"Bree, are you up here?" Eisen asked as he approached the top of the ladder leading up to the Crow's nest, and the young Fey-Kin girl stuck her head covered in bright pink hair over its edge.
"Huh? Oh, Eisen! What are you doing up here?" She replied with a smile on her face, and the old man just chuckled as he climbed into the crow's nest.
"I wanted to talk to ask you a little bit about a skill I want to get. You know a lot about these things, so..." The old man explained as he leaned back against the edge, and Bree nodded her head excitedly. "Of course! What skill is it?" Bree asked excitedly, and Eisen answered her happily.
"It's an 'Ego-Item Creation' skill, Sky told me a bit about it but he wasn't able to tell me all that much." The old man said, and Bree thought for a little while with her eyes closed before looking into the air next to her, probably looking through her database, and then nodded her head.
"I can tell you about it, yep! What exactly do you want to know?" As Bree looked up to the old man in front of her, she held her hands behind her back happily, because it's been a while since she and Eisen were alone like this, just talking to each other.
"Basically anything at all... I really don't know anything." Eisen replied, so Bree nodded her head and turned her sight back into the center of the air and then spoke up again, "Well, the type of skill it is is just a 'Synergy Skill', meaning that it will only work together in combination with other skills. The exact version you get depends on your occupation, though. If you're a Weaponssmith, then you'd get a 'Ego-Weapon Creation' skill. Hmm... Ah, you need to have a Grandmaster-Level occupation... And it's a regular occupation skill that you will get when reaching level 200 or 300... It's a high-tier skill, but because Crafter's usually don't have as high a level as combatist do, they get high-tier skills relatively early on..." She explained, while Eisen listened curiously to the explanation, and then asked a question in response.
"Alright... That all makes sense... Do you have any idea what the actual crafting is like then?" He asked, and Bree seemed to continue reading through her database entry again before shaking her head.
"I don't know the actual methods, sorry... But I do know there are different stages to it! Like, at the start you can't make items with a real 'Ego', or with Ranks or Levels... They'll just slightly grow their stats in response to being used. It's easier to build up connectivity with ego-items if you treat them well... That kind of stuff. And only later, probably at Rank 3 or 4, you would be able to create 'Thinking' items that are somewhat like living beings in the form of items!" The Fey-Kin explained, so Eisen nodded his head with a frown.
"Then do you know why exactly I could make Sigurd? It said that it was a type of Ego-Item, an Ego-Golem." He explained, so Bree tilted her head to the side just so slightly and then shrugged. "The Blueprints, maybe? I mean, as items, they're literally indistructable through any means... So they're most likely Divine-Quality items, right? That might be it... Divine-Quality items have very weird effects, so maybe because you're the owner of the blueprints, it made it possible for you to create Sigurd as long as you stuck to the instructions." Bree suggested, so Eisen nodded his head slowly as he moved his fingers through his beard.
"Maybe so, yes. Well, I guess I can try to play around with processes similar to what's described in the blueprints to try and figure out how far I can go with the Ego-Golem creation... Thanks for your help!" Eisen replied with a smile on his face. Even if he didn't get all that much new information, it was still good that he managed to hear a few things that he heard before from others again, just to make sure that the information he had was actually properly consistent with itself.
But Eisen had something else he was curious about as well. "And why exactly are you up here so often?" He asked, and Bree simpy replied with a big smile on her face, "Ah, I have my Scanner on at the moment! It let's me literally save the direct path we're taking from the last town to the islands, and it's a good way to get proficiency~! I'm scanning the fish and plants in the water or the few birds in the sky while I'm up here as well, and there's always different ones without me needing to worry about trying to find anything~! And because a Crow's Nest is made to make you find things in the distance, it extends my Scanner's Range a little bit! Also... It's just pretty." She explained with a grin on her face, before Eisen just smiled at her and nodded his head.
"I see, good to know where we could find you, then. I've got to get going again now, but be free to come join us in the dungeon in a little bit, the gate is in the meeting room." Eisen explained as he was starting to climb back down the ladder, but soon remembered that he was asked to do something else as well.
"Oh, and Dien said that he's waiting in your room and wants to talk to you about something as well." He told her, and Bree nodded her head with a bright smile and started following the old man down the high mast, before the young Fey-Kin made her way to the area with all of the cabins and Eisen stepped back up the stairs to get back to the meeting room, and with that the dungeon, where his 'Students' seemed to be waiting due to having finished the last task of the Alchemy lesson. And so, Eisen figured he should just take a look at what they made, first checking on Stahl's potion.
And what the old man saw when he looked at the bottle, was a spiral of an Average-Grade Health and an Average-Grade Mana potion, intertwined in each other but not combined. "Hmm, explain to me what you did." Eisen asked, and Stahl began to grin.
