"Infiltration? What exactly do you mean? Your face is one of the most well-known around, I literally made you a mask so that you can hide your ident.i.ty...? Do you think that"s really a good idea?" Eisen asked Evalia with a surprised frown, before she swiftly nodded her head.
"Mhm, I do. I can somewhat use my element to change parts about my face around, and I can dye my hair in different ways, and fake my clothes as well. It"s pretty unreliable, but as long as I try to stay around NPCs, then it should be fine." She replied, and Eisen slowly nodded his head while moving his fingers through his beard.
"And Stahl"s Occupation is perfect for infiltration as well, isn"t it?" The old man asked, before Evalia nodded her head in reply.
"Yup, exactly what I was thinking. And especially when he actually gets his Demon t.i.tle, he"s going to be more than capable of doing something like that." Evalia pointed out, and in response, the other Originals looked at her completely surprised.
"A Demon t.i.tle?" Brody asked with a wry smile, "d.a.m.n, I"m jealous..." He sighed, before Evalia slightly scratched her cheek with a chuckle. "Oops, I guess you didn"t know yet, huh? But yeah, a while ago, we were performing on the streets and Stahl got into a disguise I helped him with, and seemingly really moved a lot of people then. He got a notification telling him he"s close to "stepping onto the path of yang", or something like that." Evalia pointed out, and Eisen raised his eyebrows with a smirk.
"Is that so? Interesting..." He muttered to himself, before continuing to move his fingers through his beard, and in the end, simply nodded his head in response to Evalia"s suggestion.
"Alright, let"s try and go for the infiltration. We somehow need to try and figure out what they"re up to before they"re actually acting on it. They should try and gather members for the first little while of the regular launch, right?" Eisen asked the others, and Jyuuk immediately spoke up, thinking that he had a rough idea of what they might be thinking in that regard.
"My guess is that they will wait at least two IRL weeks before doing anything major. A lot of people pre-ordered the capsule, but the majority will still buy it only after a little while pa.s.sed, just to see if the game is actually worth it. It"s pretty expensive, after all." The Beastperson pointed out, and Eisen sighed slightly in response.
"Then we need to do our best to properly form a country as soon as we can at that point, huh? That should give us a lot more power on the continents as well... So we will at least be informed if they"re planning anything that has to do with us." Eisen figured, slowly trying to think about what needed to be done to prepare for all possibilities.
"Hmm, or maybe... We should just try to meet Antonio soon. When I met him the first time, his level was in the 100"s, after all. Oh, and there"s something else I need to speak to you about, but it"s Guild business, so we should wait to continue this conversation until we"re in the Guild-room in Prototype." The old man pointed out, and then looked back at Jyuuk,
"How far are we away from there, by the way?" He asked, making the beastperson scratch one of the patches of hair on his cheek with a wry smile, "Like three hours? Maybe? Kai said the turtle wasn"t that much faster than our s.h.i.+p, but it doesn"t need to be really careful so it can travel at max speed basically all the time. I"m guessing we"ll be able to reach the mainland in just three days from prototype as well, so we should be there like a day or two before Launch."
"Alright, sounds good. Then, if there"s anything you want to deal with in Prototype, try and prepare so you can do that as quickly as you can so that we can leave pretty soon again." Eisen pointed out, before he looked at his quest information and slightly sighed in response to what he was reading.
"I"ll get back to work now; I should properly try and level my skills up as much as I possibly can." The old man muttered quietly, while the others also swiftly chose to get back to what they were doing before. Eisen"s "Guild Business" was an obvious message to tell them that there were aspects to this that were related to their pasts as the Originals within this world and that they couldn"t continue speaking about this here and now.
And so, Eisen immediately got back to work and helped finish the rough structure of the buildings up some more, all the whilst trying to make the most use out of his two Occupation Skills, Crafting s.p.a.ce and Crafter"s Mind, trying to use both of them on top of each other.
For one, he was using his visual abilities to properly "scan", even if it wasn"t really a scan per-se, the environment and the physicality of the different monsters, while re-constructing them via his visualization while also breaking down certain things into blueprints.
Then, he was attempting to make his visualization help him manipulate his crafting s.p.a.ce a little bit, because he really never tried that before. He could change stuff around a little, like where exactly the s.p.a.ce would be relative to his position, but until now, there wasn"t anything that the old man could do about the shape or size himself. It "snapped" right into each spot inside of small rooms, but what Eisen wanted to do was something else.
