Eisen grabbed the piece of wood in front of him and filled the whole object out with his mana. And just as Morrom instructed, so that he could soften it, Eisen changed his Mana into a liquid state and thought for the piece of wood to react.
After a few seconds, Eisen noticed that the wood lost its hardness and shape, and slowly sagged down into a blob. It truly felt very weird. It's outer texture still felt like wood, but it gave in to Eisen's touch as Jelly or Slime would.
Eisen grabbed two sides of the weird wood-jelly and pulled it apart, playing around with it in his hands to properly feel it, as it was completely new material to what he was used to. This way, it would be far easier to form materials into a certain shape. The only down part of this was that it drained a lot of Mana from him, as just softening this small piece of wood took two-thirds of his whole Mana.
Morrom looked over Eisen's shoulder and nodded approvingly. "Good! That worked fairly quickly. But you don't have a lot of mana left, right? Bree, can you give him some again?" He asked, and the Fey-kin nodded with a bright smile.
"Yup~! I'll do that~!" She replied happily and began to put her mana into Eisen, who gratefully accepted it.
"Thanks, Bree." He smiled gently and then returned back to his experimentation. Eisen pushed more of his mana out of his hands and filled out the wooden-slime with it, and then turned it into its solid state. Slowly, the blob of wood turned hard again, keeping its new shape but regaining its solidity.
As he was now holding this rounded piece of wood, he got an idea and wanted to test something out. Once again, Eisen softened the wood as far as he could, and then pulled his mana out and returning it to its raw, energy-like state.
Out of that mana, Eisen formed a hollow sphere and placed it around the wood, slowly trying to transmute the softened wood into a sphere, and tried to keep it in that shape while he pushed solid mana into the wood, hardening it.
After Eisen was sure that the sphere was solid again, he pulled out his Mana and looked at the perfectly round wooden sphere.
Morrom laughed at the sight of that and nodded his head. "Alright, you've already figured that out, huh? The easier something is to naturally form, the easier it is to transmute. I wanted to see if you can find that out for yourself, and you did! Great! Now, I think the best way to level and practice transmutation is really to just work with all those potions. Hardening them and turning them into perfect spheres should be easy enough, right?"
"I see, thanks! I'll do that, then. Any tips you can give me?" Eisen asked, and Morrom looked up in thought for a few seconds.
"Oh, just take it slow, if you don't manage to do something right away, then try again. You can't ruin the potion through transmutation, so you have infinite tries."
"Got it, thanks." Eisen smiled and looked over at the Jellies and Mists that Eisen made a little bit ago. "Actually, can I also turn those things into pills?"
Morrom looked at them as well and nodded. "Well, yeah? Kind of. You can turn them into pills, but they won't work like they're supposed to. For example, let's take the mist. If you turn it into a pill, the requirement to activate the effect stays the same, meaning you have to breathe it in. You can't breathe in a pill, right? Same with the Jellies. You can absorb a semi-solid, but not a full solid. It makes them easier to store, so I guess it wouldn't hurt?" The Elf-Dwarf explained, and Eisen nodded.
"Makes sense, thanks. I'll get to work, then." Eisen nodded and took out one of the glass bottles.
He pulled out the cork and pushed some of his mana inside, turning it solid where the Health Potion is, and when he sees that it's slowly becoming slime-like, poured it onto his hand. He pulled out his mana and formed it into a sphere around the potion, pushing it into the shape of a small sphere the size of a cherry tomato.
Once the Potion was formed into the right shape, Eisen pushed his mana into it again and slowly turned it solid.
[You created a Low-Grade Health Pill]
[Low-Grade Health Pill]
[Quality - Perfect][Rank - 1]
[Description] A small pill made of a Low-Grade Health Potion. Will take effect when ingested. It has been formed and hardened through transmutation.
[Effect] Recover 150 HP
"Ah, so it recovers 50 HP less? That's not too bad." Eisen exclaimed and looked over to Morrom.
