"Can you feel this?" A middle-aged man asked with a lightly bitter smile as he sat behind Benjamin, who had left the capsule for his daily test from one of the doctors from the hospital. With a wry smile, the old man nodded his head.
"Yes, I do. It hurts quite a bit, so please don't be so harsh." Benjamin asked of the doctor, who just started to write something down on his notepad before standing up and walking in front of the old man. "Alright Mister Joyce, seems like your body is still quite sensitive especially around your right shoulder, but that's obviously to be expected. Luckily there is no nerve damage to be seen anywhere, and the issue with the sudden spasms in your body related to pain seem to be largely gone as well. Your rate of recovery is truly astounding, I have to admit." The Doctor said with a smile on his face, and Benjamin chuckled in response.
"Of course, if I have one thing to speak for me it's my vitality!" The old man replied, and the Doctor nodded his head with a laugh.
"Seems to be so, yes. Well, I can't promise anything, but considering how well your body has been reacting to the medication and the speed of your general physical recovery, we might be able to get rid of the high-level pain medication sooner than expected. You would still have to rest most of the time, but it would be a good idea to go on small walks once or twice a day with the help of your family. Luckily you have a quite large property, so walking across the yard and back should be enough." He explained, so Benjamin continued to smile.
"Those are great news, thank you." The old man said with a smile on his face and the Doctor nodded before packing up the differnet equipment that he needed for checking Benjamin out and then helped the old man sit back down inside of the capsule properly again, and then made his way to the door. "Then I'll see you tomorrow, Mister Joyce." The doctor said and then slowly made his way into the hallway and to the front door, greeting Sophia, Benji and Tony on the way, before the three of them came into the room after showing the doctor out.
"So, what did he say?" Benji asked with his arms crossed as he leaned against the wall, and his grandfather just slightly grunted as he re-adjusted the way he was sitting.
"Nothing much, just that I'm recovering better than expected, and that after they stop drugging me until I'm unconscious every day, I should take a few walks in the garden every day." Benjamin answered, before telling them all a few more details about things, like how long and in what way he was supposed to do what part of the recovery and what kind of medication he was actually on, something which he wasn't able to do last time, because he fell asleep mid-conversation. Or rather, mid-sentence.
And after the old man did that, it was time for him to return back to the game world, where other tasks were waiting for him.
---
"Kobolds, come over here." Eisen commanded as he crossed his arms, back inside of the Dungeon space, and the five Dog-Boys came rushing over toward him. Up until now, he had only instructed the Blacksmith-Kobold, and today, he would be doing the same for two other Kobolds, because he would start getting to work with Woodworking and Tailoring. "You, continue practicing smithing. And you four, you choose amongst each other who gets to learn today." Eisen told them, and he immediately saw that the four basic Kobolds looked at each other and then began to growl deeply out of their throat, as if to say 'It's my turn', or something like that.
And while they were doing that, Eisen created a forge for the Blacksmith-Kobold and for himself, because Eisen had to work on some other items today first, all of the metallic parts of the items that would become part of Brody's Arsenal of numerous weapons. And in order to do that, Eisen had been playing around with Maroon for a little while, trying to figure out the best way to integrate it into the weapons, and figured that it would be easiest to just alloy it with some steel.
And so that he would have enough materials to work with, he spent a large part of the last evening preparing enough charcoal to work with, as he wouldn't be able to use his element to heat the Maroon-Steel alloy up.
Eisen didn't necessarily have much Maroon to work with anyway and didn't want to use all of it up at once, despite this being the only proper use that the old man found Maroon to have like this, as nobody else would be able to actually fight with a weapon or use a tool that drained their mana while they were using it.
And while the Maroon-Steel maybe didn't have such effects to the same amount as the regular Maroon did, it at the very least heavily absorbed mana to the point where only a level 100 mage that focused on Wisdom would be able to hold off against it with their high mana regeneration. And even then, the Maroon would make it impossible to cast any spells, so that would still make it incredibly useless. So, Eisen figured that he should make something with it for the one person that he knew of that didn't have any mana to begin with! Brody!
But as mentioned, Eisen didn't have much Maroon-Steel to work with and as such narrowed it down to a few simple weapon-types to work on, which he contacted Brody for to ask what kind of weapon of that type he would want exactly.
