Spending My Retirement In A Game

Chapter 368 - Compression

"Hmm, this isn’t really all that nice to look at, now is it?" Eisen muttered to himself, before stepping back over toward the marble worksurface, at which point Constant had already brought over whatever items the old man may need.

So, Eisen figured he should first try to create the tiny version of his outfit and then move on toward finally finishing the items that Eisen wanted to make for Alnico.

And it didn’t really take all that long to finish the creation of that small Apron and pair of tiny wool pants up, considering their size, so Eisen swiftly decreased his size as far as he could again and swiftly tried it on. Seeing that it seemed to fit pretty well, the old man nodded in satisfaction and then moved on toward what he wanted to do, jumping up onto the Marble Worksurface using his Demonic Transformation’s Wings. And then on there, Eisen grabbed the smallest mythril needle that he had and got to work, hoping to be able to properly work on a very complex enchantment for this.

The enchantment that Eisen wanted to place onto the central piece of the recording device was focused around the interactive ’setting’ part of it. For that, he wanted to simply create a small display that would appear, which would let you control what was going on. So you could record whatever you wanted, change the sensitivity of the ’microphone’, and even play what you recorded out loud or send it to a nearby receiver.

That part of it wasn’t necessarily the reason why Eisen needed to create as complex an enchantment as he could, it was because he wanted to add a function similar to a ’File Explorer’ where you could properly sort through different recordings.

It took Eisen quite a while to figure this part of it out, and this was by far the longest that the old man spent on trying to figure out what kind of enchantment to make, but at the end of the day, he was luckily able to get to a relatively steady point where he was happy with what he made.

But the bad part about it was that it required quite a lot of mana to function, but the amount of mana that was needed couldn’t be created by such small Soul-Generators, and any mana-battery that he could place onto the device to keep it small enough wouldn’t even be able to keep the effect up for 10 seconds. And it wouldn’t be great to need to use mass amounts of mana for what was supposed to be just a tiny part of the overall Item that Eisen wanted to create for his Granddaughter.

So instead, Eisen was constantly working on somehow transmuting something while he was working, and then swiftly ranked up two skills just a few minutes apart from each other, the latter being the one that Eisen was actively working toward.

[A Dwarf’s Hands reached Level 100 in Rank 3, upgrading to Rank 4]

[Your hands are those of a true craftsman, effect increased by 20%]

[Due to Ranking-up your A Dwarf’s Hands Skill, you gained +1 AGI and +1 END]

[Alchemy reached Level 100 in Rank 3, upgrading to Rank 4]

[You can now depress or compress items and materials using transmutation]

[Due to Ranking-up your Alchemy Skill, you gained +1 INT and +1 WIS]

With a satisfied smirk on his face, Eisen swiftly changed out of this small crafting outfit and changed back into his regular-sized one, before turning toward Constant. "Get me as many Mana-Crystals as you can, please." Eisen asked the Helper with a smile, and he swiftly disappeared and one after another started bringing back the items that the old man had asked for, before Eisen himself quickly began to combine a lot of them into a pretty large crystal, which then ended up being big enough to chisel a full-scale statue of Eisen out of it, before the old man began to work on another item, although Constant and Serio both seemed relatively confused at what he was actually doing.

But what it was, was actually not that complicated. He was playing around with how far he can bring the compression ability before, and it seemed to be nearly impossible to compress that giant mana-crystal to the size that Eisen wanted it to be just like this, and as such wanted to try making an item for exactly that purpose.

And because it needed to be pretty stable for that, the old man figured it wouldn’t be enough to make it out of leather like the Dexterity-Glove he made, but instead would need to be a stable, full-metal gauntlet. And the metal that Eisen chose as a base was a Steel-Mythril alloy, using his own Flame-Of-The-Earth Mythril for that. Other than that, he would also be plating the inside of the Gauntlet with some of the FotE-Mythril, he just didn’t want the base of it to be a brittle metal like that.

And so, after smithing all of the different pieces for the Gauntlet out of the Steel-Mythril Alloy, the old man swiftly put everything together and then grabbed a few gems, before starting to actually think about which would be best, and then turned toward Serio and Constant. "Does either of you know what element fits best to Compression? It feels somewhat like earth would be a good idea, but it at the same time feels more like a concept, so using a combination of Light and Dark gems would also fit..." The old man asked the two Guardians, who both just looked at each other unknowingly.

"Sorry, we’re not exactly sure about that. I would reccomend trying both, although it is true that the earth element is often connected to high-pressures, which Alchemical Compression might be based on as well, isn’t that so?" Serio asked, and Eisen slowly moved his fingers through his beard.

