With a slight smile on his face, Eisen swiftly gathered some mana above his palm, trying to use his new Alchemy-Ability to compress it as much as he possibly could. And just like he expected, mana could be compressed an insane ammount, meaning that even after using 1000 MP and reached the limit to his compression, he had a crystal that was maybe the size of his fingernail.
But even then, this was great! He could finally create crystalized mana on his own, which meant that he now had a way to collect mana! At the very least, that's what he was hoping was the case. The reality was that, even with high amounts of mana in the environment, it was incredibly hard to actually create a large amount of crystalized mana. For one, it was far harder to actually manipulate mana that wasn't your own, and that counted double for ambient mana. Then, Eisen wasn't able to compress it just as much as he was able to compress his own mana, which also did make a fair amount of sense to him. Either way, Eisen knew that he had to come up with a good idea to actually collect mana relatively easily.
Of course he could always just use Soul-Generators, but souls weren't exactly the most convenient ressource to get your hands on, so Eisen wanted to rather try and find another way. After all, he was already using a massive amount of mana-crystals for the Mana-Battery, so he didn't want to be overly wasteful of other materials like that.
"Alright, let me think about this properly... With compression, it is possible to, to an extent, collect ambient mana. A large amount of it is lost when trying to 'clear' its element, so the only proper way to fuel it would be with a mana source?" Eisen muttered to himself, although Constant seemed to have an even better idea.
"Then why are you even trying to clear the element anyway?" The Core Helper asked, and immediately, Eisen raised his eyebrows in response.
"Of course... Yeah, that's actually a really good point..." The old man muttered to himself, and swiftly started to create the first protoype for a collection device, enchanting a crystal with the compression ability in a way that it would only affect surrounding mana and crystalize it directly around the center-crystal.
That crystalized mana would then be taken in by a simply mana-absorption enchantment and added to a temporary mana-battery, mixing the element in with the mana generated by the Soul-Generators that Eisen did want to spare for this. Not only would that allow for special effects depending on the area you were in, but it would also make sure that some mana could be saved.
"Perfect... Hmm, I'll work it in a bit better later, but for now, let me just work on the base..." Eisen whispered and then swiftly got to work, but when he actually looked at the time, he realized that it was just about time to go to sleep, so the old man instead let his monsters know to come back to the workshop while looking at the two Core Guardians next to him.
"Serio, has everyone properly settled in at the castle?" Eisen asked, and the Town Guardian swiftly nodded his head.
"Indeed they have. Most of them are already sleeping in the different rooms as well. Some of the monsters in town were already calmed down by the Lords and they started training them to become more civilized again, so they should be amazing help in the reconstruction of town. Through the actual system, about 10% of the area we now have control over has been reconstructed as well, although all the mana that has been saved up in the core has been used up, so we will need to wait a little while to continue that way." Serio explained, so Eisen moved his fingers through his beard in satisfaction, and sat down in front of one of the worktables in this room, writing a short list of materials and tools that he needed the next day, handing it to Constant.
"Alright, then thank you for your hard work, you two. But Constant, if it's not too much to ask, could you grab what we have of these things and bring them up here by tomorrow morning?" The old man asked, and the Core Helper immediately nodded his head.
"Of course! You can count on me, Master Eisen!" Constant exclaimed, and Eisen slowly nodded with a grateful expression.
"Thank you. Then I will be heading to sleep now. We will speak tomorrow." The old man said as he looked at the three monsters stepping through the door, picking them up onto his arms with a smile on his face before sitting down in the corner of the room, slowly dozing off into sleep.
---
The next morning, when Eisen woke back up, he was soon surrounded by a huge mountain of materials, which he swiftly recognized as the exact ones that he wanted Constant to get for him.
And then, he figured he should just quickly get to work already, for which Eisen first created a certain small alloy that was name-giving for his granddaughter, Alnico.
The material itself wasn't all that hard to make, and was just basically a mixture between three different materials, plus Iron as a balancing-material. In order to create Alnico, he needed Aluminium, Nickle, and Cobalt, all of which he luckily had on hand. He would also add a small amount of copper as well, because it was simply often done to create the alloy.
And it didn't take long for Constant and Serio to realize that that the old man got to work either, and as such swiftly appeared in the workshop to watch him do his thing, something which they seemed to have missed quite a bit.
After the metal alloy was finished, he swiftly got to work on actually turning it into a permanent magnet, because that was what this metal was used for, and it was a perfect material for the magnets that needed to be placed inside of speakers as well.
When the metal had cooled down a fair bit and Eisen could properly see that the metal had properly alloyed and become what he wanted, the old man turned the heat of the forge inside of this place up to 810° Celsius, at which point it was properly magnetized and turned into the permanent Magnet that Eisen needed.
