"I... I don't know what you're talking about..." Benji pointed out with a wry smile, but his grandfather just stared at him with a blank expression, "I was your age once too, you know?"
"Okay, fine, you were right, she was with me last night... but please for the love of god, don't say anything that makes me want to rip my ears off." The teenager interrupted immediately, but Benjamin just sighed deeply in response and shook his head disappointedly.
"Be kind to this old crippled man for once..." He said with a light sniffle, and Benji looked at him with a wry smile immediately, "Hey, you lost the right to use the 'Cripple' card the moment you made your breakfast just now."
While clicking his tongue, Benjamin stood back up and placed his empty plate into the sink, before looking at his Grandson with a slight smile, "Either way, just have fun with Evalia. I want to reach the legendary stage of 'Great-Grandparent' soon." He pointed out and then turned around, slowly making his way toward the livingroom while Benji just embarrassedly yelled at his back, "I hate that you know language like that now!"
"Right, right..." Benjamin replied quietly as he sat down on his armchair, and at the same time, Andrew finished his call and exhaustedly dropped down onto the couch.
"I hate... people." Andrew whispered quietly, lightly looking at Benjamin as he was doing so. The old man looked at his friend with a smile, "Well, at least you won't have to deal with those kinds of people in person for now." He pointed out, making Andrew raise his brows lightly in response.
"You know what? Good point, ya geezer." He replied with a soft laugh before seemingly remembering something, "Finally arrived at the next town?"
With a slide shake of his head, Benjamin replied, "Not yet, we're getting there soon though. We've been encountering something called 'Experimental Seed' more and more. I wanted to ask Jyuuk about it once he and Xenia woke up."
"Experimental Seed? Like... for plants?" Andrew asked with a puzzled expression, and Benjamin just leaned back in his armchair as he lightly tapped the armrest in thought, "Technically yes, but it's encapsuled in seemingly random gems. Sometimes it's rubies, sometimes emeralds, and other times sapphires. But whenever I try to take the actual seed out of it, that seed immediately rots and can't be grown anymore." Benjamin explained, before Andrew scratched his chin a bit.
"Huh... Yeah, I have not a single clue what that might be, ask the plantmeister." Andrew said, pointing at the hallway behind the old man. Once Benjamin turned around, he could already see Haruo standing there with a bit of confusion written on his face.
"Plantmeister?" Haruo asked with a slight frown, and Andrew just shook his head, "Nevermind. Well, you heard most of it, didn't you? What do you think?"
"I haven't heard of anything like that while I was still there, so it must be rather new. Just ask around the town a bit, they should be able to tell you at least a little about it. It might be some sort of new method of advanced plant-growth that a player came up with." Haruo pointed out, "Even if we have special positions, that doesn't mean that there aren't others that are pretty skilled at what they do."
With a slow nod, Benjamin swiftly nodded his head, "Fair enough... Although I doubt that it's just for advanced plant-growth. Neither do I think it's something at the level a Player could already achieve. Roughly half the monsters in the area that I've met had those 'Experimental Seeds' where their joints were. None of them grew or anything, they were just there." Benjamin explained to them, and Haruo swiftly grew a fair bit more attentive.
"Oh? A Monster-based experiment... Hmm, I mean, while I was in town I DID hear about some Naturalist that was experimenting with somehow artificially increasing the strength of people by fusing them with non-human things like plants, but... He was more of a laughingstock in that town. Maybe he managed to get some kind of new ability or skill?" Haruo suggested, and Benjamin stared moving his fingers through his beard in thought.
"Huh... A sudden new powerful skill... I think I should visit that Naturalist sometime. Maybe he knows something about the Dragon I'm looking for." Benjamin pointed out, before Haruo just lightly shrugged in response.
"Sounds like a good enough theory, yeah."
---
Back in the other world, Eisen swiftly stood up from where he had gone to sleep and looked around. It seemed like everyone else was still sleeping, so Eisen figured he should let them do so for a while longer and just work on leveling his new skill up a bit.
He didn't have that many chances to work with it over the time that they were travelling, but at least Eisen managed to bring it to Rank 2 already. And the Yang-Multitool was also at Ego-Rank 4 now. It was seemingly helping Eisen's movement a bit more, more easily reacting to what he was planning to do. In general, the multitool let Eisen work a fair bit quicker than he did before, at least in some situations when it came to heavily detailed work. He was incredibly curious about how much it would help once its Ego-Rank reached Rank 5.
But for now, Eisen just started working with some more elemental mana to make some magic arrows for Rudia. There wasn't any specific reason for it though. They were simply useful against monsters that had high physical but low magical resistance. And on top of that, since they were relatively easy to make and basically any version of Elemental-Mana Arrow had some sort of use, it was a good way to level his skill up.
What Eisen found recently when playing around with these and enchanting them was rather interesting as well. When Eisen enchanted these Mana Items, the enchantments were basically functioning like Magic Circles, meaning that he could make direct use of different magical properties of each of the elements.
