Eisen was looking at the different items that he had in the item storage before. Different weapons or tools that he made out of boredom or for practice, as well as pieces of clothing or armor made for the same purpose. These would take up an incredible amount of space, as far as Eisen was concerned. It was harder to store these in the same way as Eisen stored the other items, although in the end, he probably didn't need to store this kind of item that much.
Instead, Eisen should probably start putting these into the portable shop. Since any item inside of there is also stored when the shop is closed down, that would save Eisen a lot of space. And it wasn't like he needed these sorts of items ever anyway.
So, Eisen started making a shelf that he could keep the special keys for the portable buildings on. He wanted to make a lot more than just the two that he actually made so far, ones with different purposes. They didn't even have to be houses, really. Ships and carriages for travel, cages to trap monsters or other enemies, as well as things like large-scale protective or offensive equipment.
It was pretty hard to carry it around everywhere, but there were surely cases where things like a trebuchet may come in handy. For now, since Eisen didn't have that many things for such keys in mind, he just made a small box that he hung up on the wall for now. The box had 10 spaces in total, each being just large enough to fit one of the keys. Eisen placed his portable shop in there and then started thinking of other things to make.
Eisen figured that he should, at the very least, make things that he may actually need at any point. Like a mannequin with a replacement apron and pants, or some extra needles, blades, and even hammers. Eisen couldn't tell exactly what would happen to his ego-multitool in the future, after all.
These things didn't really take too long. He had replacement items like this already made anyway just in case, he just didn't have a good place for them so far.
So the only thing he had to make was the mannequin, which he quickly placed against the wall. Eisen made some hooks that he placed the tools onto, and some extra boxes to keep the small stuff in. With a satisfied expression, Eisen looked at the space in front of him.
It was far neater now, and he had a space to put everything that he had in here before as well, with the exception of the weapons and armor that he would put into the portable shop.
But looking at all these different, actually rather useless, items, Eisen had another idea of what he could possibly do in the last roughly half an hour until they would reach the island of craftsmanship. It already leveled up a little bit because of the methods that Eisen used in crafting in general, but as Eisen didn't use material combination all too often, it didn't really level up that much.
Eisen was going to try and play around with the item fusion ability. He tried doing it with some actual items before, but nothing really happened at all, so Esien figured that it was something that would happen at Rank 1 or 2, hopefully not any later than that.
Either way, what Eisen was doing now was combining different materials together like normal to level the Item Fusion skill up and bring it to Rank 1. It was pretty straightforward, really. But Eisen figured that this wasn't the kind of thing where the beauty of the skill laid anyway.
Luckily, it didn't take long for Eisen to rank the skill up for the first time.
[Item Fusion reached level 100 in rank 0, upgrading to rank 1]
[You can now fuse items together]
Happy with what the notifications told him, Eisen chose to split up the materials that he rather randomly combined with each other again, and then picked up to small, simple items. Two daggers.
Eisen held both of them in his hand and pushed his mana into them, making one item carry one 'flavor' of mana, and the other one another 'flavor' of it. And then, Eisen just brought the two types of mana together right in front of him.
Each dagger was slowly being taken apart into its particles, as if they had been built out of dust that was slowly being blown away, and combined in the center right in front of Eisen to make a new dagger.
Both of them looked completely identical, so the same could be said for this new, combined dagger. The bonus stats one gained from wielding this new dagger where a bit higher than each dagger's was individually, but just by a few points in total.
The quality was the same as Eisen was used to, so nothing about that really changed. Weirdly, Eisen was kind of... disappointed. This wasn't as great a skill as he imagined it was. Well, it would be a bit weird if he were able to potentially make a god-slaying weapon just by making the same basic sword over and over again and combining them together. That, and it was only at rank 1, so Eisen shouldn't be expecting all too much in the first place.
Either way, after Eisen fused these two daggers together and basically wasted the materials of one of them completely, Eisen tried something else out. It definitely felt like a waste, so Eisen simply pushed his mana into this one dagger and then split the mana into two types, moving them away from each other. And just like Eisen had hoped, soon, he was holding two daggers again, one in each hand.
