Eisen pushed one of his needles through the cloth in his hand, and in the next moment just snapped the thread and tied it to the other end of the thread that he had just returned to. And just like that, Eisen finished making another shirt for the clothes-shop down in the mall. Out of his main crafting skills, the only ones that weren't close to Rank 5 just yet were leatherworking and tailoring. He had spent a good while working on a bunch of different potions and enchantments, a process that spanned a couple of days.
In general, Eisen had been spending every free moment trying to work. He spent a couple of hours outside of the game, to let 'Eisen' rest a little, but whenever he got back he was already inside of the workshop, ready to keep working. His apprentices had a little more freetime, of course. Eisen had them help out at least eight hours a day, and for the rest of the day they could choose to do whatever they wanted to. Sometimes they chose to help Eisen some more, and the rest of the time they just worked on some smaller projects themselves, went for walks around town, and actually made some more friends from around the town. Eisen was pretty glad to see that they weren't as absorbed into everything as Eisen himself was at their age.
He had basically dropped out of high-school just to keep practicing, after all. Right now, the old man was trying to bring all his main crafting skills to level 99, something that he luckily achieved by finishing this last piece of an outfit. With a light smile, Eisen got ready to bring his crafting skills to Rank 5. Since the fifth rank was an important point for any sort of skill, Eisen wanted to take his time to explore any and all changes there were with these skills.
At rank 5, a skill can evolve. Mostly, it could turn into a variety skill. For example, if Eisen had only ever made weapons with his blacksmithing skill, then that blacksmithing skill would turn into the weaponsmithing skill. But it seemed like even if a skill didn't turn into a variety skill, it usually just stayed the regular skill while opening up the door to learn more skills. It was the same with enchanting and the magic inscription skill.
Very rarely, however, if one was capable of making use of a skill better than the rank would insinuate, it was possible to simply get a direct upgrade to the skill that you had at the moment. For example, the blacksmithing skill would turn into 'Advanced Blacksmithing'. And that's exactly what Eisen was aiming for. Of course, the abilities that he got in the past wouldn't change, and the rate at which his proficiency was going to rise would be incomparably low to normal, meaning that it might take two or three times longer to rank up to 6 than it normally would, but in return, Eisen would get something even better.
Any effect of an item created using the advanced blacksmithing skill was increased, while the requirement was heavily decreased, while giving Eisen the ability to actually 'edit' such effects and requirements a little bit. That was the most important thing to Eisen at the moment. Equipment could change an incredible amount over a person's ability that it would be dumb not to try and get this advanced skill.
Since Eisen was above even a Limitbreaker, a Skybreacher, it was obvious that he had a large part of what he needed to get the advanced blacksmithing skill down already, but there was something else that he needed to do as well. And that 'something else' was the creation of a special sort of item. An item that transcended the skill itself. That could either mean just breaking the limit while making the item that he needed to rank the skill up, or that could mean using abilities that weren't part of the regular skill to make the item.
There weren't that many people with the advanced blacksmithing skill, but since he luckily knew one of the few that did, he was able to get a few tips. The same was the case with the other advanced skills, tailoring, leatherworking, alchemy and enchanting. He was friends with all the people that knew about how to get the advanced skill, and coincidentally, those four people would be arriving in this town quite soon.
Today, actually.
Roughly two weeks ago, Eisen was sent a letter by them saying that they made the choice to move to the islands, and that they would start travelling to the harbor town soon. And the date they told Eisen for their arrival was today.
The old man was sure that they didn't somehow miscalculate, and since they surely had all they needed to properly get to this town in a straightforward manner, Eisen wasn't worried about them getting to the town a bit later than they said they would either.
