It was the next morning, before Eisen and Bree would start driving the carriage again further toward that farming village that Bree mentioned. By the end of yesterday, Eisen even managed to rank up his Riding & Driving Skill, which gave him a slightly higher amount of control over the carriage, which wasn't really shown all that much considering the quality of the carriage. It would have been more useful if they were driving a carriage that was hard to control in the first place.
Today, Eisen and Bree would probably reach that village by evening considering the speed they were travelling at. Some might see this as kind of boring, but to Eisen, this just gave him more time to work. And what he wanted to work on was a small dress for Caria! Now that she actually started roughly looking like a young girl, it was kind of weird to have her walk around basically naked.
But before then, Eisen and Bree sat down together and ate some breakfast. It wasn't anything special, just a little bit of the dried fruit and meats while the two of them talked to each other. But they didn't need anything special to eat, as long as they got enough nutrition to start out the day properly.
After breakfast, Bree started driving the carriage again while Eisen checked up on some things, mainly just to see if the mead was fermenting yet. Usually, it would take about 24 hours for the fermentation process to start, but Eisen didn't know if this was sped up or not. But sadly, Eisen didn't notice anything that might be a sign that the fermentation started yet.
So, Eisen grabbed some of the thin red fabrics that he bought, before laying it down on the side of his worktable to start working on Caria's dress instead. First, Eisen made a quick sketch on some paper of what it should look like. The main thing that Eisen could think of was something roughly similar to Bree's, although with a few slight differences. For example, the shoulder straps were thicker and a direct part of the chest-part, instead of being simply sewn on, and the bottom for the dress was slightly more 'puffy' and in a stronger cone-shape than Bree's.
Of course, Eisen was also only using regular fabrics for Caria's dress instead of magic fabrics. Depending on the way she grew up and her looks changed, he may have to make another dress anyway. After all, if she ended up looking like a teenager or grown woman, it wouldn't look great if she was still wearing a child's summer dress.
Now, Eisen actually got to work. He cut out the three pieces that he needed, the front of the chest, the back of the chest, and the bottom of the dress that would cover the rest of Caria's body. The next step was quite simple, as Eisen only needed to connect the two parts for the chest with a regular backstitch, and then got to the bottom of the dress.
Eisen managed to figure out a quite simple way of creating that cone-shape that he wanted the dress to have, instead of the fabrics simply hanging downward. What Eisen did was to, using transmutation, harden the string a slight bit until it was something like a rather thin cable rather than string, keeping his mana as much around the string as possible, and then carefully moved it inbetween the layers of thread that made up the fabric.
This quite easily allowed Eisen to basically shape the dress in any way that he wanted to, as long as he added enough of these hardened strings. And now, Eisen simply sewed the bottom of the dress together at each end, and then sewed its top to the bottom of the chest-part.
"Done!" Eisen exclaimed when looking at the small dress laying on the table, before he opened up its information.
[Red Summer Dress]
[Quality – Perfect][Rank – 3]
[Description] A simple, but high quality, red summer dress made by the Omni Craftsmaster Eisen.
[Effect] +5 END, +5 AGI
Eisen smiled at the result, and was happy that it would even give Caria a few small stat bonuses. And he may have broken through Tailoring with this piece again, but since he couldn't get any bonus stats through it anymore, it didn't show him the familiar notification about overwhelming quality items.
The old man turned around and looked at the small myconid who was curiously watching Eisen work while sitting on the carriage's bed. "Alright, let's put this on you!" Eisen chuckled lowly and prompted Caria to hold her hands up, before moving the dress over her cap, which actually made this quite hard, and dressed Caria up in the red dress that was the same color as her cap.
She looked herself up and down immediately afterward and happily jumped at Eisen to hug him again. "I'm glad you like it, haha. Actually, let me take a look at your status. I didn't really check after you evolved." Eisen chuckled out lowly, before the small Myconid's status simply appeared.
[Caria]
[Race- Myconid Druid Disciple(Amanita Muscaria)][Owner – Eisen]
[Rank – 2 | Level – 2]
[HP – 450][MP – 1170]
[STR – 16][END – 17][AGI – 20][INT – 58][WIS – 54]
[Skills]
-[Druidic Nature][Rank – 0][Level – 1]
-[Mana Manipulation][Rank – 1][Level – 86]
-[Plant Control][Rank – 1][Level – 2]
"Druidic Nature? It seems to be the skill that you got when you evolved again." Eisen muttered to himself while closely looking at the status screen. Since he didn't really know what this skill did, Eisen turned around to look at the amalgamation of useful information that was currently driving the carriage.
"Hey, Bree, do you know anything about the skill 'Druidic Nature'?" He asked, and Bree slightly turned her head and seemed to think for a while, before yelling her answer through the opening in the front of the carriage.
"It's just a basic skill for Druids! It makes them more connected to nature, so all nature-related skills are easier to use. Erm, there's some other cool stuff coming at later ranks, but I don't know too much about those…" She explained while Eisen joined her back on the front bench, Caria once more sitting on his lap.
"I see. That's definitely useful, then! I guess this will just help Caria grow into a complete druid then! Although I still don't really know what a Druid is supposed to do." While chuckling, Eisen took the reigns from Bree to let her relax for a bit and level his own Riding & Driving Skill.
