For the next few days, all that Eisen was really doing was trying to use his flame of the earth magic as much as he possibly could, for anything that he could. And even for things that he usually wouldn't do, but just chose to misuse his element for. After all, his element was supposed to be used like a tool. Just mass-creating it wasn't going to be enough to properly level it up.
So for example, Eisen chose to create dozens of small crucibles to constantly melt down metals, let them cool again, and then melted them again. Or he just made a perpetual water-evaporation setup, where water was in a closed container made of his element and all that happened was that Eisen made the water at the bottom boil, and then had water gather at the top of the container so that it would just start dripping down. No water was really lost like that, and Eisen could just keep going with this continuosly.
Other than that, Eisen tried some things that helped another one of the group level up properly. Dien, Xenia's Elf-Blood Chimera Halfling companion, as well as Bree's boyfriend. Since his element was the frost element, he was basically the perfect counter for Eisen. The old man would just sit there in the practice area, and there would be a box made of his element with one side open. And inside of that box was a large cube of ice that filled it out completely. While Eisen's element would constantly get hotter and hotter to melt the ice, Dien's job was to make sure that exactly that didn't happen and kept freezing the ice again. Like that, both of them were able to level their elemental skills up a bit.
Eisen wasn't entirely sure if this was really the most efficient way to gain proficiency in his particular element, but it was a relatively good one. His proficiency was constantly rising like this, at a steady and quite quick pace as well.
In the end, Eisen just chose to take this chance to make a bunch of new items that he maybe couldn't really make too easily beforehand because he still wasn't big enough to do so as easily and quickly as he wanted to. The main thing that he was working on was something that not only would increase his proficiency in one of the few other skills Eisen still had to level up, but it was something quite sentimental as well.
Because he was working on creating the item that ended up making him realize that something was wrong in the first place. Portable houses.
It would take a while to do it normally, after all, building a whole house took quite a while even for Eisen. But due to the size he had now reached, as long as Eisen had the materials that he needed, it was like building a small model or something at the scale of a doghouse.
Of course, he had more than enough materials to do this now, considering that the dungeon was still filled nearly to the brim with all the wood from the giant ironbark tree. And if he had to be perfectly honest, if he compared Askr to a house... the former was obviously far harder to build. Although, that of course didn't include the shrinking of the structure yet.
And to test that part of it out, Eisen first built a small shack out of wood. That's really all it was, a shack. Barely large enough for two grown adults to stand in. Using this shack as test-subject, Eisen wanted to really just make sure that he was going to be able to make a structure, and the items inside of it, properly scale down and up without damaging anything.
For that, Eisen had a couple of methods in mind. One, enchant the structure itself in a special way. Eisen painted the outside of shack with a special paint that he had Evalia make for him out of a mixture of different gems and metals, although the most important ingredients were the spatial gems.
After he applied the first layer of paint to everything and had it properly dry, Eisen started to carve into that paint to create the enchantment-array that he needed. Then he applied another layer of paint, carved new enchantments into everything that had different patterns to the first ones, and then applied a last layer of pain to do the same thing again. This three-layers array of enchantments were basically just meant to apply the effect of the eight crystals placed into the huts' corners onto the whole shack.
Each of those crystals was a highly-compressed spatial gem that had a complex three-dimensional enchantment placed into it to properly apply the spatial-storage effect to the item. It definitely looked off, and really did not have the right feeling for what Eisen wanted to make. He didn't exactly know how he made those portable houses in the past, but he knew that this apparently wasn't it. When Eisen activated the enchantments, the whole shack disappeared in an instant and all that was left was a small spatial gem laying on the ground.
Eisen poured his mana into that spatial gem and tried to get the shack out of it again. Surely, it did appear, but the enchantments were a bit shifted and janky. The wood seemed to have suffered a little as well, as Eisen actually kind of expected. To avoid a catastrophe by accidentally activating these broken enchantments, Eisen quickly deleted all of them and tried his best to save some of the special paint so that it wouldn't go to waste.
He had to come up with another idea. A better one that didn't break the structure each time Eisen tried storing it. And for that, Eisen soon got a pretty good idea, one that he borrowed from the Warforged, Fluke.
Fluke's items were often compacted into small cubes or marbles, and then would end up being far, far larger than would logically be possible. It was most likely the same principle as the puzzle-box used, at least it looked the same when the puzzle-box or one of fluke's items folded itself open to get larger, or closed down in a similar fashion to get smaller. Eisen was also pretty sure that he had a rough idea what exactly he needed to do for this. It seemed to be possible in other ways as well, since he wasn't sure if Fluke had that exact skill or just a similar one, but Eisen needed the Magic Inscription skill.
It was a special skill that you could get if you had a Rank 5 enchanting skill. That meant that your enchanting skill couldn't turn into a sub-type for this. But of course, since Eisen had a higher-tier version of the enchanting skill, he should be able to get this skill rather easily. It would probably take a while to get it to a point where he was able to actually do anything productive with it, but it was definitely something worth looking into. Because using the Magic Inscription skill, it was possible to very easily make the equivalent of an enchantment that required a ten by ten meter-space to carve inside of a small marble. And it would only take a fraction of the time as well, since it didn't actually require specific carving!
You could combine the way that enchantments worked with the way that spells worked, which was already quite similar to what Eisen was trying to do using his magic craftsmanship skill before, and to top it off, you could combine all those skills. So, Eisen was able to make specific abilities or functionalities of an item using the magic inscription skill, very easily combine it with others of the same kind using enchanting, and give all of it a boost by creating it all using pure or elemental mana as a base.
And so, Eisen had to try his best to somehow get the skill. He had a rough idea of how it worked, even if he wasn't actually completely sure, but Eisen tried his best and got started for now. He grabbed a simple mana crystal and sat down with it on the ground in front of him. Eisen pushed some mana out of his palm and tried to practically create a magic circle using it. It was just going to be a rather simple one. The kind that pushed out a small spark of flames, and that would be it.
Eisen took that magic circle and shrunk it down as much as he could, without actively compressing it. He just wanted to make it small enough to fit into the mana crystal. Eisen slowly pushed the magic circle into the mana crystal and then basically fixed it into place inside of it, so that it would move when the mana crystal itself was moved.
And so, Eisen picked the mana crystal up and pushed his mana inside of it, making a flame be pushed out of the mana crystal where one of the two faces of the magic circle was facing. Soon after, a notification appeared in front of Eisen.
[Magic Inscription Skill acquired]
"This easy, hm?" Eisen muttered to himself quietly, although he quickly shook his head to that thought. It probably wasn't easy to get this usually, but it was just because of Eisen's high-tier Enchanting skill that he was able to get it basically instantly when actually trying to get it.
Either way, now, Eisen should be able to get started. First he would have to properly level this skill up a bit as well. His flame of the earth magic was leveling up at a pretty quick pace as well, so it wouldn't take long anymore to get it to properly rank up, so there was no reason not to go ahead with this.
The way that magic inscription was supposed to work was rather easy as well. It was basically a magic circle that was infused into an item, albeit a lot easier to use, at least once it ranked up a couple times.
Eisen moved his hand to his apron and was quickly given one of the needles he wanted to grab from the multitool, since it already knew what Eisen wanted to do. With a light smile, Eisen pushed his mana into the needle and started forming a fine magic circle in the air. It wasn't really one that was too complicated though, and it technically followed the principles of enchanting rather than sorcery, but either way, Eisen was able to soon take this magic circle and pushed it into another mana crystal.
When he was trying to make it 'affixed' into place inside of it, the magic circle just disappeared and basically fused with the mana crystal.