Spending My Retirement In A Game

"Huh? No, of course, I knew about that... You didn’t?" Xenia asked, confused, while Eisen stared at her in disbelief. "What... Xenia, why didn’t you tell me about that?" Eisen asked, and Xenia took a quick look around to make sure that Kirisho, who said she wanted to go for a walk now that they only had a few more days left in this city, wasn’t around. And since they were now only amongst players, Xenia sighed loudly.

"Well, it’s a pretty normal thing, you know? In any fantasy fiction or game, things like enchantments can give bonuses to the user, not only to the item. In this game, it’s still far more effective to find some way to cause the effect you want by only placing it on the item than making the item cause an effect on the user. So I don’t think you missed that much anyway." Xenia pointed out before she took a look at the coin that Komer was currently holding while Eisen was rubbing the bridge of his nose in light annoyance.

"Wait, did you enchant a Gold Coin?" Xenia asked in surprise, and Eisen immediately nodded his head. "Yeah, I did. That turned it into a ’Coin of Fate.’ Right now it’s probably a bit too expensive to use, but I’m sure this is the kind of thing that Komer’s Element was made for, after all, he has the ’Coin’ element." Eisen pointed out, and Xenia nodded her head slowly. "Yeah... That’s pretty cool... By the way, what can you do with your element again?"

Surprised, Komer lightly tilted his head to the side before taking out the magic coin from his pocket and then laid that down on his palm, before a small tower of gold, silver, and copper coins shot out it. "Basically, this. Oh, and when I put my element in my eyes, I can see the rough value of different items. Those are all the uses I found so far."

"Well, then try to play around with it a bit. You don’t have anything else to do for the rest of the day, do you? I mean, honestly, if your element turns out to have some combat uses with those ’Coins of Fate,’ then you should be able to do different stuff than only that." The High-Elf pointed out, and Komer looked at her in surprise before moving his gaze over to Eisen.

"Should I do that?" With a light shrug, Eisen answered the young Merchant’s question. "Sure, why not? I mean, your brothers both had some special merchant occupations, so maybe you should look into that? I doubt you want to end up a pencil-pusher here in the game, and I don’t want that to happen either, even if you’re largely taking care of the business side of everything that’s going on."

Slowly, Komer nodded his head as he kept playing around with the coin he was holding before Eisen got an idea. "You know what? Here, let me try something..." The old man muttered, actively trying to think of creating a Quest for Komer as he spoke what he needed to do.

"I’m sure this is going to help you a bit. Take 100 Copper coins and enchant them in unique ways. Meaning, come up with 200 different enchantments, they can be similar to each other as long as they technically have different effects or executions, and place them on the coins. Try to think of unique combinations, and see if you can figure out different conditions to make those coins work even better." Eisen told him before a notification appeared in front of his eyes.

[Quest <100 Coins> given to Komer]

"Huh? Did you give me a quest? Awesome!" Komer excitedly exclaimed as he read through the quest information, before smiling brightly at the old man standing in front of him. "Thank you! I’ll get right to it!"

Happily, the young merchant then sprinted out the door to find a good place to work on the 100 Coins, before Brody, Xenia, and Jyuuk looked at Eisen with surprise in their eyes. "You gave him a quest for something like that?" Brody asked, and Eisen just shrugged.

"Yeah, why not? It’s easier to motivate kids like Komer if they actively get something out of it. As far as I can tell, the quest is going to give him a bit of experience. I’ll see if I can end up preparing something else for him as a Bonus reward. The 100 Coins should take him a while to make, after all." The old Titan pointed out as he made his way back to the door as well. "Anyway, I’m off to start extracting the metal from the petrified eggshells now. Shouldn’t take too long now." Eisen told them before stepping down the stairs and making his way back to his workshop where he already placed the three barrels now filled with charcoal.

"Let’s get to work now." Eisen grinned excitedly and poured the charcoal into a large bowl that he temporarily made with his element, before slowly starting to grind the entire contents of one of the barrels down.

Eisen bound some thin cloth in front of his mouth for this, as he didn’t really want to breathe any of this in, and then swiftly continued. After a little while, the magic bowl was filled with finely ground-down charcoal powder, and Eisen then moved on to the next part.

In another large bowl, Eisen ground down enough of the Limestone, which Komer had ordered for him, to be at a rough 1:1 ratio with the charcoal. Next, Eisen grabbed the two eggshells and hammered against them to first crack them down into larger pieces. Considering that this still was a dragon egg, it did take a good bit of force to do so. In total, to completely grind down one of the eggshell-halves, Eisen took as long as grinding down both the charcoal and the limestone took him.

Then, Eisen looked at the ground down powder in front of him and nodded his head, before creating another, fourth container into which he simply poured water, and then grabbed a quite large, flat wooden pan with riffles on its inside, which would be used to separate the major impurities from the metallic dust.

Eisen stuck the bowl into the large pan with all of the petrified-eggshell powder and filled it up a good bit, before just so slightly submerging the container in the water. With swift, circular motions of the bowl, Eisen then continued to sift the impurities like dirt or unusable rock from the metal. While those light-weighted impurities would be taken out with the water, the heavier minerals and metals would end up getting stuck in the riffles and would be leftover.

