Eisen grabbed the crystal and slowly split it up into two parts before pushing his mana into one of the halves again. The small ball that was created was half the size of the one from the regular one, so Eisen managed to confirm that it was really properly working like it was supposed to. The gem itself now had the effect of creating a rock sphere. The old man merged the two halves together, and then carved an effect-enhancing three-dimensional enchantment into the mana crystal, without specifying which effect it is enhancing.
After that, Eisen poured his mana into the mana crystal and a ball that was roughly two to three times the size of the base effect's appeared in front of the old man.
Now that Eisen was sure that everything worked just like he hoped it did, he got started with working on the actual project that he wanted to work on now. He grabbed a spatial gem and just like before, placed the tip of the needle in his hand against the spatial gem and poured mana into the gem through that needle. Eisen then pulled the mana out again and spread it out a bit to properly work with it. The thing about these sorts of special gems was that they already had special properties. It was basically like the natural equivalent of what Eisen was now able to place onto things artificially. And such natural properties could rather easily be edited with the magic inscription skill.
The mana in front of Eisen that he placed in front of him like that using the magic inscription skill slowly started to change without the old man's influence. It started shifting around, compressing and decompressing, disappearing and reappearing, over and over again constantly. This was the raw state of the 'Spatial Property'. And what Eisen now had to do with this was to simply stabilize it.
By actively intervening, Eisen could stop this constant shifting and changing, and slowly brought order into this shapeless structure. The thing about the 'spatial' property was that it had certain spots in it, which were now represented as small clusters of mana, that were randomly moving around all over the place. What Eisen could now do was simply take those spots and arrange them properly while fixing them in place.
Usually, something similar was done through enchantments. The spots were supposed to be made to basically stick to objects placed into the spatial gem to create order at least around the object while the other spots were still causing random disarray.
But Eisen now took every single spot that he could find and created a box out of them, trying to put an equal amount of spots on every edge just to make sure that there wasn't some sort of imbalance there. There was just one exception.
After Eisen created the base, he added extra spots to the edges framing one of the cube's six sides, because Eisen had a special purpose for that place.
Once Eisen finished that, he just had to write a few words into the mana to make sure that the change to the 'spatial' property was actually accepted and the 'special purpose' was also properly described.
When Eisen was done, the mana was pulled back into the spatial gem and Eisen could try it out. He pushed his mana into the spatial gem afterward and activated it, and in front of Eisen, a notification appeared.
[ ]
It was a completely empty, square notification.
"Huh? Eisen, what's going on? Did you somehow make your notification's visible for others?" Jyuuk asked confusedly from where he was sitting while feeding some of his beasts, and the old man chuckled and shook his head, because it wasn't actually a notification.
"This is a new way to use the spatial gem. It's a lot less effective for storing regular items, but it's perfect for my plan. Here, come on." Eisen explained and waved Jyuuk over. The monkey beastperson did as asked and squatted down next to Eisen, who had been sitting cross-legged on the ground while working on this.
"Alright, so what..." Jyuuk muttered, although he already got a rough idea when he got close enough to actually see the front-face of the large notification. Rather than a notification, this was a window. A window into a small cubic space that was just lit up by the light from this room shining into it. The walls of the space were pure white, and it was angled as if the slightly-tilted notification was one of the space's walls.
"It takes a lot more mana to keep it up compared to the regular setup, but it's pretty fun. Look here." Eisen pointed out and stretched his arm out toward it, just pushing his hand into the white space until it just completely swallowed his hand.
"It's something like an actual subspace." Eisen explained, and Jyuuk excitedly looked at it and tried to push his hand into it as well, "And this is what you want to use for those portable houses? It's a bit different to the way you described it, right? Like this it wouldn't like folding together if you use it, but just like... you push the building into a subspace and are left with the gem holding it, right? Also, doesn't this make that new material storage ability of yours kind of obsolete?"