Using Visualization, he could make sure that he actually properly had the s.p.a.ce in sight at all times, and then, using the principles of compression, Eisen was able to "compress" the crafting s.p.a.ce down a little. It was starting to drain mana to keep the crafting s.p.a.ce up like this, however, but Eisen coud deal with that.
This once more just boosted his crafting abilities more, so he was able to look past that. On top of that, considering how much proficiency he was gaining in his two occupation skills through all of this, the old man didn"t mind this at all and just continued on doing exactly this for another while.
When the buildings were finished, Eisen also took the chance to further his drawing and "scan" a little more by trying to sketch what he was able to pick up using his Crafter"s Mind skill. It was something pretty rough to keep up concentration-wise, and Eisen knew that he really had to take a calm break by just Mining and Farming later on, but until then, Eisen would just concentrate on whatever skills he could at once
And so, within the next three hours that it took them all to reach the central island, Eisen managed to level a bunch of his skills up.
For one, his Crafter"s Mind skill now had a new ability that let Eisen learn information that he couldn"t normally be able to find out and save that information as well, with the consent of the other party, his Crafting s.p.a.ce skill was now able to boost two skills at once and his Drawing skill got a speed-boost.
And in order to push his Soul Engineering skill into rank three, Eisen also quickly gave a form to two or three souls, and with that ranked his skill up, gaining the ability to make "Soul Amalgamations".
It followed the same principle as enhancing a soul by feeding it other souls, although it was actually very, very different. Instead of having one soul that would be better in its ability, Eisen was now able to push multiple souls together into the s.p.a.ce that one soul would normally occupy. When it came to more advanced things, such as the creation of Ego-Items, the former of those two methods would be the better, but for simple Soul-Engineered items like Soul Generators, the latter was the better choice, because like this, Eisen could really enhance the amount of mana that a single generator could produce, which he swiftly made use of, of course, although just for a few more important generators.
And then, the next while was spent by Eisen just creating numerous different pots out of clay made with his element, both to increase his magic skills" level and to increase the level of his pottery skill, which he managed to push to a high Rank 1 already.
His Mana Manipulation and Flame of the Earth Magic skills were really close to ranking up now as well, and Eisen figured he would be able to finish that all up on everyone"s way back to Prototype, which they all of course swiftly embarked on.
There wasn"t much time to lose, after all, so they brought the carriage out as quickly as they could, and Eisen did his best to simply try and make sure that the path from the broken-down "Harbor" was turned into something like a brick-road, just to further use his element as much as he could.
This was done by simply shaping his element into brick-like forms and using a clay-like, it was a fair bit tougher than clay when heated up properly and as such couldn"t be counted as proper clay, substance to piece them together as he was doing so.
Of course, this was only really possible because Eisen was using a constant stream of mana to accomplish this, while Bree and Sky were taking turns driving the carriage itself.
The path was just broad enough to fit the carriage on it as well, so Eisen would probably widen it a little on the way back. And just as Eisen had hoped, soon enough, he managed to rank his Elemental Magic skill up to four!
Just one more rank away, and Eisen would be able to make use of that "Elemental" that Xenia mentioned a while ago, saying that an elemental was growing inside of everyone"s body through the Elemental Magic skill.
Either way, the skill"s Rank-Up sadly didn"t really give him any other ability, it was just the element becoming more useless in combat while growing for its use in crafting even more than before.
Other than that, his Mana Manipulation skill was only a couple levels away from reaching Rank 4 as well, so Eisen was trying to spend as much time as he could properly training it using simple routine practices that Xenia showed him a while ago, that she said to be able to help with a steady proficiency growth, at least for that skill.
And that was being done all the whilst they were moving through the still broken-down areas of the town. Most areas here were at least "pacified" by the lords, but because the Town Core technically didn"t reach this far, the reconstruction took far, far longer than for the inner areas of the town.
There weren"t a lot of monsters left here anyway, because most of them chose to move to the center of the town, because it was safer there and there was an actual, certain "quality of life" there. And it wasn"t tough to see what exactly that "quality of life" meant, becuase the change wasn"t gradual, but instead like a proper cut-off line.
And that cut-off line was exactly where the control of the Town Core reached. None of the roads had any cracks in them anymore, all of the buildings were reconstructed, and while there maybe weren"t that many people directly next to that cut-off line, there weere some to be seen in the not-so-far away distance.
Just through that, the old man was feeling pretty complex emotions. Sure, he liked that everyone seemed to be having fun deeper into the town, but the change from "Prototype" to the rest of the town was truly insane, something that really wasn"t seen all that often anywhere. There were major differences between the slums and the "rich" area of towns that Eisen visited in the past, but it was never this strong.