[You are now level 295]
With a pleasantly surprised expression, Eisen looked in front of him as he opened his status and just quickly put his five new points into his stats.
[Eisen]
[Race – Giant-Dwarf Halfling][Occupation – Omni Craftsmaster][Level – 295]
[Guild – World's Peak]
[HP – 6932][MP – 6932]
[STR – 362][END – 362][AGI – 363][INT – 362][WIS – 362][CHA – 43][SS – 344]
"Hmm, my stats rose a fair bit, huh?" Eisen said with a light smirk before waving his status away again, and then looked in front of him into the distance of the desert again. What he just killed was a Desert Worm, an annoying monster that made it practically impossible to keep moving in a straight line.
Usually they weren't that hard to deal with, but as they were able to create annoying sinkholes, it got tougher and tougher to just keep on running. The biggest issue was when a couple of Desert Worms came together and basically created a single huge sinkhole.
Luckily that only happened to Eisen once, but he was able to actually rather easily get rid of them by using smaller versions of his magic-grenades and throwing them into the sinkholes whenever he found them. He actually used Frost-Mana for this, since most of the monsters in this Desert were extremely weak to the cold.
It was pretty tough to then try and collect their materials, but as they didn't really have anything that Eisen thought to be useful anyway, he just let most of them underground for now where they would be taken apart by the ambient mana pretty soon.
And all those Desert Worm corpses made it easy for Eisen to avoid the other pest of this place, the Sand Vulture. While they were fine most of the time, they kept circling above Eisen constantly. Their bodies seemed to create sand on its own that kept dropping down onto him, and that was incredibly annoying to the point of Eisen seriously considering to make a gun to shoot them down whenever he saw them.
But once the Desert Worm corpses were around, the Sand Vultures finally stopped annoying him all the time so that they could keep moving more quickly again.
Just after the sun went down, Eisen spotted some lights in the distance, ones that didn't seem to be just created through some luminescent monsters, "Alright, it seems like we'll finally be at a town soon." The old man said as he looked down in front of himself, and Melissa swiftly made one of her bees fly further ahead just to check the place out a bit.
"Yes, seems like a normal town. Not another bandit hideout." Melissa explained as she slightly turned her head around toward Eisen, who simply returned a smile.
"Oh, good. We managed to get some good materials from there, but other than that, they were rather annoying." The old man muttered quietly as they continued riding on Fafnir's back toward the town that they found, slowing down once they approached the gate.
Standing in front of the gate was a Demon, currently just leaning against the wall in boredom. Although, once he spotted Eisen, it seemed like he grew a slight bit excited again. Or rather, when he spotted the dragon that Eisen was riding on.
He drew his weapon nearly immediately, although he grew quite disappointed when Fafnir slowed down and Eisen stepped off his back and approached the gate with peaceful intentions, "Good evening." Eisen said with a smile, and the guard sighed deeply as he looked back at the old man, "Yup."
Slowly, the guard started to take a look at Fafnir with clear excitement, and just glanced at the three monster children and Eisen himself for only a moment before returning back to the gate to open it up.
"You can come through now." The Guard told them and with a grateful smile, Eisen stepped through the gate and was swiftly followed by the others.
The towns in this desert really had the feeling of those classic arabic desert towns with flat-roofed houses. Despite it being night, there were numerous people walking around and trading different goods with each other. It seemed like instead of money, while it was still used a fair amount, most of the NPCs used actual items to trade for other items.
"Hmm... Interesting." The old man muttered quietly, before immediately proceeding to step through the town with a light smile on his face, trying to inspect as many of the different things here that he could. There were actually quite a lot of spices that he couldn't get that easily in other parts of the continents that Eisen instantly bought as much as he could of.
Even if he were to be able to get these spices somewhere else, they would most likely not be nearly as fresh and high-quality as what he managed to get his hands on now. Of course, that didn't only count for spices, there were also materials here that were quite different to usual ones. Even armor that was traded here was largely cloth, albeit one woven from special monsters.
Either way, there was one thing that was vastly different to a usual desert-town that Eisen knew about. There were numerous artificial rivers, ponds, and aqueducts spread throughout the town. Especially the aqueducts connected to small drinking fountains that anyone could easily access to make sure they wouldn't dehydrate.
