Spending My Retirement In A Game

Eisen poured his Mana into the thick needle that seemed to be made of Mythril and pushed down onto the Mana Crystal. Immediately, without even needing to use too much pressure, a small line appeared in the crystal. Seeing how easy this would be, Eisen activated his racial skill A Dwarf’s Hands and continued to work.

He first formed the small circle in its center, and then added the flame inside of it. After that, he added the six circles directly around it, with the triangles pointed outward inside of them, and then the simple circle around the whole pattern.

[You created a Simple Flame Enchantment]

[Simple Flame Enchantment]

[Quality - Average][Rank - 0]

[Description] A Simple flame enchantment that has been carved into a mana crystal. It will only expel one size of flame no matter how much mana is put into the crystal.

[Effect] Expells a small flame when in contact with pure mana

"Let me take a look at that," Morrom said and grabbed the Mana Crystal. "Well done. Good base, the surface you made was without any uneven parts. The circles are definitely lacking in some areas. You need to make sure they are as perfect as possible, or else the quality will suffer a lot. At least the flame in the center is quite good, and the triangles are alright as well. At least I’m happy that you didn’t get this perfect either, otherwise, this would have made me look bad as a professional enchanter, haha.." He smiled and gave the Crystal back to Eisen, completing the quest.

[You have earned 250 Experience]

[You are now Level 10]

[Enchanting Skill Learned]

Eisen willed those notifications away and put his new stat points into his INT and WIS stats, bringing them both to 32. He was kind of annoyed, however.

Up until now, he didn’t have much trouble with getting everything perfect, but for some reason, enchanting was somehow harder than he expected it to be. And that wasn’t only because Eisen always somehow had trouble making perfect circles from hand, because who can actually do that, but it also seemed like Eisen was kind of looking down on the skill, simply because he didn’t have much trouble until now.

The reasons he didn’t manage this as well made sense, though. Eisen has been working in professions like Blacksmithing or Tailoring for the big majority of his life, so the only obstacle he had to overcome was to get used to the game system, which happened quite quickly considering the amount he has been playing.

In Alchemy, the only thing besides transmutation he did was to grind and mix things, which didn’t really take much effort. And now that he thought about it, the only reason that Eisen was able to use transmutation somewhat easily was that he has been practicing his Mana Manipulation a lot, and already figured out a few important parts himself, before even trying Transmutation for the first time.

Combine that with the fact that the quality of the finished item made with transmutation was mainly based off of the base item’s quality. If Eisen hadn’t been able to use perfect quality potions for his pills, then maybe they would have turned out quite low-quality as well.

After thinking about this for a while, Eisen actually felt somewhat relieved that the enchantment didn’t turn out perfect. Without this, he probably would have become condescending at some point, a quality which he hated about himself whenever it happened.

At least now, Eisen knew that he wasn’t perfect. Sure, people called him a ’Legendary Craftsman’ in the real world, but this wasn’t that place. There were so many things he never heard about and never could have thought of himself. Of course, as mentioned before Eisen had experience with carving, but that didn’t mean he had experience carving enchantments.

Although the carving itself wasn’t completely horrible, Eisen found it hard to not think about what you’re doing, but what you want the item to do. When you made a sword, you didn’t think about how it would be used to fight while swinging down at the metal. You thought about the metal itself, about how hard it is and how much it gave in to your swings.

And according to Morrom’s explanation, Eisen had to think about the flames he wanted to see coming from the enchantment, and still manage to perfectly carve the actual enchantment. Multitasking never was one of Eisen’s strength. More the opposite actually. He would focus too much on one thing, and forget about other completely. It allowed him to indulge himself into practicing the numerous craftsmanships he learned in the past, but after all, he never had access to magic.

Maybe now would be a great chance to make up for his shortcomings!

Once Eisen thought about everything like that, all of his frustration disappeared. He would grab this chance now that he had it, and use it to its fullest extent!

Seeing that Eisen was smiling to himself while in deep contemplation, Morrom smiled and handed the Mana Crystal back to him. "Try it out, I want to see how well it works."

Eisen nodded and looked at the crystal in his hand. He looked at the enchantment, and slowly poured some of his mana into it. The enchantment began to glow slightly, and Eisen could even hear the sound of crackles that one could always hear during a fire. A few seconds later, a tiny spark appeared a few centimeters above the enchantment, followed by a small flame appearing in its stead. It was considerably smaller than the flames Eisen saw coming from enchantments like these before. Whether this was because of his Skill Rank or because of the quality and rank of the enchantment itself was still unknown to him, but he was sure to find out sooner or later.

"Good, it worked faster than expected! The first time I carved that enchantment, it took several attempts to get it started! Anyway, now I’ll explain what which part does. Those triangles are the alchemical symbol of fire when seeing the center as the bottom. Those parts are there to specify the enchantment type. This was a fire enchantment, so we used that. When it comes to elemental enchantments like that, you have to combine the different alchemical symbols for water, earth, fire, and air to get the needed element. There are other types, non-elemental ones, but they are too many to tell you about them, also because you can get most basic effects through the four basic symbols."

While Morrom was explaining this, he drew up the four Alchemical symbols for the four elements on a piece of paper. Eisen knew these already, as they were relatively basic symbols so far. They were simply four triangles. The fire one was pointed upward, the water one was pointed downward. And the air one was pointed upward but had a horizontal line cutting it in half, and the earth one was the same just turned downward.

