Spending My Retirement In A Game

"Huh... that's new," Silber said curiously, looking around the house that had been built out of practically nowhere. Eisen nodded slightly, but mostly just waved his comments off. He didn't really have the leisure to talk to his brother that much right now; even if he wanted to.

Eisen looked at the marble worksurface, starting to engrave an enchanting into it. After creating the generic golem base, he continued on to the specific functionality. Basically, they were transport-golems, that would move the stone cubes that Eisen cut out from the mountain over to the blood-ice statue, building itself up bit by bit, replacing parts of the ice when needed.

However, instead of simply having the blocks be carried, it would be much easier and faster to have the block carry themselves. Eisen would place the golem cores onto the surface of each cube, and the cube would be turned into the body. Then, the cube would place itself into its predetermined position, returning back to its cube-shape.

Since the cubes themselves would all be uniformly sized, he could create a simple design for the golems to allow them to move fast through the mountainous terrain, and even climb up on top of the other cubes without needing to waste much time on making things adapt properly.

Now, when the golem reached its position, and if it some ice was in the way, the cube would make use of some of Eisen's magic to heat up the parts touching the ice, melting out the exact portion that was needed, which would allow for the ice-statue to simply be replaced piece by piece. Then, the golem-core would automatically detach itself. However, Eisen still needed to prepare three more things.

One; golems, preferably flying ones, that would bring the golem core back to Eisen to be put back onto a new cube.

Two; a way to get rid of the massive amount of blood that was going to me molten. Since he couldn't just leave it stuck to the statue; that would just cause structural damages and sanitary issues over time if the blood was left.

And three; a 'supervisor' system to automatically tell each golem where it had to go, while also telling the flying golems when a core needed to be retrieved. And of course, it also needed to keep track of the blood and make sure it was gotten rid of.

The first was quite easy. All that Eisen needed was to create another simple golem core base, and then place them into air-magic infused wood. To speed things up, he also created a simple bird base-model, so that the golem cores created their bodies on their own with the gievn material.

The second wasn't all too tough either, in the end. Eisen had gotten his hand on some blood magic a while ago, having placed the ability into some marbles to make use of it later. While this magic was more useful in the realm of necromancy, at its base, it was also the most effective way to physically move large amounts of blood.

Eisen created another set of golem cores, but he had to put some more effort into their bodies. They were going to be mana crystal golems, something that Eisen didn't tend to do since they were fairly limited in most of their uses. However, in this case, it was a little different. By softening parts of the mana crystal, he could create crystal hoses that he could also infuse with the blood magic.

The hoses would then pull all the blood in through the hoses, even the parts that were dried up through the heat from the stone cubes that had molten the ice, and then gather that blood inside of their hollow bubble-like bodies. Those bubbles were enchanted with transmutation abilities to compress and shape the blood.

If they reached their limits, they would bring a cube of blood outside of the city walls and stack the freshly-crystalized blood up on a pile. Jyuuk said he wanted to use this opportunity to gather samples from a transcendent monster; he could also get samples from Silber, but it was always better to have more varied samples to figure out transcendant properties.

And now, for the last thing that Eisen needed to prepare, he had to spend a lot more time thinking about it. He couldn't finish the other patterns up before he figured out this, since they all needed to be connected together. That was why Parc and Rouge really just spent this whole time preparing and fusing the materials for the golem cores.

They were going to need quite a lot of materials, after all.

Eisen thought for a while, and in the end, figured that he should be able to use his 'Blueprint' ability to give this supervisor system basically all the information that it was going to need for the Cube-Golems. Since the cubes were going to be a uniform size, it was easy enough to figure out a way to calculate each subsequent position for these golems.

By telling it the dimensions of the blood-ice statue, this system could also control when the cube-golems would activate the heat. That way, Eisen could also just give a mana-generation ability to this system, so that it could provide the cube golems with the magic they needed later.

However, the supervisor system also needed to be able to adaptively tell the other two golem types what they were supposed to do when. Telling the bird golems when to retrieve a new golem core was fairly easy as well, since it just needed to get a signal from the cube-golems when they were in their new position.

For the blood it was a bit different though; the crystal golems needed to move all over the place and know where they were needed the most. Eisen couldn't predict how the blood would end up flowing through the crevices of the cubes, after all. That's why Eisen also placed some blood magic into this system so that it could sense all the blood related to the statue, and go from there.

He ended up giving it a small number of multiple souls so that it could be more adaptive and intelligent than just a base system, and then attached some mana-generators to it. Then, all of the other golem cores were given a 'receptor' for this supervisor system, and the rest would be handled within the calculations of the supervisor.

This way, it was also easy to expand the amount of golems the system was linked to if they ended up having too little or had to speed the process up over time.

And then, Eisen just had to actually apply all the enchantments onto the individual 'blank' cores that Parc and Rouge prepared. By the time Eisen got to this stage, those two had already headed to bed for a while, resting so that they could continue helping out tomorrow.

The old man stretched a bit, rubbing his neck. Doing this sort of mass-production was usually relaxing to him, but the situation that he was in, and knowing that there were people actively dying not too far from where he stood... he just couldn't get into the flow that he normally did. Eisen took a deep breath and sat down for a moment.

He still had to prepare the blueprint to feed into the system, but that wasn't too complicated. He quickly pulled up the blueprint window and got to work.

But at the same time, Eisen couldn't help but glance to the side.

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[XXXXXXX Skill leveled up!]

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That window had changed over a dozen times while Eisen was working, each time 'repairing' itself more and more. Though that didn't change the fact that Eisen couldn't close the window. At this point, he figured that it was triggered when he used his skills somehow, but he didn't know what it really was.

Luckily, while he was crafting, he didn't notice any changes, but that might be different when he tried transforming again. The worst part was that, since the text was mostly fixed, he couldn't really tell when the skill leveled up anymore.

"Eisen," Silber called out to the old man, "Are you alright?"

"Hm? Oh, yeah, I'm fine. This is nothing, I've worked for longer sessions," Eisen replied quickly, continuing to figure out the blueprint. But Silber didn't seem convinced, "Yeah, but... back in my time, you'd work with a smile on your face."

Eisen slowed down for a moment. Silber wasn't wrong with that. He wasn't doing this work for the love of it right now. He cut a lot of corners to speed the process up. And he was getting somewhat sloppy, even. To his standards, at least.

"It's alright, Silber. I'm just... stressed. We need to get this done soon if we're planning on replacing you," Eisen pointed out. Frankly... from my perspective, consciously...

until a few months ago, the most pressure I've had when working was when I had to get something done quickly before picking the kids up from school. It was never anything like this. The weight is just... a bit different. So cut me some slack, alright?" Eisen asked with a light smile toward Silber, who quietly looked at his brother, "Those kids of yours... you never really used to talk about them much.

You've told me about them, but... you were always in so much pain when you thought about them. Are they alright?"

Eisen scoffed quietly, "They could be better, I guess. I'm causing them a lot of trouble recently, but they're doing well. I hadn't realized it, but I guess I missed them quite a bit, huh?"