Spending My Retirement In A Game

"Soul Engineering? It has its own skill? Interesting..." Eisen muttered out as he waved the notifications away with a smile, and Komer overheard him.

"Hm? Did you gain a new skill?" He asked curiously, and Eisen simply nodded. "Yes, I did. I guess there are enough things you can do with souls that it prompts the soul engineering skill. And here, you can take a look. If we should ever get a good source of soul stones, this might be something interesting to sell as well. It takes the mana that the soul generates and gives it out. I can activate enchantments just with that, or put it into a mana battery to save it for later."

"Huh... now you can even tamper with souls... huh..." Komer said with a blank look on his face as he leaned back against the wall, starting to feel an inferiority complex crawl up on him, which did not get past Eisen either.

"Don’t worry, Komer, I’m actually not especially talented either. I’m just very, very old. I’ve done this my whole life, so I’m good at it now, but I didn’t wake up one day and was able to do all of this all of a sudden. If you work hard toward a specific goal, I’m sure you have what it takes to become the best as well." Eisen said while smiling and placed his hand on Komer’s shoulder to cheer him up, and the young merchant simply nodded, apparently not feeling better all that much.

"Thanks, Eisen... It just feels like... Even though the ways that my brothers did things weren’t right in any way, they were actually successful... Like, buying a shop in such a short amount of time, or getting enough money and influence to bribe guards at the capital? Without you, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything, I wouldn’t even have an occupation yet... I just feel... useless..."

As Komer was looking down at the ground, he slowly slid down the wall before simply sitting down right where he stood, and Eisen squatted down and looked at him with a serious expression. "Komer, don’t say that. Sure, your brothers started out better, but that’s because they’ve been relying on other people as well. Do you think they could have done all that without their goons? No way. They started out with a great base, while you were alone. You did what you did back then because you had to, they’re doing all of that stuff because they can. That’s a big difference, never forget that. You are you, and honestly, you’re great at it."

Slowly, Komer looked up at Eisen again, actually starting to feel somewhat embarrassed at the way he acted just now, and nodded. "You really are a wise old man, huh? Always know the right thing to say..." He chuckled as he stood back up. "Thank you, it means a lot to hear someone say that. Now... can I help somehow? I feel bad just being fed by you and not doing anything the whole time."

"Sure, I’ll show you some things then. Just so you know a bit about everything you’re selling." Eisen smiled, before looking over at Kiron, who had been watching with a complicated expression. "Do you want to help too?" The old man asked, thinking that Kiron was jealous or something like that, but the half-dragon simply shook his head.

"You can go ahead and work by yourselves. There seems to be some relatively strong monsters roaming the nearby fields and forests, so I will rather keep watch. Is it alright if I do so from the roof, with the sword that you handed to me before?" He asked, and Eisen simply nodded, handing Kiron the Zweihänder again.

"Just be careful, it’s easy to fall off." Eisen told him before the knight nodded gratefull and climbed to the top of the carriage, taking a seat there to make sure no monsters would just go ahead and attack them now that they reached a somewhat troublesome area.

"Well then, do either of you want to help?" Eisen asked as he turned to Caria and Melissa who were playing with each other in the corner while sitting on some barrels.

"Nope! Caria and Melissa are fine~!" Caria exclaimed with a bright smile as Melissa began buzzing loudly, agreeing with the Myconid next to her.

"Alright, then it’s just going to be you and me then, Komer. Bree and Sky seem like they want to keep talking on their own for a while." Eisen said with a smile as he got out the different materials he needed now, which were for now basically just more mana crystals and blank soul stones.

"So, for the wands and staffs, I need wood that has been transformed into magical wood by taking in large amounts of mana. That’s why I made this Soul Generator, that gives out 1000 MP per hour. I’ll make a few more just to speed everything up, and then hook all of the generators up to something that will pour as much mana as possible into whatever I want." Eisen explained the plan and reason for making this generator to Komer, before showing him the enchantment.

"All of this will basically work with enchantments, as many of the things I make right now do. The outermost circle there describes the process more in detail, meaning that it just tells the enchantment to do whatever it’s doing to the soul directly in the center there. That has to fit together with the center, though, which is the ’image’ to describe what’s happening, and the symbols in the middle between the center and the outer ring is once more to describe what it’s doing. The flame enchantment there has the rune for ’Flame’ in that spot, and this one here has two different runes, one for ’mana’ and one for ’stealing’."

Curiously, Komer watched Eisen as the old man drew up a small sketch on a piece of paper to describe it in more detail and then handed him a thick book. "If you want to take a look at different enchantments and how they work, here you go. I’ve written what they do above each enchantment. Just pour a little bit of mana into them and they’ll activate."

