With a slight frown that was paired with a confused expression, Eisen stared at the notifications in front of him and then quietly grumbled to himself as he looked over toward the others.
"You four, come on over for a moment, please." The old man said, and a few moments later, the group of four that had been taking a break from working on a few things themselves just took a break and walked over toward Eisen.
The old man closed his eyes for a moment and crossed his arms, "Have any of you heard of a 'Mastered' Skill?" The old man asked them, and the four of them just looked at each other for a moment before Denmir spoke up, "Hm, I think it's the skill ya might when yer skill reaches Rank 10?" Denmir suggested, before Folmirra quickly nodded her head.
"Yes, that's what I've heard as well. There are very, very little craftsmen that have achieved so, and not all of them would get this kind of skill, so it's hard to say." The woman explained, and Eisen just sighed deeply and then started rubbing the bridge of his nose.
"Well, then I'm pretty curious about what I'm getting a couple ranks from now." Eisen started, and the others looked at him confusedly, before Morrom slowly understood the gist of it and started opening his mouth with a wry smile, "N-No way... You didn't..."
"I did. I just ranked up the five skills I learned from you guys, and they became, well... 'Mastered' Versions of themselves." Eisen explained, as he slowly looked at the notifications and tried to see a bit more detail on them. It seemed like all of the abilities that he had gotten before were still the same, just far, far more potent than they were before. It seemed like Eisen barely had any limits in what he could do with these five skills now.
"Something else happened too..." Eisen started. Denmir, Folmirra, Jekyll and Morrom already seemed far too perplexed to say anything right now, and while it may have been a bad idea to try and stack more onto that, Eisen chose to just get it out of the way. "I was given the choice to upgrade my current 'Omni Craftsmaster' class into 'Godly Craftsmaster'. So there's that."
The next half hour or so, Eisen just had to face the onslaught of questions from these other five, together with the feeling of him being maybe a little bit too worried about getting the Advanded Skill series... This one was much better, wasn't it?
"I guess there's no reason not to accept. Upgrade my class." Eisen said out loud as he looked at the notification in front of him, prompting this one to disappear just to be replaced by another.
[As you have a currently open Level-Up Quest, upgrading your class is not possible. Your class-upgrade will proceed once you finished the current Level-Up Quest]
"Or don't." The old man sighed, "I have to finish the Level-Up Quest first."
After looking at Eisen a bit more closely, Jekyll started to frown slightly, since he was thinking that something was just a bit off. "Why are you looking like that?" He asked, and Eisen slowly raised his head surprised.
"Hm? What do you mean?" Eisen replied, before Jekyll sighed deeply and crossed his arms, "You seem kind of disappointed. As if you wanted something else. Eisen, you just got a combination of skills that I can surely say no living soul currently has. Then you were given the chance to get a 'Godly' crafting class, something that also currently no living soul has. The things you wanted were far, far worse than what you ended up with. So why are you disappointed, of all things?" Jekyll asked, seemingly actually getting slightly pissed off at how Eisen was acting, and the old man simply looked back at him, thought about it for a few moments, and then came to a relatively clear conclusion.
"It was just far, far too easy." Eisen explained, and all four of them looked at Eisen confusedly, before the old man explained.
"Sure, there have been a lot of mysteries that we've been trying to figure out lately, but everything has been going so well. During the 70 years of my life in the other world, I have come to find out that you can only get somewhere if you work really, really hard. But here? Ever since I've been here, I've been playing around, having fun, and basically just doing whatever I felt like. And as the reward for that, I was given things that others here work literally hundreds of years toward to even get the chance at acquiring it to no avail. Just like that." Eisen pointed out, although Morrom looked at him with a deep frown.