There were some arrows made with Caria's 'Mushroom Forest' element that Eisen made so that they would create a 'Mushling', like Caria called them, of the target once it was hit. With Sal's 'Marionette' element, Eisen could make an arrow that would create a thick thread between where the target was hit and the ground to keep it in place a bit more.
And of course, there were many other applications and ways that Eisen could play with these Mana Items. He was actually able to slightly look past that fake and artificial feeling that it gave him when working with the materials because of that. Either way, after making a few more bundles of those arrows, Eisen figured he should continued experimenting with the Mana Items that he had been thinking about for a fair while now.
The 'Instant Potions' as Eisen called them. If he could produce them in bulk, they would definitely come in useful. With just a little bit of mana, you would be able to use the potion without even grabbing it, which could be a life-saver in a life-and-death battle.
Either way, for a while now, Eisen was trying to concentrate on coming up with good combinations for potions, in the sense of which element would be a good fit for which potion, and would now try that out.
Whenever he had the chance during the trip, Eisen would stop and collect any crystalized mana from random mines and save them in Mana Batteries, so he had a fair amount of at least the four basic elements now.
First came a potion he wanted to make using the Fire Element. He pulled some of the elemental mana out of the battery and compressed it into a large enough crystal before then simply setting it to act like water.
Then, the regular process began. Eisen mixed the Fire-Water with some ground-down crystalized fire-mana and then added in the regular herbs and roots like normal. Luckily Fire Mana itself wasn't hot until it was 'lit up' by the user, so Eisen could mix it properly like this.
And then once everything was mixed, he just boiled the Fire-Water away and was then left with a couple relatively simple attack-damage enhancing potions. In total, there was enough for six potions in total.
Two of those potions were filled into a bottle made with Fire-Elemental Mana, two into a bottle made with pure mana, and two into a regular bottle.
The reason he split it up like this was to see how the containers would change the effect of the potion, of course. And there was also a reason why he had two potions for each bottle type.
Since it was possible for Eisen to influence the Fire-Mana a bit now, he simply did what one usually would with Fire-Elemental mana. He made it burn.
Immediately, three of the bottles' contents started burning. And with the next thought, Eisen set all six bottles as finished items.
But before he knew it, the glass bottle with the burning contents shattered immediately, and the mana-potion disappeared before hitting the ground.
Eisen was slightly disappointed to see that, but he didn't really expect anything else anyway. Either way, next, he looked at the other bottles. The flaming-contents of the Fire-Mana bottle were burning a bit stronger and apparently also hotter than in the Pure-Mana bottle. It seemed like the bottles with the flaming-content had a time-limit to be used, and the longer you waited the lower the effect of it was. They started with higher effects, but within roughly five hours, it would be lower than the effect from the non-flaming contents.
"Hmm, then the best would be to add an enchantment to the cork to make it that anyone can light the potion up when needed, huh?" Eisen muttered to himself, and then placed the bottles to the side with a light grin on his face, just staring at the one complete Fire-Mana bottle with the flaming contents. "A Flame in a bottle, huh?" Eisen muttered quietly, and then thought about it for a while.
"What if..." He whispered, and then slowly started to divert his thoughts away from the potions again. What he would make now would work similarly, but would have a vastly different result at the end of the day.
First things first, Eisen got some more fire Mana into a compressed state, and then had it act like water before... freezing it. It seemed a bit weird considering that it was Fire-Mana, but once Eisen actually tried to use the freezing-enchantment that he made to preserve food more easily, he found that it worked like normal. It also made sense in a way, since it was also possible to heat up crystalized mana as it was set to be metal-like, so of course it should also be possible to freeze it.
Either way, once the Fire-Mana was frozen in place, Eisen formed it into a sphere and then started to turn it into a 3D enchantment, or basically a 3D spell, and soon encapsulated it in a thin layer of Fire-Mana turned into glass. Now, Eisen just had to wait for the Fire-Mana to melt again.
And just like he thought, the enchantment stayed in place like it was, since it was created using mana as a base, technically at least. The Fire-Mana was still flowing around like water inside of the sphere while Eisen enchanted the glass-like surface to shatter five seconds after mana was pulled out of it. Basically, you could start everything by putting your mana inside, and then it would start the timer once you pulled it out again. Simple as that.
Either way, then, Eisen made it so that the Fire-Mana inside of the sphere would start to burn, and then swiftly made his way to one of the work-in-process Dungeon Floors to test this out. Since the floors 11 to 20 would have a 'Desert' and 'Ravine' theme, there wasn't much growing here, especially not this early in their construction.
So, Eisen swiftly poured his mana into the enchanted sphere and threw it as far away as he could, pulling his mana out as he was at it, and then counted down.
And exactly five seconds later, Eisen's could see the large magical explosion of pure flames in the distance, flinging Sand and dirt toward him. Just now, Eisen created a Grenade Spell.