mana that lingers around like water-elemental mana from the ocean, or air-elemental mana from, well, the air, but I figured that we could try and create a light-elemental mana collector, taking something I 'heard' about as a basis." Stahl explained in a quite monotone voice, although he did purposefully accentutate the 'heard' part, so that the other players understood what he was talking about.
'Solar Panels, huh…?' Eisen muttered out to himself, before he slowly nodded his head and just smiled. "Alright, sounds good. Let's build that later then. I guess we just need to find a way to get Dark-Elemental mana now, and then we can try to make Margon!" The old man exclaimed with a bright smile, and Stahl shrugged before continuing.
"Yeah, about that… We're getting close to one right now." He explained, but Eisen just looked at him confused, before pointing out one of the windows. "You can see it in the distance. A Dark elemental mana source." The young man said, before Eisen turned around and faced in the direction he was told to, where he really could see a quite singular dark spot."
"We figured the location out with Bree and Sky's help, because it's a relatively well-known place, and then I instructed my Skeletons to go that way." Jyuuk then explained, before Sky spoke up again. "Yeah, but the problem with that place is that Dark Elemental monsters are incredibly, incredibly tough to deal with, because they are quite evasive, and because of the mana source, also pretty strong. But because their bodies have been influenced by so much mana, they don't have much physical strength, and are mostly magical. But now that we have Maroon, we don't need to worry about that, and can try to somehow create something to gather the mana from there and coat it with Maroon so that it can just go to the mana source without any issues." The Fey-Kin boy explained, as the group had already thought about this quite thoroughly while Eisen was gone. With a smile on his face, the old man then simply nodded his head and crossed his arms, before grabbing the, quite heavy, maroon ingots.
It was just as he was told, Maroon was a metal that was quite easy to mold. With a bit of pressure, which was technically inhuman, as Eisen did it with all his strength, it was possible to make a dent into it. "Alright, good. Let's do this. Do any of you have ideas for how we're going to get everything yet?" Eisen asked curiously, before the others looked at each other embarrassedly.
"Actually, not yet… Using the Maroon to avoid as much conflict down there was basically as far as it went." Stahl admitted in the end when noone else was speaking up, so Eisen nodded his head. "That's fine! Then tell me, how do you actually grab mana from a mana source?" The old man asked, before Xenia slowly spoke up.
"There's a specific kind of Enchantment Circle that makes it possible… It's kind of a mixture between scribing and enchanting, though, because you're basically creating a contract with the world that allows you to take the mana." She explained, before Eisen nodded at her with a smile that also included happiness over the fact that she didn't stutter anymore during that whole explanation, which meant that she finally calmed down.
"Hmm, if it's a mixture between scribing and enchanting, do I actually need the scribing skill to make that enchantment circle?" Eisen asked with a frown, before Xenia nodded her head. "Yeah, you do… You need it at Rank 2, at which point you can make proper contracts." She answered, so Eisen replied with a sigh.
"Got it… Then who here has Scribing at Rank 2, and a proper base for Enchanting?" Eisen asked with a smile, before two boys raised their hands.
Stahl and Komer.