Spending My Retirement In A Game

Chapter 421 - Aged Cluster

With the charm in hand, and Ranger back inside of the storage box, Eisen made his way back into the Dungeon to try this next step out. Hoping that this would properly work, the old man carefully grabbed the soul in the shape of a necklace and ’disconnected’ the decorative part in the front, before trying to combine it with the charm in his hand.

At first, it seemed like it wouldn’t work again, but after a few moments of continuosly trying as hard as he could, the soul and the charm finally combined with each other, and the charm was pulled onto the rest of the soul. With a smirk on his face, Eisen quickly hurried up and grabbed some of the gold-layered thin ’bars’, or rather sticks, that he then used to bend into the shape of the chain-links, before putting them together.

Once the old man had a chain of the right length necessary, he quickly connected the chain to the loose ends of the chain wrapped around the charm using transmutation, before connecting the chain to the soul as well. And so, the old man was now holding a new item.

[Ego Charm-Necklace]

[Rank - 1][Quality - Perfect]

[Description] A Necklace with the innate ability to grow made by the Omni Craftsmaster Eisen. An Ego-Charm that fully grew to the highest of its ability was used to create this, strengthening its ability to grow. The Soul has been used as the base.

[Effect] +10 INT; +10 WIS

[Requirements] 90 INT; 90 WIS

[Growth] 0/50

Surprised, Eisen looked at the information displayed in front of him, smirking lightly as he was doing so. "Interesting..." The old man muttered to himself, glad to see that there was such an effect. The effects on this were lower than the charm’s when it fully grew, but it seemed like this was higher than it normally would be for a rank 1 necklace, especially considering that it was an Ego-Item, which usually seemed to have lower stats than normal to start out with.

But either way, the growth potential on this necklace was far higher than any other Ego-Item that Eisen made so far. For now, Eisen figured he should just keep it around to see if the growth was any different to before, so the old man wrapped it around his hand, considering that he already had the coin around his neck.

Although, now that he thought about it, it was pretty weird that this was an item that was just completely useless, while also being utterly indestructible. And Eisen did actually try before, but no matter what he did, the coin never bent or reacted to heat, despite obviously being made of metal. And on top of that, it was a metal that he didn’t recognize in the slightest.

Eisen figured he should try and look into that at a later point in time, and for now, he just wanted to try something else out, for which he took all of the soul clusters apart again and went to take a look at each and every one of their soul-realms, without actually giving a shape to any of them.

The reason why he didn’t was pretty simple as well, because Eisen wanted to cluster souls together that were as similar to each other, or that had the greatest synergy with each other, as possible. So there were a few souls in the form of accessories, swords, tools, and so on, that Eisen put together into a cluster.

It seemed like that alone wasn’t enough to make them mix together closely like that, so Eisen made his way back out of the Dungeon to call over a certain man that might be able to help with this.

---

"You want me to do what?" Jyuuk asked surprised, currently training with his beasts, and Eisen just repeated what he said again. "I want you to use your element on these Soul Clusters. I found that the souls somewhat mix together, and I think that effect might be stronger if a lot of time passes for these." He explained, and Jyuuk nodded his head in response.

"Yeah, I get what you mean, but I haven’t really tried using my element on souls yet..." The Beastperson pointed out, and with a smile, the old man nodded as well. "Maybe you haven’t tried yet, but it should work. Your element is called ’Cycle of Life and Death’, not just ’Cycle of Life’, right?"

"Fair enough... Let me just try, then." Jyuuk responded and then swiftly placed everything in his hands down onto the ground next to him, before while Eisen held the soul-cluster of five different souls over toward him.

With his hands over the cluster, Eisen wasn’t really able to see much of what was going on with them at the moment, but he was pretty sure that everything was working. Otherwise, Jyuuk would have probably just stopped after a few seconds.

But soon enough, Jyuuk stopped and uncovered the cluster, and Eisen looked at it surprised. Before, the souls were somwhat comparable to filled waterballoons placed into a bowl together. They were pressing against each other tightly, but they were still their own seperate entity. However, now, it was more like the souls somewhat started pulling each other in, as if merging on the edges, kind of like slightly molten gummy-candy that was pressed together.

"Huh..." Eisen muttered to himself surprised, and then took the cluster back from Jyuuk, trying to pull the different souls apart from each other. It was a bit harder to do so than normal, but soon enough, Eisen was holding the first soul in his hand, or rather, it was floating on top of his hand, and then Eisen swiftly entered that soul’s soul-realm to take a look at how much it changed.