It was rather obvious that this water was created through magic, which made Eisen just want things like that in 'real' life even more. Droughts could be solved so easily like that.
With a quiet grumble just directed at himself, Eisen kept walking through the town, letting Fafnir drink a little at the rivers, just like the other animals here did.
While they were taking a small break for now, Sigurd appeared right in front of the old man with a curious expression, "Who exactly are you looking for?" The Core Guardian inquired curiously, and Eisen just smiled back at it before slowly moving his fingers through his beard.
"Do I really look that lost?" Eisen asked with a light chuckle, and then kept turning his head a little more while answering Sigurd, "I'm trying to see if i can find the area with all the guilds in this town. One of them has to have some more information about the Dragon we're looking for. At one of the other towns, they already told us that we could probably find out a little more directly here in this area."
"Let's hope they didn't just say that to get rid of us, eh?" Sigurd pointed out with a laugh, before Caria looked at it with a deep, concerned frown, "Wait, they can do that?!" She asked nervously, but the core guardian looked back at the myconid and shook its head.
"Just kidding. Don't worry, it'll be fine. The others somehow made it possible to be found as well, so." Sigurd replied, before Eisen just lightly smiled and kept looking around, "Hmm..." He hummed, "I really want to get this done soon... It was said that those with that become the champion of five dragons can speak to Trygan." The old man muttered, and slowly mist poured out of his amulet to turn into the form of Kirisho.
"You are doing this all to speak to your son again?" She asked, and with a light chuckle, the old man nodded his head, "Well, of course I'd like to speak to him again, but I'm not sure if Trygan is going to let that happen. You see, when we were in Ornier, I completed one of the points of my Demonic-Title, to inflict strong emotions of any kind onto five thousand people. Now I just need to 'ascend to heaven and fall to hell', and be 'acknowledged by the gods of the heavens and the underworld'. All my meetings with gods were rather 'unofficial', things that I didn't necessarily earn, or those that were kept hidden. Now it's an official occasion." Eisen explained clearly.
He really hoped that it would count this time. Then again, it might be harder to find a 'god of the underworld' to impress. Eisen hadn't even heard much about them. Well, he did ask Komer to research a bit about it, since he had a weirdly large amount of contacts all over the continent at this point.
The last time that Eisen spoke to him, he still didn't find anything though. There were apparnetly hints toward where an entrance to heaven and hell might be, however.
Both of them seemed to be somewhere on the god islands. Eisen expected the entrance to heaven to be there, to be fair, but the entrance to hell apparently being there as well really came as a surprise to him.
They just had to find the entrances relatively soon. Once Eisen made his way to hell, he would surely be able to find some kind of God to impress there.
That's what Eisen was hoping, at the very least, even if it wasn't something he could directly confirm. Gods were often rather moody, after all. And beings that lived for such a long time must get really bored at some point. Somehow, Eisen understood that part of it the most, even if he didn't remember his insanely long life in this world.
"Hmm, I think I know where we can look for a bit of information." Eisen pointed out. He had been looking around with his mana-sight a little bit as well, and soon spotted the figure of what seemed to be a Lizardfolk, humanoid lizards that seemed to be officially people, although many were still a little hesitant about them.
To normal people, they looked basically identical to Lizardmen, after all, which were a race of monsters. Either way, Eisen swiftly chose to make his way over toward the place where he spotted the figure of a Lizardfolk, soon seeing that it wasn't the only one of its kind here.
There were numerous other Lizardfolk inside of the same building, so Eisen figured he was in the right place. Lizardfolk as a race were believes of Trygan, so they saw all ancient dragons as his disciples. Especially when Eisen saw the name of the bar they were currently in, he couldn't help himself but smile broadly.
The bar was fittingly called <The Steel Nest>. It seemed rather unlikely that he wouldn't be able to find any information on the ancient steel dragon he was looking for in this area. This would be too much of a coincidence otherwise, after all.
With a smile on his face, Eisen swiftly pulled the curtains that acted as a 'door' to the bar to the side and stepped into the room, before he was met with numerous Lizardfolk's stares.
"Oye, this ain't a place for humans to be." The barkeeper said immediately, but Eisen immediately chuckled as he stepped further in since Fafnir's snout was pushing into his back, "Good thing I'm not a human, aye?"