"Well, the material storage skill is still a bit different. More convenient. It's not tied to an item, I can pull it up instantly with near to no mana-cost, and I can manipulate it quite a lot. This is a bit different." Eisen said, "And I won't use this exact method, because it would be far too mana-inefficient. You see, usually, the 'spatial' property is tied just to the gem. But what I'm going to do is extend the property directly onto the whole building in one way or another. I'm just not sure about the exact way just yet." Eisen pointed out.
The old man had to really think about this now. But first things first, he had to construct another shack to test everything out on.
This didn't really take too long, though, since the shack wasn't actually that large. After that, Eisen shrunk down a bit again until he properly fit into the shack and then started working on the interior. He figured that the middle of the floor was a good a place as any to put the 'control center'.
Eisen carved the space for the central gems he would place in there later into the floor already, and then started planning out some ideas for how to assign those 'spots' to external positions. One idea that Eisen had was to split of numerous small parts off of the spatial gem that Eisen would edit later and then physically place those parts into the places where he wanted the spots to be.
Two, he could try to mix some enhancing enchantments or maybe find some spatial-type magic element to use as a magic-craftsmanship base so that he could maybe try to actually edit the gem itself to allow it to actively pull in external things.
Although, the latter of those two options was for one going to be a lot more mana-expensive and unstable, just from the raw thought of it. So the former option it was.
Eisen grabbed some spatial gems that he quickly combined with each other, and then set up everything to properly start the magic inscription process. First things first, Eisen had to get started with making it so that each of the 'spots' currently floating through the air in front of Eisen could be connected to a small piece of this spatial gem.
And the way that Eisen wanted to do this was rather simple. First, he froze everything that was going on in front of him and, with the needle he was holding, pulled one of the spots toward the spatial gem. As the mana that was floating around here was Eisen's own mana, the old man was able to also use it together with other mana-based abilities of his. The ability Eisen was using now was transmutation.
Since the spots were represented as clusters of mana, it was rather easy to just pull a small part of the spatial gem into it using transmutation, before Eisen could cut the small part off the main gem and then formed it into a small sphere.
And now, Eisen wrote a short description, or rather instruction, into the mana to make sure that the spot properly stayed connected to the spatial gem. After he confirmed that this worked by moving the spatial gem around and seeing the the spot was moved together with it, Eisen got started on doing the same thing for all of the other spots until all of them were properly assigned to a small piece of the spatial gem.
Eisen went around the shack and started attaching them to the outside of it to form the folding lines. Basically, the places where Eisen literally wanted the hut to fold together. That meant that parts of the roof sticking out over the walls would fold onto the roof which would then fold onto one of the walls of the house. All the walls would then also fold inward once and then fold into the center one after another. The flat surface that would be left would then fold into itself a couple more times to just leave behind a cube.
That's what Eisen was hoping for at least. Since the process of the magic inscription was still going on, Eisen could properly connect all the parts how they were supposed to be connected to create all of the surfaces in the right size.
And on top of that, Eisen also tried to get started on describing the way that the 'storage' would end up working so that the wood wouldn't be crushed, but that the parts that would logically end up overlapping would just be stored away into the subspace.
Then, after Eisen finished the magic inscription, he took the central piece of spatial gem that would be the base for everything going on, and wrapped it in a mixture of other crystals. He got started on the enchanting for this, and further described the way that everything was supposed to fold, just in a more logical, sorted fashion. Eisen then placed the 'Core' into the middle of the floor that he had already carved out before, and then carved more smaller lines of enchantments and runes into the floor and walls so that Eisen could connect the core to the smaller parts of the spatial gem.
In the end, this was really what nearly took the longest for this project, just the raw carving and figuring out the logic for everything. But after Eisen was done, he stepped out through the shack's door and pushed his mana into the small gem outside that was directly connected to the core to activate everything.
With a quiet creaking, the roof started folding into itself, and the small shack turned smaller within just a few moments. Soon, all that was left was the flat wooden surface on the ground, which was starting to fold into itself more and more, until a fist-sized cube was left that had a small part of the core showing on the top of it.
The old man took a step forward and picked the cube up. It seemed like it somehow didn't lose any of the weight that it had when it was just the complete, full shack, but other than that Eisen thought of this test as a complete and utter success.