With a smile, Eisen looked at the magical forge in front of his eyes, while both Bree and Komer stared at it in a mixture of curiosity and surprise. "What is that? What did you just do?" The Fey-Kin Bree asked, and Komer nodded, wondering what Eisen did just as much.
Eisen turned over to them with a smirk. "I've just solved my Blacksmithing problem, that's what I did!" He said with excitement burrowed deep inside his voice, and stepped closer toward the structure, holding his hand over the fire to figure out how hot it actually is. "Or rather, it will be a solution to my Blacksmithing problem if I keep ranking my Flame of the Earth magic up. It's not hot enough yet. It can be used like a tempering oven like this, but not as a forge." He sighed loudly, shaking his head in disappointment while cancelling the magic spell.
After tilting her head to the side in thought, Bree's eyes finally began glittering excitedly. "Oh, so that's what you meant! I explained to you what that new skill effect was!"
"H-Huh? Bree, what do you mean?" Komer asked confused. He still didn't know much about magic, so beside the fact that this was a forge that popped up out of thin air, he had no idea what was going on.
"Ah, erm… Eisen's magic element can change states from pure fire, over to pure dirt or rock. So now that he can change what area has what state better, he managed to make the base of the forge out of his element turned over to rock, and the flames inside out of his element turned over to fire!" She explained, and was happy to see that Eisen smiled at her while nodding, telling her that she got everything that he did right.
"So you can even do things like this with magic, huh..? Now I'm really excited to see what my element will be!" Komer exclaimed as Eisen stepped back toward the carriage.
"Sorry to basically drag you out of town for that. We can go back if you wanted to do something else there, but I really wanted to try this out." Eisen explained, but both Komer and Bree shook their heads.
The young man smiled lightly while stepping back toward the carriage. "No, it's fine, I don't really mind. And I've looked at some maps of the continent before, and it seems like it's going to take pretty long to get to Ornier, so it's better to move whenever we can, right Bree?"
"Hmm? Ah, yeah, it should usually take about a week, maybe? So driving as much as we can really is a good idea, and since Cabarum doesn't need to sleep, we can basically keep going as long as any of us are awake." With a smile, Bree followed behind Komer.
"I see, then thanks, you two. Now then, shall we keep going?" Eisen asked with a smile as he jumped back up onto the bench of the carriage, grabbing Cabarum's reigns while Caria climbed up and sat down next to him and Melissa crawled up his arm, Bree and Komer sitting in the back of the carriage.
Happy that Eisen now figured out how to do the one thing he couldn't do while on the move up until now, he commanded Cabarum to start walking forward again, so that they could continue their journey toward the capital of Litgern, Ornier.
---
It has been three days since then, and the group was now close to arriving at the town they were travelling toward for a while now.
But they weren't just mindlessly driving the carriage forward, of course, and a few different things happened. First, Eisen finished the tools by simply carving wooden handles and attaching them to the steel heads. But that wasn't the only thing that Eisen did, as he also enchanted them to be more efficient. The Pickaxe gained a 'Crushing' enchantment, so that it would easily break apart any rock that it contacted, while the Axe was enchanted with a 'Cutting' enchantment to cut apart wood easily, and on the shovel, Eisen put a 'Burrow' enchantment for it to smoothly dig into the ground.
He briefly tested them out before and after placing the enchantments, and while their effectiveness wasn't easy to see at the start, but soon the time that was saved like this built up and amounted to quite a big sum, so Eisen couldn't see them as failures in the slightest.
Other than that, Eisen gained quite a lot of proficiency in different skills as well. He obviously continued crafting and as such gained some proficiency in his crafting skills, but he also gained a bit of proficiency in his 'Truth Seeing Eye' skill to the point that it wasn't far from ranking up again, and was also nearly half-way toward ranking up his 'Flame of the Earth Magic' again.
But Eisen also ranked up a bunch of skills. First off, he managed to rank up his 'Riding & Driving' skill, and the effect didn't really help him much. Usually, it would have reduced the amount of stamina that the animal that was ridden or drawing the carriage would use up, but since Cabarum didn't have any stamina, that didn't change anything.
Eisen's cooking skill also ranked up once more, which didn't change much either, since it only ranked up to rank 1. His Woodworking skill ranked up as well, allowing Eisen to work with 'extraordinary woods', as far as the effect told him. He didn't know what that meant exactly, but he figured it meant things that were changed beyond the laws of the real world through magic.
As for the skills that changed things the most noticably, one of them was definitely the Golemancy skill ranking up. Immediately, Eisen felt a change in Cabarum's and Aulu's behaviour, and they responded to even simpler commands than they used to.
