"Good, now, go ahead with this one." Eisen said with a slight smile on his face as he restrained a 'Hill Boar', a relatively large variant of an 'Earth Boar', although it was just a Rank 4 Monster. It was quite strong and had immense defensive prowess, and while it was quite fast when running in a straight line, it was close to incapable of turning while moving at speeds beyond its regular walking-speed.
While it required a fair amount of patience for Eisen to do so, soon enough he managed to just cut into its limbs to make it too hard to keep its heavy body properly on its feet, meaning that Eisen could relatively easily hold it in place to let Sal attack it and finish it off with some spells.
Especially at the start, Sal was a bit hesitant about actually killing monsters, but in the end he somewhat just got used to it. And he managed to go forward with some pretty interesting techniques as well.
For one, as his body had such a high connection to magic, he was able to quite easily enhance his movements to get around different monsters without worry. It didn't fully make up for the halving of his stat-gain in agility, but it was good enough for now.
But the most interesting part about everything was actually the technique he had when it came to creating spells. As he was already capable of letting out thread out of his abdomen, he would usually simply spin it around his fingers in different patterns to create a reusable magic-circle with the help of the thread.
Due to the size, that may only allow him to cast simple attack spells like bolts or spheres, but in the end that was more than enough practice. The thread usually snapped pretty quiclly as well after being used a couple of times, so Sal was constantly trying to re-make the magic-circles on the hand that currently didn't have one on it yet so that he could keep on attacking without a break.
Of course, he couldn't only do this kind of thing when using only his fingers at a base. He managed to do the same when trying to use his arms to allow attacks that are a bit bigger, and he even made a magic-circle that allowed him to propell him upward pretty strongly by using his feet as a base.
But the thing that he was currently working on was the type of web one would expect a spider the size of Sal to have, using the trees in this forest as a base for it while Eisen was taking care of the boar.
And for this one, Sal even added something a little new. It was slightly tough to really understand this magic circle that Sal made, considering that his view of magic was more abstract than others', so there were patterns that Eisen would have never even thought of using.
Either way, when Sal finished the large web magic circle, he climbed down from the web with a thread still connected to the very middle of the web, and then rushed up to the snout of the Hill Boar to tie it around it, and then turned toward Eisen to give him a thumbs-up.
"Well then, go ahead and activate it." The old man said, wanting to finally let go of this dirty beast, and Sal quickly tapped the center of the thread he used to connect the boar to the web, and before Eisen knew it, that web started to glow brightly as Eisen took a look at the flow of mana with his Truth-Seeing Eyes, and quickly noticed that a large amount of natural mana was being sucked in at the back of the web and pushed through the thin thread after being changed around a little, and when the first bout of that mana reached the boar, Eisen let go so that he wouldn't accidentally end up in the crossfire.
Although, the old man probably didn't need to worry, considering that it seemed like the attack only happened inside of the boar, as it quite swiftly started spitting out blood before dropping onto the ground. Anyone else probably wouldn't have understood what exactly just happened, but as Eisen observed the flow of mana even further, he understood. What Sal did was quite simple. He used the natural mana as a base 'material' for the spell, which is exactly how most Sorcery-Magic Circles worked, especially ones at such a scale, and the thread was simply used to extend the range of the spell
Then inside of the boar, all of the blood inside of its body was simply frozen instantly. And then the blood-ice was manipulated to form spikes to destroy the Boar's body from the inside.
It was a rather gruesome attack, but Eisen figured it worked good enough in preserving the materials of the boar, so he didn't really mind all that much.
But more importantly, the death of this Hill Boar triggered something else.
Sal finally gathered enough experience to Rank up to 3! As a light enveloped him, his body grew a fair bit until the light disappeared again, and Eisen could see that exactly what he thought would happen, happened.
His abdomen still looked roughly the same, just that there were some slightly different patterns and that it was simply far larger than before, but the biggest change was with Sal's humanoid torso. He now had actual skin! He was still basically completely white, but at the very least he didn't have a carapace anymore, and a rather cute, child-like face, and hair of course! His eyes were still like that of a spider, of course, although the size slightly changed around a bit.
Sal had two 'central' eyes in the places that regular eyes would be, but at the outer sides of each eye were three smaller, button-sized eyes. They all still looked very spider-like, but he figured that even someone like Xenia might be able to deal with Sal the way he was now.