"The fuck are you talking about? Are you trying to say that all the work the 'other' Eisen did was for nothing? He himself worked for 500 years to peak. There's a reason why you look this old. Giants have a lifespan of up to 1000 years, dwarfs of maybe... 80 or 90? You were reaching the end of your life, and-"
"I know." The old man replied, "I know all of that. But I didn't work for it. This old man here didn't. Eisen did, but I didn't. I'm living off the fruits of someone else's labor. And even if I know that technically it was my own labor, I don't remember any of it. It wasn't actually me. The thing is, I just keep expecting something bad to happen. And the longer everything works out perfectly, I fear that the worse the repercussions will be."
With a quiet grumble, Eisen just sighed and looked at the time floating right next to him, "I'm going to keep working for now." He said, "Sorry for my attitude about this. I just somehow can't bring myself to be cheerful right now." Eisen expained to them, before choosing to get started with another project. One where he could maybe somehow really make use of his two racial skills some more. They were close to ranking up to five, so there was a pretty good reason for not trying to continue on with all of this.
First things first, Eisen turned around toward Fafnir, who was currently sleeping in the corner of the room. Sigurd was preparing a part of the dungeon to be expanded a little right now, so they weren't out in the open currently, "Fafnir, open the gate." Eisen said quietly, and Fafnir slowly stood up and stretched a bit just to roll back up on the ground while opening the second gate.
"Sigurd, connect the gate to the material garden." Eisen said as he placed his hand onto the door before pushing it open. In front of him was the scene of a large room that Eisen had been planting a lot of different things in. For one, nearly all of the floor, expcept a small path running through its center, was covered in material-grass. It acted a little bit different to what Eisen saw in the metal forest before, but that was probably because he didn't choose the exact right metal. After all, he had used a couple of different materials as a base to create different strips of this grass, and they all acted slightly different to each other, so that was Eisen's guess for now.
In here, Eisen was doing a few experiments simply on how different materials influenced the growth of different plants, he was growing materials to use in things like he was about to do, and of course he was also trying his hand at selective breeding. Eisen wanted to see if it was possible to turn a plant-family that started off with high-carbon steel back into iron after a few generations. They took a little while to grow, so Eisen couldn't say for sure how well it was working just yet, though.
Either way, for now, Eisen just walked up to the area at the back of the room, while covering his feet in a layer of rock so that he wouldn't hurt himself by walking on the special grass, and took a look at the different trees.
Eisen got out his multitool and had it near to instantly turn into its axe mode, before Eisen immediately cut through one of the trees made entirely out of steel.
The old man looked at the tree and then first tried something else out. Alchemical Compression. Eisen covered the metal trees in a layer of his mana, and then 'pressed' it into the smallest size that he could manage. And that size was really ridiculously small. The five-meter tall tree had been squeezed down to a head-sized sphere. With a wry smile, Eisen tried to pick that sphere up, although that was really quite hard to do considering its confusingly heavy weight, but once he managed to hold it properly he could quickly carry it into his workshop.
Eisen placed the ball of metal into a crucible he made with his element and then started to melt it down. It seemed like the others were pretty curious about what he was doing at the moment, although they really couldn't expect what happened next. The old man decreased his size as much as possible and stood in front of the crucible. He pressed both of his fists directly onto each other, taking off any sort of accessory that he had on them, and then had the crucible pour the molten, heavily compressed steel onto Eisen's hands.
"Wait, Eisen, what are you doing?!" Morrom asked in shock, "Are ya crazy? Not even you could have hands that can handle that heat for a long time!" Denmir added, before Eisen just nodded his head.
And the next moment, a number of potions appeared in front of him after being placed there by Sigurd. But they weren't any potions either, they were the special mana-potions that could be activated near-to-instantly by just 'absorbing' them. What Eisen wanted to do was quite simple, really.
"I'm going to keep this metal here hot at all times. And then, I'm going to try increasing my size with my giant racial skill. If there isn't any space for my all of my body to change, it usually doesn't work. It's as if there's just a wall there that I can't break through for my own safety. I'm going to abandon my safety for a bit to try and break through that wall. That will both strain the pressure- and heat-resistance of my hands, as well as my size-changing ability." Eisen explained to them, "I think this will let me level my racial skills up simultaneously pretty easily."