"I’m not convinced... It’s not exactly based on pressure, at least not as far as I’m aware. Pressure wouldn’t press crystals materials together, it would just... shatter them. So maybe it’s more conceptual after all?" Eisen asked himself, but in the end, he didn’t really come to a complete conclusion and just chose to go for hte Light- and Dark-gem combination for now, and if it didn’t seem right then, he would switch the pieces in the Gauntlet out for Earth-Gems.

So, next, Eisen swiftly moved on toward creating the gems that he needed. First of all, he ability-enchanted the Marble surface with his new compression ability, and then carved a simple enchantment to use that compression ability onto the surface in front of it, changing smaller parts about the carved enchantment to specialize it for each part of the inside of the two Gauntlets, and then created a central mana-crystal enchanted simply to be used to define the strength of the compression and placed it onto the back of of the Gauntlets, swiftly connecting it with the other gems through some mana-crystal thread that Eisen could just slightly transmute to connect with each gem or crystal part.

And when the two Gaunlets were done, Eisen was quite proud of the effect.

[Compression Gaunlets]

[Quality - Perfect][Rank - 4]

[Description] A Pair of Gauntlets created by the Omni Craftsmaster Eisen. Due to the enchanted gems placed on the inside, it is possible to heavily enhance the amount of compression possible on things you touch.

It has a central enchantment created simply to change the strength of the enchantments.

[Effect] +20% Benefit To Compression Speed; Strong Compression; +20 INT, +20 WIS

[Requirements] Rank 4 Alchemy; 100 INT, 100 WIS

[As you are the creator of this item, you can ignore the Requirements]

With a smile, Eisen swiftly put the two Gauntlets on and poured mana into them, making the two dials swiftly appear above the crystals on the backhands of the Gauntlets, and the old man swiftly turned them both to Maximum before starting to get to work on the Giant Mana-Crystal.

Slowly, he started pressing into the different areas, and just by pushing his hand into it, he swiftly created a Handprint inside of the crystal. It felt slightly weird to him actually, especially when he began to move his hands around the surface to smooth everything out.

While it felt like he was scooping away some parts of the crystal, those parts that he scooped away nearly instantly seemed to disappear, because they were already compressed onto the rest of the surface.

And while Eisen was working on the outside with his hands, he used his mana to compress the center of the crystal at the same time, so that he could actually finish this relatively quickly.

But there was something else weird about this large crystal, or rather about the process of compressing it. When he tried it out with one of the smaller crystals before, he wasn’t really able to do much to it, but now he already compressed it down heavily to about a fifth of its original size. Sure, it didn’t seem like he could do much more than this and was now just trying to really push each and every part of it to the max, but the difference was way too large to just be caused by these two gaunlets, even if they did drain a huge amount of mana from him and had that vague ’Strong Compression’ ability on them.

In the end, though, Eisen didn’t want to complain about anything that solely worked in his benefit, and as such just continued to work on this, before he noticed something peculiar that he had a lot of fun playing around with. As Compression was basically just an application of transmutation to use external force to press a material together, now that he had these gauntlets on, he was able to practically push the mana-crystal away from the inside of his hand. And due to that, it felt nearly like he was just moving around some very tough dough instead of a crystal, and as such was able to further compress it by just ’folding’ the center of the crystal to the outside.

And when he was finished, Eisen nodded his head in satisfaction and finally deactivated the Guantlets, placing them to the side as he did so, and then swiftly squatted down to pick the crystal, which had now been reduced to a far, far smaller size, and tried to bring it to the Marble-Surface, even if the whole thing was incredibly heavy now. But nonetheless, due to Eisen’s strength stat which had risen above 200 only recently, the old man was able to pick it up either way. It might be more problematic for Mental-Stat based people, but as Eisen wasn’t going to use this whole thing anyway, he didn’t worry about it all that much.

Swiftly, Eisen ability-enchanted the incredibly dense mana-crystal to turn it into a Mana-Battery, and then split a small piece of it off, and was more than just happy to see that the mana that could fit into the battery was more than enough to keep the small recorder’s functions up for a few minutes, which should be enough considering the plan that Eisen had for the items he was making for Al in the first place.

Because the whole thing would most likely consume a mass-amount of mana, Eisen would of course need to create an incredible source of mana for the items, and because the central-piece of it was already somewhat bulky as is, it probably wouldn’t be an issue to place such a large mana-battery inside of it. The only issue was the weight, although Eisen was somewhat hoping to be able to fix that in some other ways. For now, he had to come up with something else as well, a way to actually create, or collect, all that mass amount of mana.

And when Eisen was trying to think about that, he inevitably thought about how nice it would be to be able to make use of the natural mana in the environment, of which there should be more than enough to completely load the dense mana-battery up at least for a little while.

Although when he thought that, he just now realized that he just got his hands on the method of creating crystalized mana.