After Eisen repeated this for the whole giant bowl, which took him a few more hours until it was getting close to midnight in the game world, he was left with a surprising amount of metallic-dust. Usually, the minority of a rock like that would be metallic, but in this case, it was a good majority. And Eisen was quite happy with that.

In another bowl, Eisen then mixed together the Limestone dust, the charcoal dust, and the metallic dust, before recalling all other summoned containers, excluding the one that still had water in it because he didn’t want to cause a small flooding in his workshop, and then prepared the fourth material, which Eisen wanted to try out.

In this game, through alchemy, it was already possible to combine materials that were usually impossible to combine, at least with the current methods used, with each other, so why shouldn’t he be able to apply the same concept with metallurgy? Eisen grinned a slight bit and then poured the Red-Dragon Crystals into another bowl before grinding them down to a fine powder, which he mixed into the bowl with the other three materials as well.

Usually, you wouldn’t be able to alloy metal with crystals or glass, it was basically like trying to mix oil and water. It just didn’t work. But in hopes of this actually working in this game, Eisen attempted to do so anyway. After mixing the four materials, Eisen changed the shape of the bowl they were in and immediately turned it into a crucible, before turning up the heat to the maximum with his Staff.

Eisen was just large enough so that he could peek into the top of the crucible and take a look at the molten sludge inside of it to make sure he could see the proper time to turn the heat down. And a short while later, that moment was reached, and Eisen could already tell that his plan was a success.

With a grin on his face the whole time, waited for the content of the crucible to cool down enough to be handled, and soon enough, just that happened, so Eisen removed the walls of the crucible and looked at the large block of metal and impurities that were pulled out only from that metal. Grabbing his hammer and a chisel, Eisen then swiftly removed the impurities to separate them from the amalgamation itself, and once Eisen saw it, he couldn’t help but grin broadly.

[Red-Dragon’s Alloy]

[Quality - High][Rank - 4]

[Description] A Metal-Crystal alloy created by the Omni-Craftsmaster Eisen. By Combining Red-Dragon’s Crystals with an Alloy of numerous high-grade metals, a genuinely fantastic Alloy has been created.

"Yes! Perfect!" Eisen exclaimed as he read through the Alloy’s description. He really couldn’t help but keep grinning like an idiot. Alchemy, truly opened up a whole new world of materials to him once more, now that he knew he could combine crystals with metal. And not only that, the alloy itself was quite high-quality.

Different from the nearly candy-red color that the crystals had before, this alloy was a deep, dark mahogany-red, which would probably look quite nice when used for the scales. Eisen removed the impurities from the metal further, and then tested how resilient it was.

Luckily, it seemed that he kept everything in the crucible long enough that the carbon that would have otherwise ended up within the metal had already disappeared, so it was an incredibly strong metal that would probably be amazing to work with.

"That really was lucky though, the different metals combined without an issue... There aren’t any major issues with the metal either. Weird, I would have thought I would need to smelt it down a few times more and remove any contaminating materials, but apparently, I don’t..." The old man muttered to himself before placing the metal down at the other side of the room and then cleaning up any leftover dust or rocks laying around.

"I guess I should probably go to bed now, huh?" Eisen muttered to himself before stretching a bit, leaning back against the metal that he just created, and then logged off.

---

As he stood up from the capsule, Benjamin noticed some steps outside in the hallway already. And from the sound of it, those steps came from Benji and Sophia. Quietly, so that he wouldn’t wake any of the others up, Benjamin opened the door and followed his two oldest grandchildren to the livingroom.

"Well, good morning, you two," Benjamin told them with a grin while Benji was turning the TV on, and Sophia went to the kitchen to grab some cereal to eat.

"Morning, Gramps! It’s only another hour or so, and then we can finally play!" Benji exclaimed excitedly, and the old man sat down on his armchair with a soft chuckle.

"Yep, sounds about right. So listen, I want to talk to you two about a few things. When you start playing and finish your character creation, I need you to check if you have the friendslist option already and if I’m on there. If I am, message me the name of the town. If I’m not, and I notice that you two don’t appear on my friendslist, quickly log off and come to my room, and then tell me the name of the town you started in. I’ll come to you, and then you can take the time until then to figure out a few basic mechanics." Benjamin suggested, and Benji swiftly nodded his head.

"Coolio, we’ll do that. And who knows, maybe I’ll already be the Great Emperor of the game before you get to us." The young man chuckled in a visible, quite humble manner before Sophia sat down next to him with a bowl of cereal in her hand.

"Oh shut it, as if. Let’s say it was possible to become the king of a country in the game. You wouldn’t be it. And I doubt it’s possible." Sophia chuckled, and Benjamin grinned at her as he leaned back in his armchair.

"It’s ’absolutely’ possible. I’ll probably be a King in the game not too long from now."

Immediately, both Sophia and Benji snapped their necks in Eisen’s direction, letting out a single sound in unison. "Eh..?"