For the next few hours, they continued driving while Eisen continuosly activated his Truth Seeing Eyes skill as well to level it up a bit while he was doing nothing else.
---
[Truth Seeing Eyes reached Level 100 in Rank 0, upgrading to Rank 1]
[You can now see the quality of things around you]
[Due to Ranking-up your Truth Seeing Eyes Skill, you gained +1 INT and +1 WIS]
In front of Eisen's eyes, this notification popped up the moment that his skill proficiency reached 100. Nonstop, for the past six hours, Eisen had these special eyes activated and looked at the information of everything that he saw. Luckily, this didn't completely fill up his sight, since the status information that he accessed through the skill worked different to regular status windows.
While those regular notifications stayed around him at all times and followed him around, the information that the Truth Seeing Eyes skill made available stayed at the item where that information came from.
Before now, there were simple white circles in front of an item, but now, he actually saw a little bit of color. When he looked around, he noticed that these circles were now colored differently. For example, the circles in front of Bree's and Caria's dresses were now both a very vibrant Yellow.
On the other hand, the shirt he was currently wearing, the black crafting shirt, had a vibrant orange circle instead.
So immediately, Eisen came to a quick conclusion, that he would need to confirm further at some point. It seemed like depending on the rank of an item, Eisen was now seeing differently colored circles.
And now, it seemed like when he opened status pages of items through his Truth Seeing Eyes skill, the windows themselves were also in that color. This was definitely quite useful if he wanted to quickly differentiate between high and low-quality items, although not for much more.
However, considering that the skill only became rank 1 just now, its effects were already quite amazing. Despite the fact that it took far longer to gain proficiency in this skill than other of rank 0, Eisen decided that it was worth it to try and rank it up even further as soon as possible.
Eisen gripped the reigns harder excitedly and continued using his skill on all kinds of things around him. Although most of them were still simply white, the color that Eisen figured was the color for Rank 0 items and objects, that was probably because the things he was mainly inspecting this way were plants and trees by the side of the road.
It was only when he saw the tiniest red dot in the distance that Eisen deactivated his skill to be able to see a bit better. After all, while using the skill, Eisen was only able to see in black and white, with an ever so slightly shifted vision the further away he looked.
It wasn't too much of a difference, but still enough to make it hard to see things perfectly in the distance.
Before Eisen could even make out the source of the red dot, the color for Rank 1, Bree already stood up on the bench and happily pointed forward. "We're here! That's the farming town I talked about!"
While Bree was smiling brightly, Eisen narrowed his eyes to try and see what it really was that he saw in the distance, and he saw something reflect the sun, so it was probably a piece of armor belonging to a guard.
Only a few minutes later, Eisen could already confirm that this really was the case, and their carriage was stopped directly in front of the wooden gate in the center of the large wooden fence acting as a wall to protect the inhabitants of the town.
One of the two guards standing in front of the gate held his hand in front of him to signal Eisen that he should stop. "Before you enter, we will have to make sure you are not transporting illegal substances. Are we allowed to search your wagon?"
"Of course, of course! Come through the back, please." While saying this, Eisen stood up and made his way to the back door of the carriage and quickly opened it up to let one of the Guards inside. He was quite surprised by Aulu, and vice-versa, but both of them quickly ignored each other and the guard continued his search. He mainly took a look what it was that was stored in the barrels and then left again. Nothing seemed to be too suspicious, after all.
"Alright, clear." The Guard told his colleague with a nod, who then quickly opened up the gate to let carriage through, smiling at Eisen as he passed. "Have a nice stay in our humble village."
And it really was quite a humble village. But that was no bad thing, it just meant that it was quite small compared to a town such as Melroe, and you could see the gate on the other side of the town at the end of the central street.
At least it wouldn't be so hard to find the places they wanted to visit. As the gate closed behind them with a creak, Eisen steered the carriage through town until he found a stable. After quickly paying a small fee, he left Cabarum and the carriage there. He would have liked to bring Cabarum as well, but he left him behind so that he could make sure nobody just entered the carriage while Eisen and Bree weren't there. Aulu was also still lying down in the carriage as a guard dog, so they shouldn't need to worry about thieves too much.
Since it was already getting close to evening, Eisen and Bree chose to stay at an Inn for the night, and then buy whatever they needed to buy tomorrow morning before departing. So now, they took a look around town while they had the chance.
And now that Caria was too large to sit on Eisen's shoulder, she was walking next to him while he held her hand to make sure she couldn't just run off somewhere and kept up.
However, due to the village being quite small, there was not much to look at in the first place. Other than a small smithy, tailor and leatherworker, there weren't many crafters here in town either. There were some small guild buildings, some of them even seemed to be sharing the buildings amongst themselves, but the largest amongst them seemed to be the Merchant's guild, and directly in front of that guild was the small marketplace, where most people just finished packing up or were still in the progress.
On the other hand, there was one young man, maybe in his early 20's, who was sitting at the side of the street on a blanket with a bunch of different items laying on the ground. He was the only one who was still enthusiastically trying to sell things, yelling out a sentence that grabbed Eisen's attention.
"Find the best items in the whole town, nay, even the whole country! They have passed the Omega test of approval, so you can be sure they are top quality!"