"Huh... These aren’t really all that complicated, are they?" Komer said in surprise as he looked at the different enchantments that were already added into the book, and Eisen shook his head in reply. "Not really, no. I feel like enchanting is a pretty simple thing to get into, and it’s something that allows huge possibilities, which is why I’m using it that often. I feel like I’m at a small advantage because I have transmutation through alchemy as well and can just shape the mana crystals however I want. Enchantments on mana crystals are usually stronger or generally more effective than when you put them on other things, so yeah."

Komer scratched his chin as he began thinking about what Eisen just said, until he got an idea that was, in his opinion, pretty good. "Then why don’t we sell re-shaped mana crystals?" He asked, before Eisen looked at him with a frown as if asking what he meant.

"Erm, usually mana crystals are rugged shaped weirdly so that you can’t really do anything, right? But if we sell mana crystals that are flattened down, it would be great to sell as something that especially rooky enchanters could use."

Eisen began scratching his beard for a few seconds before slowly starting to nod. "That’s actually a pretty good idea, yeah. At the very least I haven’t seen that yet, so it might actually be pretty popular, especially in a city that’s probably filled with lots of enchanters. And they are cheap and easy to make as well, so we can make loads of them, even on demand."

"Alright, then let’s do that! Anyway, how are you going to build that wood-transformer?" Komer asked curiously as he looked at Eisen already transmuting different mana crystals into one large tube that Komer would probably be able to stand in if he tried.

"It’s pretty simple, really. I’m going to put a large enchantment on the inside of this tube, that will take the mana from the generators and directly put it into whatever is inside of the tube. That’s it, really. I’ll put it in the corner and have it run whenever I need to as long as I need to. I’m making it pretty big, actually. It may take a bit longer, but in the end, it gives me more freedom to make larger things. I can also put smaller stuff in, of course." Eisen explained as he finished the large tube, and transmuted it so that it split off at one line and simply ’rolled out’ to be a flat square so that Eisen could properly enchant it.

It was quite large, so Eisen needed a lot of space to do so, but the actual enchantment wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t all that big either, since Eisen made it so that all of the mana would be pouring out of every part of the tube toward the inside. Once that was finished, Eisen simply closed the tube up again and got to work on where the mana actually came from.

It didn’t take long to make the other four mana generators either, as they were quite simple as well. Their quality was a little bit higher than the first one that Eisen made, but it didn’t really seem to change anything on the amount of mana they generated.

Once these things were finished, Eisen built a small mana crystal stand that he could simply place up to ten mana generators into and that would then pour the mana into the tube’s enchantment.

"Now, this is basically it. Could you help me fill it up with some wood?" Eisen asked as he walked over to the stack of different types of wood that he had in the carriage, simply stacking them up on top of each other with Komer’s help until the whole thing was filled up as much as possible. There were of course some gaps, considering that they were placing cuboid pieces of wood in there and this was a round tube, but there wasn’t too much space left over.

After that, Eisen placed a thin mana crystal lid on top of the tube to make sure none of the mana could simply escape into the open space, and put everything together so that it would start, and immediately the space inside the tube seemed to be flowing around weirdly, which showed that it was now completely being filled out with mana.

"Great! Done!" Eisen exclaimed with a smile and looked over at Komer who was curiously checking out what was going on inside of the tube, as it was really quite an interesting sight.

To see if anything was already changing about the wood, meaning if there was something like a counter in its description page now, Eisen activated his Truth-Seeing eyes, but before he could even take a look at the wood, something else happened.

[Truth-Seeing Eyes reached Level 100 in Rank 1, upgrading to Rank 2]

[You can now see mana]

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

Surprised, Eisen read through the notification, and looked around to see if there was any difference. And indeed there was. The inside of the tube was now basically pure white due to the large amounts of pure mana flowing around inside of it, and there seemed to be a tiny layer of pure mana also surrounding Komer and Melissa, while Caria’s seemed to have the lightest tint of green. He probably wouldn’t have been able to see that if everything else around wasn’t just black and white with his current sight.

"Huh, interesting..." He muttered out, and confused, Komer tilted his head to the side.

"What’s going on?" Komer asked, and Eisen began to explain. "My Truth-Seeing Eyes ranked up, so I can see mana now, it seems. And I guess you’re giving off mana all the time, and it looks like something like an aura, or something like that." Eisen explained to the young man, who simply replied with light awe.

Curiously, Eisen looked out the window in the front to look at the two Fey-Kin, and immediately saw a difference to before. Sky also had just a white aura, but it was a bit larger than Komer’s, and Bree’s aura was even larger, even though still quite thin, and had a light pink tint.

But that wasn’t all he saw, as, when he looked out toward the fields and forests nearby, he saw mana flowing around that was at some parts light green and at some parts dark green, but everywhere it was just very thinly spread around like incredibly light mist, and only directly around plants.

It actually looked quite beautiful.