Next, his Tool Connection skill ranked up as well, letting Eisen 'feel' where his tools were that had at least a connectivity rank of 2, meaning that if he concentrated on one of them, he would feel something pulling him toward the tool's direction. It wouldn't actually physically affect him, it was just something like a gut feeling. In the end, this would mainly just be useful for people that were quite messy with their tools and kept misplacing them, as this only worked within a 50 meter radius of Eisen. And since Eisen treated his tools as well as he could, he probably wouldn't be using this feature too much.
And at last, Eisen's 'A Giant's Strength' skill ranked up. What this did was that Eisen would be slightly resistant to blunt weapons while the skill was activated. It wasn't a lot, but it may still be enough to change the course of a battle. But since Eisen didn't fight that much at the time, that was only something he would need to worry about later.
And there was one thing that made Eisen incredibly excited as well! It seemed like the royal jelly was a substance that would give a Queen Bee Larva experience, enough to level them up one after another. Each day, that alone gave Melissa 20 level on average, and the rest was taken care of by Eisen doing the same thing he did with Caria, having her 'technically' be part of a fight, but finishing off the beasts himself. They did this whenever they noticed some kind of monster around them, so it didn't actually take all that long.
So, Melissa was able to evolve!
She turned from a Queen Bee Larva, to a regular Queen Bee! And with that, she got a skill as well. 'Hive Control'. Not only would this allow her to literally control what was going on in her own hive, but also seemed to influence how many eggs she could lay and how many types of bees they could hatch into at this point. Her size changed a little bit, and she was about double the size that she was as a larva in, and instead of turning into a simple yellow and black color, the yellow seemed to be replaced by something similar to gold, at least optically, as it even glittered in the light.
Now Eisen only had to think about what to do next. For sure, he could maybe have Melissa actually start her hive, but the only option for that would be the inside of the carriage then, and that didn't seem to be a good idea for many reasons. So setting something like that up would need to wait for a while until Eisen had something like an actual plot of land to construct things like this around.
So for now, Melissa only layed five eggs, all of them soldier Bees just to act as something like protection, that hatched within a few hours.
It seemed like even though Eisen didn't technically tame these himself, as they were Melissa's minions, he could somewhat control the soldier Bees as well. These soldiers were basically the same size as Melissa, but just a bit bulkier, and with an incredibly sharp stinger.
But Eisen's other tamed monster didn't fall behind either! Caria kept practicing her plant control over and over again, until she managed to get it to rank 2, and even brought Mana Manipulation to a point where she was close to ranking this up as well.
Either way, the plant control skill ranking up allowed Bree to grow grow the plants beyond what they usually should be able to become. Meaning, she could for example increase the size of a small flower to be two, three or even four times larger than usual. But in return, she could also make them smaller than they usually would be, even creating a tiny tree out of an acorn that may have been far smaller than usual, but was still technically like a regular sized tree all the same.
But right now, the group was taking a break together inside the carriage while Cabarum and Aulu were drinking some oil.
Eisen checked the current real-life time and turned over to Bree with a smile. "So when do you think we are going to reach Ornier? It isn't far anymore, right?"
"No, it's really not. We just passed the border this morning, so it should only take about another three or four hours." Bree explained with a smile, while Komer was sitting on the bed, currently reading a book about different countries in the world that may be useful to him in figuring out the best sales tactics for each area they were in, which they bought when they stopped by a small village yesterday.
Eisen nodded and looked down at Caria who was sitting on his lap as well as the six bees all clung to his arm. Many people would probably be freaked out by this, but for some reason, their large size and tendency to stick around Melissa made them far less threatening than regular sized bees. Eisen actually somehow thought they were all quite cute when they were sitting on his arm like that. And Caria, Bree and Komer didn't seem to be bothered too much either, so everything was fine.
"I've still got a few hours left before I need to go to bed. You've been staying up for a while, right, Bree? How about you go to sleep?" Eisen suggested, and Bree nodded slowly.
"Sure… I'm just somehow excited, you know? It's been so long since I've been to Ornier." The Fey-Kin explained with a bright smile, only causing Eisen to chuckle in response.
"I see, that's understandable then. Alright, I'll re-attach Cabarum to the carriage now, so we can keep going. You're probably pretty tired as well, right, Komer?"
"Huh? Ah, yeah, I'll go to bed in a bit. Just finishing this chapter about Litgern. Really want to be prepared for my first time independently and properly selling things on my own without scamming anyone." Komer laughed with embarrassment clearly in his voice, and Eisen couldn't blame him.
Over the past few days, Komer has been realizing how bad what he was doing actually was. At first he didn't think it was too bad, since there were still some people that bought the items he sold, but those were all NPCs. Since the game allowed him to play like that, he thought maybe it wouldn't be too bad to continue like that, and always kept on lying, becoming more ridiculous each time.
But once Komer actually took his time to inspect what he did from a position where he was thinking about all of these NPCs to be real humans, he began to see what was wrong. At least he realized his fault in the end.
Either way, now it was time for them to finally arrive at Ornier, after they've been traveling for so long.