This was actually the limit of what Eisen knew about Alchemy, besides things that basically everyone knows about it, like that it’s supposed to be able to turn coal into gold. He only knew this through reading fairytales to his children, though.

"The circle around the whole thing is for further specification. There are specific symbols you should use if you want certain effects. The ’basic’ mode of the flame enchantment is to push it outward, so we didn’t need to add a specification to the outside. You can also add symbols if you want slightly stronger or weaker effects depending on the amount of mana that was put into the enchantment, as well as if you want it to be connected to a source of mana, like a storage crystal filled with mana, and constantly pull mana out of it, or if its only supposed to activate when someone puts mana into the enchantment on their own." Morrom explained further and showed some basic specifications that seemed to be written in some kind of runic alphabet, which Eisen just barely recognized. Amongst the types of specifications, there were those to turn the effect inward, for example. If Eisen had added this specification to his enchantment, it would have made the mana crystal heat up.

"And lastly, the center. That describes the actual effect. While you’re carving that, you especially need to think of what you want the enchantment to do. You thought of the type of flame like those I showed you, right? If you had thought of something like a sphere of fire appearing above it, then that would have happened instead. However, what you carve into there needs to correspond to what you’re thinking about somehow. If you had drawn that flame and thought of it expelling water, it wouldn’t have worked. You can get creative with that. And the more complicated that center part is, the more stable and stronger the effect of the enchantment. And of course, it has to fit together with the element and specifications you chose."

Morrom smiled and looked over at Eisen, who was deep in thought while looking at the different enchantments that Morrom drew onto the paper to give Eisen an idea of what some more complicated ones looked like. He laughed softly and stood back up.

"For now, just test some things out. I’ll give you some of the basic patterns you need to know, so just mix and match all kinds of stuff. Get your Skill to Rank 1, and then keep practicing a bit more if you want. I’ll be spending a good few hours re-furnishing my workshop over there..." Morrom sighed out and gave Eisen a few mana crystals, rocks, and even pieces of wood, as well as a few sheets of paper he prepared beforehand containing the basic patterns which Morrom mentioned.

First things first, Eisen looked through these patterns to think of some ideas for enchantments he could make, as he didn’t only want to repeat making the same one over and over again.

Thinking that Bree might have some ideas, and feeling bad that she always just sat there and silently stared at his work, Eisen looked over to her and asked for her help.

At first, she was flustered, which also showed she didn’t expect Eisen to ask for help. This only made Eisen feel even worse. He really wasn’t treating her right.

For a while, the two of them brainstormed some fun ideas, thinking up self-burning wood as firestarters, canteens that would never run out of the water, or hats that gave a gust of cool air if you needed it in the summer.

Taking some of these ideas and simplifying them so that he could create some of these things right now, Eisen grabbed fist-sized Mana Crystal and first turned it into a good enough base with transmutation, changing its shape into that of a cylinder with flat ends, and then sketched up the enchantment he would make so that he at least didn’t have to come up with it while carving it.

And quite surprisingly, that was enough to push Eisen’s Drawing Rank to 1, giving him one INT and one AGI. The bonus that ranking this skill up gave was that it would be easier to create complicated drawings. What that meant immediately showed itself as his Drawing skill, that before didn’t really do anything, now helped while sketching the enchantment.

As mentioned before, Eisen was never great at drawing or carving perfect circles, but now Eisen managed to make on that was near to perfectly round! He was unsure whether this would help with the carving, but even if not, it didn’t matter too much.

Anyway, the enchantment’s element that Eisen chose for this was Water, meaning that he drew triangles pointed toward the center. Since for now, what he wanted to make didn’t need any specification, as the enchantment only needed to push out water above it, Eisen didn’t add anything to the outside circle.

For the center, Eisen thought for a while to come up with a good pattern that came naturally while thinking about the effect he wanted. As it would be a simple enchantment and that didn’t require a complicated pattern in the center, Eisen chose a regular Water droplet.

As the design for the enchantment was now finished, Eisen got to work. He poured his mana into the Mythril needle and placed it against one side of the Mana Crystal Cylinder, slowly beginning to carve the enchantment.

First, Eisen carved the circle for the center and added the water droplet inside. After that, he carved the six triangles which were pointed toward the center of the enchantment around it and added a circle around each triangle. And lastly also the circle around the whole enchantment to finish it off.

Once more, it definitely wasn’t perfect. The circles weren’t round enough and seemed too shaky, and it seemed to Eisen that he still had a few problems with concentrating on the effect rather than the carving itself. Either way, he still got a little bit better.

[You created a Simple Water Enchantment]

[Simple Water Enchantment]

[Quality - Above Average][Rank - 0]

[Description] A Simple water enchantment that has been carved into a mana crystal. It will only expel a weak stream of water no matter how much mana is put into the crystal.

[Effect] Expells a weak stream of water when in contact with pure mana

Seeing that the enchantment was finished properly, Eisen placed his hand onto the mana crystal and began to transmute its shape without activating the enchantment. He practically ’pulled’ the bottom of the cylinder upward and around the enchantment, the surface it was carved on would end up acting as the bottom. The top was left open, and this finished the item that Eisen was trying to make.

[You created a Self-Filling Mana Crystal Cup]

[Self-Filling Mana Crystal Cup]

[Quality - Above Average][Rank - 0]

[Description] A cup made out of a Mana Crystal. A novice Enchanter carved an enchantment to expel water when mana is infused into it onto the bottom of the cup. You need to be careful that the contents don’t overflow.

[Effect] Cup is filled with water when mana is poured in