Next came the part that Eisen himself was a slight bit unsure about. It's been a fair while since he's even looked inside of a speaker, so he wasn't 100% familiar with how they properly worked. He did spend the time that he was sleeping in the game in his Desktop mode instead of just sleeping regularly so that he could research it a bit on the internet, which helped refresh his memory a good bit, but Eisen still wasn't 100% sure he would be able to do this perfectly on the first try.
But that wasn't an issue, after all, he could do this as much as he wanted to. He had more than enough materials, after all. Either way, after Eisen finished creating the magnet, he created the 'Cone', which was the part that was vibrating to create the different soundwaves that a speaker gave off, which the old man made out of copper, a relatively light but also quite stable material. He was mainly using this as a test material anyway, he might still switch it out for something else later.
And that cone was swiftly enchanted to allow for better transfer and creation of sound, both through a vibration-enhancing enchantment and through a conceptual enchantment connected to that vibration-enhancement, for which Eisen quite literally just went for a 'Sound-Enhancement' enchantment.
The other parts were also actually more straightforward than Eisen expected, and the only thing that he really had to worry about was the way that electricity would be transfered into the voice coil, although that was actually rather easily done when Eisen played around with some enchantments.
Because they were both, in the loosest sense, simple energy, it was surprisingly easy to change mana to electricity, and as this was regulated through enchantments anyway, it also wasn't too hard to properly create an enchantment that was able to work with direct 'input' sources.
In the end, Eisen swiftly created a simple speaker, although he took it apart and re-made it because he wasn't totally happy with how it ended up. So, after a few more tries, Eisen figured he got the hang of it and then had a few speakers to work with, although at that point, he was already todl that his grandchildren and their group arrived in the area of town regulated by the Town Core.
"Hmm, Serio, could you maybe meet them and let them know that I'm not done yet? I should be ready by... afternoon?" The old man said as he moved his fingers through his beard, and the Town Core Guardian swiftly disappeared in a cloud of mist, re-appearing a few minutes later to tell Eisen that they would just spend that time helping out around the area, while Eisen continued to work on what he wanted to make for Alnico.
It was the most complicated item that he was going for out of all of the ones that the old man would be making for that group, so it also would take a little longer, especially because modern electrical engineering wasn't his strong suit.
On the other hand, he would probably be able to handle everything with magic and enchantments, although the Problem with the lack of programming-capabilities came in for the more complicated ones.
Either way, for now, the old man continued to work. He had now created the most important limbs of the item, so next was the body to connect those limbs to, meaning the actual speakers.
In the end, they were just some small metal boxes with information-receivers inside of them, a gravity enchantment to make them float if wanted, as well as a balancing-enchantment to make sure it wouldn't flip over somehow.
Then, after that, came the 'Head' and 'Heart' of the item. The 'Heart' was of course made up of all of the different items that Eisen had made so far to power the whole item and make sure that the different 'abilities' could be used, while the 'Head' was made up of all of the logical things such as enchantments for the actual part of interaction with it.
Of course, Eisen wanted to make everything as compact as he possibly could, but there was still a limit to that. He had another solution to that issue. The 'Heart' would become a backpack created with the help of spatial gems to increase the size of the space inside to fit everything properly. It might not be able to fit anything else beside that, but that wasn't too big a deal either. At the very least, it would be able to store the heart and the speakers, when it came to general items, Eisen would come up with some ideas for that as well.
And then, the 'Head' of everything would also be placed inside of the backpack, but would have a connective interface to activate everything in the form of another item that Eisen would be making later.
But first, he had to actually create that 'Head' as well, and that took another long time, and Eisen even had to return to his minimal size.
Hours later, when he was finally finished with everything enchantment and equipment-wise, he got to work on the other things, the backpack, and the connective interface.
The backpack ended up being an cloth backpack, the cloth being a mixture of spatial-gem thread and aluminum thread. Then, the inside of the backpack got a few more stitched-enchantments to make sure that the backpack was actually capable of having as large a space inside as possible, after which Eisen slowly put everything inside, making sure that whatever was needed to be used from the outside could actually be used.
After that came the connective interface, in the form of a pair of over-ear headphones with small interactive setting menus on both sides.
Eisen even added another microphone that could be hooked up to the control-system, and then, after finally finishing everything, sat down on one of his tables exhaustedly.
The physical work wasn't actually what exhausted him, it never was, but it's been a while since he's had to think about what he was doing that hard. And if Eisen was being honest, he didn't even really mind it either. After all, it was in order to make a DJ-Set for his Granddaughter, while at the same time defying the will of whoever was toying with him.