"Well, a regular potion is already pretty thick, right? At least it's not as thin as water. But even then, if you pour it into a bottle with another potion and shake it, it will definitely combine and either cause an unwanted effect or explode on you. I figured I should go with rather simple potions to demonstrate my idea, because those shouldn't do anything horrible when mixed together. So, what I did was to simply use a little bit more Mana Crystal powder while making the potions, just enough to make them so thick that they wouldn't naturally combine, but not thick enough that ingestion wouldn't work anymore." Stahl explained, and then held up the small bottle with a smile. "And then, I basically just asked Thul to twist the potion bottle around in a circle while I poured the two different potions slowly into it, and here you have it! Oh, and Thul managed to level up pretty well too!" He exclaimed with a smile, and Eisen nodded his head slowly.
"Hmm, so it gives both effects now?" Eisen asked, before Stahl grinned broadly.
"Yup! Well, it gives half the effects of a Health Potion and half the effects of a Mana potion, but that's just because there's simply half of each in this. That can be solved by putting it into a larger bottle, though." He pointed out, before Eisen smiled in response.
"Interesting..." The old man muttered before opening the bottle up and simply downing the content, swishing it around in its mouth a little, and then nodding. "Mhm, it doesn't even really mix in my mouth now, good. The quality itself is also pretty high, so good job on that. Well done, kiddo." Eisen said with a smile and placed the bottle down on the table again before moving onto Rouge.
"So, what did you make?" The old man asked, and Rouge handed the bottle he prepared over to him, before starting to explain. "It's a flavored potion. Especially High-Grade potions or those with very apparent effects taste horrible. So I was trying to figure out if different fruit extracts changed anything about the effects of potions, and when I noticed that they didn't, I started doing the same with one of the worst-tasting potions. It tastes a little like cherry now. The aftertaste is still bad, but at least the bad taste won't throw you off initially while fighting." The young apprentice explained, and Eisen took just a little sip of the potion to see the flavor, and was pleasantly surprised that it was actually somewhat good, although the horrid aftertaste slowly crept up on his tongue.
"Yeah, I know what you mean, it's pretty bad... But good job on changing the flavor a bit. Did you use a special method?" Eisen asked, and Rouge just scratched his cheek while continuing to explain. "Ah, I kind of just de-cored some cherries, smashed them up with the mortar and pestle, split the pulp off the juice, and then dehydrated the juices before mixing them into the other materials." He explained, before sighing out loudly. "It reduces the effect of the potion a little though, and with some potions it might change the effect completely, so this method isn't really the best to use... If you want, I can try and work on this idea a bit more." Rouge said, so Eisen nodded his head with a smile.
"Good idea, do that. Good job." He replied and then moved on over to Parc, who was excitedly waiting for his turn.
"What did you make?" Eisen asked him, before Parc crossed his arms and looked at the the different candy-like items laying on the table in front of him. "Hmm, hardened potions?" Eisen asked confused, but Parc shook his head.
"No, they're candies! Potion candies! Stahl brought back a bunch of super nice candies from the last town we were in, and I got the idea to make these! I did combine it a little with cooking, though... Was that fine?" Parc asked with a wry smile, and Eisen nodded his head. "Mhm, that's totally fine. I asked you to come up with a potion-based idea, so as long as these mainly are supposed to be used like potions, that's fine."
"Okay! Well, mainly what I did was just make hard-candy with water, sugar and corn syrup, and then mixed the materials for the potions together into that... I didn't do that twisting-thing though, sorry, I just wanted to see how this would work first." Parc said apologetically, but Eisen shook his head. "That's fine, don't worry. It's mostly about the idea right now. So, I'm guessing you're supposed to just put them into your mouth at the start of battle and keep the effects for a while?"
"Mhm! Exactly!" Parc replied, and then pointed at the small red candies with a smile. "These are Health Candies."
And so, Eisen grabbed one of them and put it into his mouth, before taking a knife and scratching his arm with it to lose a little HP, before noticing that, after the first few drops, new blood already wasn't coming out of the small wound because it had started to heal. "Good, good... Works like a treat." The old man said with a wink, and then stepped over to the next apprentice, although he turned around to Parc again. "Good job to you too. And now, Koro. You basically already passed this one this one up because you showed me a good new idea in your test to become a Magicraftsman, but I noticed that you were still working on something. What is it?" Eisen asked with a light, suspicious frown, and Koro slowly handed him the small, see-through balloon in his hand with red mist inside. "I just made a thin, softened layer of mana crystal, filled it with Potion-Mist, and added a small separate part as a 'plug', and made that plug so that it was pretty havy to be able to throw the balloon properly. When you throw it on the ground, the plug pops out and the mist spreads around." Koro explained in a relatively monotone voice, and Eisen nodded his head with a smile, happy that Koro didn't do anything extreme this time around.
"Alright, well done. This is relatively simple, but probably also quite useful." The old man said with a smile and then swiftly stepped over to the 'Apprentice' who was the only one that was told not to come up with their own idea just yet, the Kobold. And after checking through the different potions that Eisen had the Kobold make, he nodded with satisfaction, ready to move onto the next skill.