It would probably still take a little while, and since Melissa's bees were already heading out to see if they could spot the group approaching, Eisen was sure he could take his time and try his best to bring some of his other skills up in the meantime. And since he was quite curious about them, as they were the most out-of-the-way skills he had, Eisen chose to get started with advancing the skills he got through the dragons. Luckily, what he got through Trygan was an ability instead of a skill, because Eisen wasn't necessarily in the mood to try and bring another Rank 0 skill up all the way to four. The Material-Growth skill already ranked up once, though, same with the extraction skill. The former ranked up just because the seeds that Eisen created finally grew up properly, and the latter because Eisen kept playing around with it.
Right now, Eisen was simply trying to come up with some ways to further increase those two skills. He might try to use the crystal plants in particular to practice enchanting with special effects though. But just when he was thinking about that kind of thing, another idea came to mind.
Eisen quickly compressed some of his mana on his palm, until it was just a small rock, and then grabbed one of the rose seeds laying on the table in the corner and simply tried to combine them. Just like this, it didn't really work, however. Crystalized mana in itself wasn't a material, after all. It was more like a fuel, of sorts. You could use it to activate enchantments or to store excessive mana for later, but you couldn't usually craft with it. Usually.
"Mana Crystal." Eisen said with a light smirk on his face, assigning another type of crystal's behaviour to this crystalized mana before trying again. And behold! Eisen was able to combine the seed with the crystalized mana now.
With a curious smile, Eisen handed the seed over to Sigurd and asked the core guardian to plant it as well so that Eisen could see what exactly would happen, before trying to repeat the same thing with some other types of mana. And those types were really just different elemental types. Either the basic ones that Eisen had access to, or even a bit of the mana that the others here had. It seemed like especially Kiron's Crystal-Flame and Sky's Inkheart elements would turn into quite interesting roses. But for now, Eisen just had to wait and see. It took a couple weeks for these to sprout as well, after all.
Either way, since the old man just combined mana with something living, it reminded him of a project that he wanted to work on since getting the magic-craftsmanship skill in the first place, and as such, quickly got out some of the larger clumps of mana that he had.
First, to test it out in the first place, Eisen chose to go ahead and try it with the base elements. He took a large amount of earth elemental mana-crystals and slowly assigned different materials to them. For example, there was a large amount that he simply assigned to be rock, while others became mana-crystals and some were even turned into marble.
One of those mana-mana-crystals was then used as a base. Eisen formed it into a sphere with transmutation and then grabbed some of the mana-marble-balls to enchant it with everything that a golem core needed. Before moving on, Eisen simply grabbed a blank soul and placed it into the hollow interior of the unfinished golem core to turn it into an ego-golem core.
Then, the mana-rock was used to create a rough, maybe one meter tall humanoid body. Sure, there wasn't any sort of detail, and Eisen didn't try to use the systems that he usually did with trying to give the golem different joints to ease the possible movement. This was really just a rough prototype to see if this would work at all.
And with a light, curious smile, Eisen got started and started just so slightly turning the earth-mana into actual rock. Of course, he didn't go all the way, but just stopped midway. It was like the point at which elemental spirits usually were at. Because what Eisen wanted to create was nothing else but an artificial elemental spirit.
Once the old man poured his regular mana into the mana ego-golem-core, he soon started to notice some changes on the golem's body. It actually started to move! It was kind of weird actually. Since its body was still mostly made of mana, it was able to change the volume of its body to an extent. Its limbs in particular were shifting in size a bit, and its whole body was constantly either growing or shrinking by roughly twenty centimeters.
This slowed down after a while once it got used to its body, of course, but for the most part its body was still kind of shifting and changing the whole time. "Hmm..." Eisen hummed quietly. It seemed to work, sure, but... was there really a reason behind it? It wasn't actually like a spirit, after all. It was more like an... intelligent spell, more than anything else. This might be useful in some other situation, but as a replacement for a spirit, probably not so much.
Eisen would show it to Xenia later and then ask for her opinion, but for now, the old man just wanted to make some more of these mock-spirits made of different elements, just to give Xenia as much to play around with as possible. He really wanted to make use of this somehow. They needed as much manpower when going to the giant country as they could get.