"Yep. It's not horrible. 50 HP can be a lot when it comes to life and death, though." Morrom said, and then moved back toward his own work, leaving Eisen and Bree to theirs.
Eisen moved onto the next potion and turned it into a pill. As each one took around five minutes, it was quite obvious that he wouldn't be able to finish this for quite a while. He would make as many as he could today, and use his free time to continue this endeavor so that he could finish the pills before he and Bree began hunting outside of Melroe.
---
It was around 30 minutes before Eisen and Bree would leave Everything Magic for the day, and Eisen finished about 50 pills. He slightly sped up toward the end of it, so he finished more than he thought he would. But either way, after 50 pills, even Eisen felt like this was getting kind of monotonous, and Bree was running a little bit low on mana as well, even with her high mana pool.
Eisen wanted to do something different, something more interesting to end the day. He took ten bottles of the Low-Grade Health potion and poured them together into a bowl.
Eisen formed his mana into a tiny humanoid figure, albeit only a very rough one, and placed it over the potion. Using the 'pull' method of transmutation, Eisen pulled the liquid potion into the mold of mana.
When his mana was filled with the potion, Eisen slowly activated hardening and turned the potion into a shining red figurine.
[Low-Grade Health Doll]
[Quality - Perfect][Rank - 1]
[Description] A small doll made of 10 Low-Grade Health Potions. Will take effect when ingested. It has been formed and hardened through transmutation.
[Effect] Recover 1000 HP
"Huh, even less recovery? Anyway, doesn't matter…" Eisen muttered to himself and continued his plan. He placed the small red figure onto the table and poured his mana into it, completely filling it out.
Slowly, Eisen shifted the humanoid figure of Mana, imitating a walking motion in snail-pace, and activating transmutation to pull the Doll's limbs to where he wants it to.
After a while, Eisen managed to make the Doll walk a few centimeters forward, just when Morrom came back into the room.
"Oh? Don't tell me you managed Golemancy, haha." He laughed and looked over Eisen's shoulder, who tilted his head and looked at Morrom.
"Golemancy?"
"Just a joke, don't worry. But well, Golemancy is basically to create a doll, usually humanoid but not necessarily, and have it move around autonomously. Obviously, you're doing this with transmutation. I can show you how to make a golem core, though, if you're interested."
"Hmm, that definitely sounds interesting. Let's do that sometime soon then!"
"Yeah, let's! For today, maybe you should get back to the Inn, though. I've got some work to do, and that might be pretty… well, explosive." Morrom laughed embarrassedly.
"Haha, alright. Bree seems kind of tired as well, so we should really get back. I can leave the Potions here for now though, right?" Eisen asked, and Morrom nodded.
"Of course, don't worry about those. You'll be back by tomorrow morning anyway, right?"
"Yep, exactly. See you tomorrow, Morrom!"
---
"Morrom, what the hell happened?" Eisen asked worried as he looked at the workshop. The one half, where most of the important projects were standing, and where Eisen worked the day before, was left basically untouched. The other half of the workshop was usually wide open without many items laying around, either for larger projects or for the case that something happened like it apparently did last night.
The whole half of the workshop was completely obliterated, and a big spherical room, with its center where Morrom's worktable for explosives stood the day before, was formed.
On its edge, Morrom stood, staring into it.
"Huh? Ah, well… my project worked!" He muttered out and smiled embarrassedly.
It was the morning of the next day, and Eisen and Bree entered Everything Magic excited to see what would happen when Eisen broke through the enchanting skill.
However, when they entered the workshop, they were faced with this.
Eisen sighed out loudly and walked up next to Morrom. "And what project would that be?"
Smugly, Morrom crossed his arm and jumped into the whole. "A compression bomb!" He smiled and looked at a small, fist-sized sphere on the bottom of the hole. Morrom placed his hands around it and tried pulling it up with all his might, but the sphere wouldn't budge.