A Jian, a type of double-edged straight sword, A chain whip, A dagger, A set of Batons, as well as a spear. Those were the metallic weapons that Eisen would be working on. Only the metallic ones, however, as there were a few other types of weapons that Eisen was going to be making for Brody out of different materials.
And first, Eisen would be working on the Jian. Taking the grey-red metal that Eisen prepared beforehand, the old man placed it into the Forge, which was the first time in a while that he was using a forge that was heated up with coal instead of his own element, which for some reason pumped him up even more.
Just like that, Eisen then started working on the different blades first, because they were rather basic items and all kind of similar to each other, especially the dagger and blade-part of the spear. After finishing the blade parts of those three items, and nearly accidentally throwing the still-hot dagger-blade onto the ground by forgetting that there was Maroon inside of the metal and that he had to place things down on surfaces other than those made of his element, Eisen moved on to the batons.
The old man figured that these didn't need to be all that special in their basic shape either, and just started creating the metal rods before placing them down to the side to cool as well. And next came the item that would take the most amount of time out of all of the items he would be making for Brody, the chain whip.
Creating the basic pieces wasn't that big of an issue, as they were really just thin rod cut up into even parts, and then bent into the shape of a chain-piece. But as Eisen didn't want any parts to bend mid-fight and then cause the whole thing to break apart, the old man really wanted to make sure that the chain-pieces were basically perfectly uniformly self-connected pieces of metal, which was rather annoying to do considering that he had to do so while the chain-piece was already connected to an already-finished piece, so the old man had to fiddle around with a lot of parts.
Either way, Eisen managed to finish everything quite quickly still, however, and then in the end only needed to create a small steel weight which was then connected to one end of the chain.
"Alright, next I guess I really only need to make the handles, huh?" The old man muttered to himself as he scratched the back of his neck and then began to clean up after himself, waiting for the hot coals to cool off properly before handling them and packing them away to be used for other things later.
After Eisen was done with all of that, he already started preparing the workstations for the Woodworking lessons that were the lessons for the first half of the day, and then got all of the materials and tools that he needed out of storage, before already starting to teach one of the Kobolds that had 'Won' the fight over becoming the first to be taught about how to hold the different tools. After all, it would just speed everything up if the Kobold gained a little bit of knowledge on everything before the others were coming to join the lessons.
And just as Eisen was thinking that, the four others made their way into the Dungeon space and then stepped over to the area where the old man was already waiting.
"Alright, let's get started, shall we?" Eisen suggested with a bright smile, before he jerked his head over toward the tables he made with his element. "Today we're starting with woodworking." The old man explained and then immediately began to speak.
"Now, just like with Blacksmithing, the most important and most basic thing to start with is figuring out the right material to start working with in woodworking. When you just want to carve small figures, choosing a relatively soft wood may be the best idea, but if you want a very sturdy chair or table, then you should better choose a firm and hard wood. And aftercare is an incredibly important part of woodworking as well, so that none of the things you make just start to rot away in front of you. Similarly to yesterday, I want you all to first get comfortable with the different materials. You have a few different types in front of you that we'll work with today, and I'm leaving it up to you to decide which task will get which one. Just take the smaller pieces into your hand, rip at it, try to bend it, smell it, anything that might help you with your choice of material later on." Eisen explained, and the five of them, including the Kobold, quickly did as they were told. The Kobold seemed to be rather happy while just chewing on the wood, and it took a little while for Eisen to notice that it had completely forgotten the task and was just playing around, but when the old man took the wood away from it for a moment and then once more told it what to do, the Kobold quickly got used to its new task.
It still seemed to like biting into the wood, but at the very least it didn't chew on it, just a small bite into a piece of it to help figure out how hard the wood was. And Eisen wasn't necessarily opposed to a peculiar method like that either.
But the others chose the more conventional ways, just trying to split the wood up a little bit, or trying to scratch parts of it off, and all of those were rather valid methods to get used to the wood in Eisen's opinion. He would have liked it if he could have made them fell the trees for that wood, but woodfelling would be a lesson for another day, for example once they got to the islands and began to cut down trees to get materials to construct basic huts.