These souls were all supposed to be for different types of swords, and from what Eisen remembered, this one here should have been like a cutlass beforehand. Now, it grew longer and thicker, and had less of a curvature, even if it was still noticable. The handle didn’t have the regular hand-guard anymore, but now rather had a handle that you had to slip your fingers into directly, as if the handle itself was gripping onto the wielder, and it was protecting the hand that way.

With a smile on his face, glad to see such a change, Eisen nodded his head and then looked at the second soul. And to his surprise, it was nearly the same as the ’cutlass’, just a bit larger and less curved. For the most part, you would at the very least recognize these two as a ’Set’ of swords, and it didn’t seem like it would be tough to ’combine’ or ’layer’ them like he did with the necklace.

And after checking the three other souls, Eisen confirmed that the others were very, very similar to these two souls as well, with just a few minor differences inbetween each weapon that Eisen may have to work on a little.

Either way, for now, it seemed like Eisen would be able to create a quite interesting growing sword. He would just make one of them and send Brody out to the area around the merchant town with it for a while to have him level it up, and then he would try to integrate it with the next soul, then send brody out again, and repeat the whole thing until he layered everything five times in total. Although, this meant that Eisen had to make the item for the first weapon twice, something that he really just thought about only now.

With a smirk on his face, Eisen then took out four more soul-clusters and asked Jyuuk to ’age’ them with his element, and the final versions seemed pretty interesting.

For the cluster with tools, Eisen ended up with something in the rough shape of a hammer, meaning that the handle and the tool-head ran through each other like a ’T’, just that one side of the head was a chisel, and the other something like a twisted pick. Eisen wasn’t sure if this was useable at all, but he would try it out, at least.

The cluster with accessories had turned into something like an accessory-glove, with five rings for each finger, which were connected in a row through thin chains. Each individual ring was then connected to a metal wristband, at least that was the ’final stage’ that Eisen would end up with. The first few ones were slightly different sometimes.

As for the cluster with charms, which were a seemingly pretty ’popular’ shape for souls, they all were pretty similar in the first place, but now they nearly all turned into something like a pointed snail-shell made of metal, and decorated with different patterns and gems.

Then at last, there was a cluster with the rarest soul-shapes that Eisen found so far, the cluster with Masks. To Eisen’s surprise, while they were all vastly different from each other beforehand, for example one being a Dragon-Mask, another one was a Goblin-Mask, and there was even a Tengu-Mask in the mix, they all ended up perfectly the same to each other. Just a smooth, white oval mask with openings for eyes, and nothing else.

At the very least, these wouldn’t need to be physically changed to ’layer’ them, the only thing that needed to be done was to properly level this mask up, and then Eisen might be able to see what this mask was about. Luckily, he didn’t have to try and figure out a proper order for these, but could just move on with whichever of these mask-shaped souls he wanted to. At least after he gave them a proper shape, which was the first thing that Eisen did now, spending a few hours on making the in total 30 different items, 25 to give the souls from the five clusters their form, and then five to make the first Ego-Item of each cluster.

Apparently, it seemed like Ego-Items couldn’t only level up through combat, but just by doing different things they had ’synergy’ with. For example, Eisen would be able to increase the growth level of the weird tool through working with it, the accessory-glove maybe just by wearing it and doing things with that hand, the mask had to be worn and used as a disguise, and so on.

So, Eisen figured he should do these things, and then swiftly put the accessory-glove onto his hand, placed the charm into his front pocket, and put the tool into a free spot on his Apron, before bringing the Sword to Brody and the mask to Evalia. Evalia usually wore a mask when she was outside, so maybe she could replace it with this one for a little while to avoid being seen. It should help a little even if it wasn’t enchanted, after all.

Either way, for now, Eisen figured he should just try and do his best and work with each of these items as much as he could. He hoped that the charm would gain some growth-levels just through being carried around while Eisen was working, so he just figured he should try that out.

Or first, Eisen had to try out what he could actually do with the tool in his hand. The first ’stage’ tool had something like a straight needle on one end and a flat surface on the other, so Eisen figured he could try and use this for crafting. Or at the very least to help out in the construction of the few different things that were still being built in the Dungeon, so that’s what he did.

The Accessory-glove was a bit annoying, but that was just because Eisen wasn’t used to wearing something on his hands while working. He was pretty sure that he would just end up getting used to it fairly soon. And if that wasn’t the case, Eisen could just place it to the side and work on leveling it up later.