"Yes! It really did work!" Morrom yelled out happily and placed his hand onto the small sphere. From the distortions of light happening around it, Eisen knew that Morrom was using his mana. Slowly, the sphere grew and grew, and Morrom held out his second hand as well. The whole room seemed to shift and twist due to the amount of mana filling it, and the holes that were caused by the bomb were filling up again.
After a few minutes, the whole room was nearly completely restored, with the exception of missing furniture and tools.
"What the hell was that?" Eisen asked curiously, and Morrom quickly explained.
"Pretty simple, really. I infused an alchemy ability into a crystal with enchanting, and it blew up. The ability was compression, and it worked, compressing the whole part of the room. I simply decompressed it and used transmutation to restore the room."
"If this is what alchemy can do in later Ranks, I really can't wait!"
"Yeah, haha, it's really amazing, isn't it? Anyway, should we get to Enchanting now?" Morrom asked dismissively of what just happened to the Workshop, and since there wasn't much reason to stick to this topic, Eisen nodded with a gentle smile.
"Alright! Then let me explain the basics of enchanting. There are two types, the first being carved enchantment. And the second is ability enchantment. Carved enchantment is fairly simple. You have a surface, it can be basically anything, and you carve patterns into it while expending mana. The only difficulty is knowing what pattern fits to what enchantment you want. Ability enchantment is something you can't do just yet, as it's unlocked at rank 2. It's placing abilities you yourself possess into an item or crystal."
Eisen listened closely to the explanation and thought it was simple enough. When it came to carving, he did have experience, of course. It only came to the conditions needed to carve something good.
"Let's start with basic carving. Mana Crystals are still a perfect base for that, so let's just put simple enchantments into some of them. It always starts at a center point. From then on, you expand it outward with different runes and patterns. For now, let's try a simple flame enchantment. First, flatten the mana crystal with transmutation." Morrom explained quickly and placed a fist-sized mana crystal onto the table in front of Eisen.
[New Quest - Enchanting Tutorial]
[Description] Morrom Marson offered to teach you Enchanting. He told you to carve a simple Flame Enchantment into a Mana Crystal. Follow his instructions to the best of your abilities.
[Reward] Enchanting Skill; Experience
[Failure] You will have to try again
[Time Limit - None]
He nodded and placed his hand over the crystal, pushing out his mana. Slowly, he pushed the crystal into shape and flattened its top.
"Good. Now, take this needle and carve this into the crystal. Constantly use mana, and deeply think about the effect. You've seen how it works before, so that should be simple." Morrom said and handed Eisen a thick needle as well as a piece of paper with a simple pattern on it, similar to what magic circles looked like, at least from what Eisen knew about them through basic research.
In its center, it had a simple circle with a shape that looked like a flame inside of it, and around it, a number of triangles pointed outward. Around each triangle was a small circle, and then another large circle around the whole pattern as if framing it.
Eisen looked at the crystal and smiled, setting the tip of the needle against it before getting to work.
----------
[Eisen]
[Race - Giant-Dwarf Halfling][Occupation - None][Level - 9]
[HP - 500][MP - 390]
[STR - 34][END - 41][AGI - 38][INT - 29][WIS - 30][CHA - 10]
[Titles]
-[Original of the Mechanical Arts]
-[Limitbreaker IV]
[Skills]
-[A Dwarf's Hands][Rank - 1][Level - 69]
-[A Giant's Strength][Rank - 1][Level - 6]
-[Alchemy][Rank - 2][Level - 7]
-[Appraisal][Rank - 1][Level - 7]
-[Blacksmithing][Rank - 1][Level - 58]
-[Drawing9[Rank - 0][Level - 99]
-[Leatherworking][Rank - 29][Level - 4]
-[Mana Copy][Rank - 1][Level - 4]
-[Mana Double][Rank - 2][Level - 41]
-[Mana Manipulaion][Rank - 1][Level - 72]
-[Tailoring][Rank - 2][Level - 6]
-[Tool Connection][Rank - 1][Level - 10]
-[Woodworking][Rank - 0][Level - 49]