Eisen held the wooden box in his hand with a smile on his face, trying to think of how to best optimize this process. It worked well with a shack, but it might be a different story when it was an actual, complex building.
When Eisen stood there with the portable shack in his hands, Jyuuk came up again. He had been peeking over the whole time while Eisen was working, so now obviously he had to come over and have a look at the finished item.
"That whole shack, just in that small cube?" He asked curiously as he squatted down on the ground next to Eisen, and the old man just nodded his head with a slight smile on his face.
"Yep. It probably wasn't the most efficient way to do it, otherwise, I probably would have been able to make it a bit smaller. And lighter, of course. But for that, I would need a more complex control center, and those are usually a bit too unstable to be placed on the ground like that. If I make a shop, then it would be too dangerous to have people walk all over it. And it would be a little bit distracting as well."
"Then how about you put it into the door?" Evalia suggested after listening in a little bit, and the old man looked over toward her with his brows raised, "Elaborate."
With a light smile, she took her large brush-staff that Eisen made for her a good while ago and practically painted the shack into the space in front of her, "So, this is how it was before, right?" She asked, and Eisen swiftly nodded his head, "Yeah, exactly. Now, what idea did you have with the door?" The old man inquired.
"For one, let's say you turn the whole front door into the 'control center'." Evalia said and started changing the front door a little bit to turn it more colorful and crystal-like, and painted random patterns into it to look like enchantments were placed on it.
"One, it's going to be easy to spot damages, because the front door will usually have nothing in front of it." She started, painting a small crack into the bottom of the door that she soon erased again, "And it's a pretty good tactic to draw attention to your shop as well. Colorful and unique doors are definitely going to stick out. Most places have just really bland wooden doors that don't even have any sort of decoration on them." Evalia pointed out, and then continued with a smile, "And then, you won't need to add some sort of connection to the control center to the front, and just need to activate something in the door. So, putting it down and picking it up will be much, much easier, right?"
After a bit of thought, Eisen just nodded his head with a smile on his face, "That's a really good idea. This way I can make it a lot larger and more complex without worries." The old man said, "As I thought, you're really going to fit into the family." The old man said with a wink directed at Evalia to 'hint' at something that her relationship with Stahl could lead to.
"Grandpa, shut up!" The young man in question yelled out from the other side of the room, and Eisen just started laughing lightly as he cracked his knuckles, "Well, either way, it seems like a good idea. Thanks, Evalia." Eisen pointed out, and then chose to quickly create another small shack with the exception of the door.
The base that he was going to use for that door would simply be magically infused Ironbark, even if all that would be left of the large, thick plank would be the frame of a couple of inches on each side. And the rest was quickly filled in with a mixture of different crystals and gems. Before Eisen could continue working on this door, Eisen had to prepare the actual spatial gem.
He grabbed some of the ones that he had left and directly repeated the same process that he did before with the other shack, assigning each of the 'spots' a small part of the spatial gem before putting them onto the outside of the shack and properly creating the lines along which the shack would actually fold up. This time it would be a bit different.
First the roof would fold down like before, and then three of the walls, except the wall with the door, would fold down and onto the floor, which would then fold against the wall with the door. And the parts of the wall around the door would then fold directly onto the door. The door itself would then fold itself up a couple of times until it practically wrapped itself around the key which would work as the activation-signal for all of this.
Like that, Eisen just needed to 'lock up' and the whole shack would be in his hands, and then he could 'open up' and the whole shack would appear in front of him. It seemed like a pretty good idea as far as Eisen was concerned.
After everything else was set up, Eisen continued with the door. First things first, he carved the actual control-enchantments into the door and re-shaped it a bit to turn it into a three-dimensional enchantment. And not only the surface-enchantments, but also the hollow areas of the three-dimensional enchantment were then filled out with the leftover spatial-gem. Of course, Eisen had to decompress it a little bit to actually be able to fill all of it out completely, but for the most part, it worked pretty well.
The enchantments were made to, in a more specific way, describe the process of everything folding up in the way that Eisen wanted it to. And of course, there was also the part with the lock that Eisen would be using as the trigger for everything.
The 'Key' for now was just a very, very basic metal key. The 'lock' wasn't really a proper lock either, since it didn't actually lock the door, but it would just react to the key being turned and would then immediately start the folding-process up.
And of course, Eisen also wrote enchantments into the door to properly make sure that everything would actually directly fold into the subspace, instead of just being there halfway like it was before, resulting in little to no change in the total weight. Now Eisen hoped that it would actually be possible to have the resulting item be actually rather light in weight instead.
Just like that, Eisen chose to try it again. He pushed the metal key into the lock and twisted it around while supplying mana to it, and then quickly saw the door light up a bit. The roof of the shack quickly started to fold up, and a few moments later, only the door stood there. It didn't take long for the door to disappear as well, however, and it folded itself up and wrapped around the key that Eisen was holding.
It seemed like now, Eisen finally managed to get this method down. Evalia's idea was really a good one, and the old man would be able to adapt this to any sort of building as well. In the end, all that he would need to do is mass-produce the doors as well as the smaller spatial-gem-shards with the 'spots' connected to them, and Eisen would be able to properly make any house portable.
Well... It still required him to enchant the inside and outside of the house a bit more, while also running mana-crystal thread through the walls to connect all of the spatial-gem-shards with the door. But that was something that the old man could do within a single day, so it wouldn't be too big a deal. It might be a lot less mana-efficient to do it with buildings that weren't specifically made for being stored like this, but with the amount of soul-generators and mana-batteries that Eisen could create, that wasn't really an issue anyway.
Either way, Eisen could now actually get started on creating some buildings for this. He looked for an open spot within the dungeon and got started producing the materials for everything.
For one, Eisen started mass-producing bricks with his element, which he could easily turn into actual items with his magic craftsmanship skill. He had more than enough wood that had already been turned into usable planks as well, so Eisen could quickly get started with his work.
Eisen wanted to first create a rather large building that he could make use of, and for that, first set down the wooden pillars that would act as the base for everything. He split the place up into provisionary rooms like this and then started building the first walls on the outside using the bricks that he created just now.
After he was done with this, he started covering the inside of the house in a layer of the wooden planks and started actively creating the actual rooms using either brick or wood. Of course, the actual workshop area in the back was made using bricks, so that it was harder for work-accidents to leave lasting damages.
But the front of the house, the area that would end up being the shop, was of course mostly covered in wood, simply because it looked a lot nicer. The same was the case with the second floor that would be the actual living area. After all, this place was supposed to be something to be used instead of the dungeon in case it had to stay at a certain place for a longer period of time for actual dungeon-business.
Other than that, Eisen quickly got started on actually creating all of the materials for everything, including the spatial-gem of course, and quickly split it up into the numerous small beads that each had a 'spot' connected to it, that Eisen then swiftly placed onto the outside of the house.
The angled roof would flatten down and fold onto itself and into the rooms of the second floor, which would then fold onto the second floor's literal floor. That would then fold down into the ground floor, the walls would fold over inside, and everything would turn into a flat surface except the wall that held the front door.
That wall would then fold onto that front door, which would in itself also fold up in a similar way to before, just to wrap around the key that would be used to activate this whole process.
Not only did it take a while to actually build this house, but it also took a while to connect all the different mechanism together, without actually building anything inside of the house just yet. Either way, once Eisen was done and he watched the large structure fold down onto the key he was holding, he saw it as finished with a smile on his face.
[You created a Portable Shop]