And they were the exact items that he had combined together before. Eisen confirmed that he was unable to do that with regular items by trying it with either of these daggers first, which didn't work, and then looked at the two daggers with satisfaction. At least he was able to play around with this a little bit without worrying about wasting anything now.
Just like that, Eisen grabbed one of the daggers, and just for fun, a ruby. He split his mana into two and pushed either type into one of the two items, and then brought it together right in front of him. And when Eisen then took a closer look at the resulting item, he was rather surprised to see that every material making up the dagger was basically like it had been infused with a little bit of ruby, even the leather, making Eisen wonder about something.
He enjoyed the way that this dagger looked, having just a slight red glimmer to it, but Eisen had to try something else out as well that was far, far more important to him at the moment. Eisen kept the ruby and placed both of the daggers to the side, before pulling a small strip of leather out of the part of the shelf made exactly for that.
With a curious expression, Eisen split his mana into two again, pushing half of it into the ruby and the other half into the leather, before bringing them both together in front of him. And what Eisen was then holding was tough, slightly rigid, ruby leather.
And not only Eisen was excited about that, but so were the Grandmasters, with Jekyll at the forefront.
"You've gotta be shitting me!" Jekyll exclaimed, "Ya combined a crystal and leather? Wait, you combined ANYTHING with leather? But Morrom said it ain't possible!"
Immediately, the Dwarf-Elf Halfling nodded his head and took the strip of special leather out of Eisen's hand to take a closer look together with Jekyll, "Yeah, because it's not! You can't combine things like plants, meat or leather with anything! At least not with Alchemy!"
"Exactly." Eisen chuckled lightly, and this isn't Alchemy either. I used my new 'Item Fusion' skill for this. It let's me fuse full items together, for one, and apparently also things that usually shouldn't be able to be combined." Eisen pointed out, "This is definitely going to open up a lot more doors now."
"Of course it is! Come on, ya need to give me a steady supply of this type of special leather, old man!" Jekyll exclaimed. He seemed to be really going crazy over this, and that was to be expected. It was hard to come across leather with special properties like this, and while a creature with this kind of hide may be a thing somewhere in the world, it was far, far easier and quicker to just make it like this instead of trying to find, hunt, and transport whatever creature needed for the leather.
"Of course, of course. Or actually, wait, no, I won't give you a steady supply of it." Eisen said, changing his mind in the middle of the sentence, and Jekyll looked at him as he was currently despairing, "What the fuck, why wouldn't you-"
"Hey, don't get so loud, Jekyll. You're going to get your leather, I'm just going to make an item for you that lets you create whatever leather you want yourself. That would be far easier, probably."
"Oh..." Jekyll replied, "Oh yeah, that makes sense. Thanks, old man!" The Jackal-Beastperson and Dwarf Halfling started to laugh a bit, and excitedly looked down at the leather in his hands. The others were already capable of making their own special materials with the help of things like alchemical fusion, for which they usually visited Morrom to get his help, but Jekyll was the only one that had to rely on other things. Like giving leather special material-baths to strengthen it, or apply a layer of other special materials or paint to it. Things like that.
Really, having this kind of ability made the skill completely worth it already, but the fact that he could combine different direct items with each other really made Eisen slightly curious about something. If he was able to combine items, then what if he tried to combine an item with his multitool? Eisen didn't want to do it just yet, because it would most likely ruin the whole multitool by slightly infusing every material with steel or something as long as he didn't use yang metal. Maybe at some point he would gain an ability that would let him control which parts he combined, like whether he just wanted to use the material or the properties of the item. Then he would do that, and hopefully he would be able to expand upon the multitool with any kind of tool that came to mind, to possibly create an 'Omnitool' instead of a multitool.
This idea was actually more of a joke, but it seemed like the multitool hanging onto his apron was getting rather excited after noticing what Eisen was thinking.