"Well, well, well, who's this handsome little guy here?" The old man asked with a laugh as he ran his hand through Sal's hair, before the boy started to giggle in response. "Hehe, it's just me!" Sal exclaimed in response, before Eisen just chuckled and nodded his head.
"Of course, of course, how could I not see that?" Eisen laughed, "Now, want to continue on with leveling up a little more?" The old man suggested before Sal immediately nodded his head excitedly and started following behind Eisen as he went to look for the next 'prey', all the whilst Bree was happily taking the hill boar apart and had Sigurd transport all the pieces into the dungeon so that Eisen could take care of the meat, skin, and other materials later on in peace.
And so, for the next couple of hours, Eisen and Sal continued on having the young boy level up as much as possible, and by the end of the night, considering that Eisen could make use of pretty strong monsters to speed the process up, Sal was already quite close to reaching Rank 4 when they all got back to the carriage.
"Now then..." Eisen muttered quietly as he helped Sal into the carriage with his body that was now far harder to fit into such a space than before, but they managed to get him into the Dungeon to let him walk around a bit more comfortably. If this continued on, Sal would have the hardest time out of anyone to fit into the Carriage, except if he somehow turned bi-pedal instead of octo-pedal. Eisen hoped for such an evolution, but it wasn't anything that he could force to happen, after all.
For now, Eisen made the choice of just bringing Sal to Rank 4 in the area around Melroe where he wanted to let Caria and Melissa level up as well, just while being a bit more focused on Sal at the start to bring him up-to-par.
"Let's get back to Melroe, shall we?" The old man suggested as he looked at Bree with a slight wink, and Sky raised his eyebrows confused. "Wait, Bree, you were in Melroe before?" He asked, and his sister looked at him with a bright smile.
"Yup~! It's where I met Eisen!" She exclaimed happily, and Sky sighed deeply in response. "Could you have mentioned that sometime..? I thought we're just going to the place where Eisen first got... It's going to be really troublesome now, isn't it?" The young Fey-Kin asked as he scratched the back of his neck, and Eisen turned to him with a slight chuckle.
"Really, why is that?" He inquired, before Sky just turned to him with a slight frown, the type of expression that you had when you were annoyed with something out of embarrassment. "Well, I have to thank the people there for taking care of Bree, then..." Sky admitted, before Eisen laughed loudly with a swift nod.
"I see, if that's the case, then I'll introduce you to everyone there. It's just another one-day trip, so be excited till then." Eisen exclaimed and slightly stretched before starting to 'feed' Cabarum and Aulu their Oil.
"Can you two take care of the Driving, then? I want to properly work on the Dungeon-Golems." The old man explained, before the two Fey-Kin siblings nodded their heads nearly in sync. With a slight smile at that sight, Eisen stopped feeding the two Automata and then made his way into the back of the carriage, and then directly into the Dungeon, where he didn't even take a step out of the reception-building and instead opened a gate to an area of the lowest floor that Sigurd figured could use a little more expanding anyway. And so, the old man then used that area as a little excavation-spot, because the Core Guardian spent the last little while turning the rock here into... ore.
Simple Iron ore. Of course, there was also another little spot prepared that Eisen wanted to make use of to turn some of the trees here completely into charcoal by enveloping them with his element and heating them up for a while as he was working. That meant he first had to cut them down as well, of course, but that wasn't that big a deal.
Either way, soon enough, Eisen managed to properly mine the Iron Ore and told Sigurd to stop the automatic destruction of the bits and pieces that always dropped off while mining, so that he could properly keep the Ore around.
Luckily, it was surprisingly dense ore as well, and because it was created through the dungeon, it was as pure as it Iron Ore could be. Just a couple of hours later, the currently deepest floor gained a cave that could be turned into a secret room for those that liked exploration, and Eisen had a lot of Iron Ore, which he swiftly started grinding down into powder as much as possible.
In the end, the Iron ore he had here was part of the Dungeon, and regular players couldn't actually destroy it. It would just 'regenerate' immediately before they knew it. But when Eisen worked with this, it didn't act like that at all, even if it still stayed the same to players. So if Eisen made some Golems with the metal he got from this Dungeon-Iron Ore, he was able to create indestructible Guards and Enforcers for the Dungeon.