Spending My Retirement In A Game

Chapter 872: Treant Wood (3)

Eisen tapped his finger on the table in front of him. There, he had two different pieces of treant wood. One of them belonged to a treant that was still alive, and one belonged to one that Eisen had just killed.

The dead treant's mana was still lingering in the wood; of course, so that he wouldn't waste any of the materials so that he could continue testing this as much as he could, the rest of the dead treant's wood had been stored in a special container that would keep the mana contained in the wood longer.

Or rather, it was basically something like slowing time inside of the container to reduce the speed of decay.

Whichever the case, it meant that, while Eisen had a bit more time to figure out the qualities and properties of the treant wood before they lost their mana, which could very well be the driving force of the properties that Eisen needed to make use of, he still had to hurry up and properly analyse what he was working with.

If he found out that the mana really was the only way to make this work, and he somehow didn't preserve the wood with said mana, he would be wasting a full treant's materials and he wasn't particularly in the habit of being wasteful for no reason.

Eisen carefully observed the mana inside of the two pieces of wood as he ran his fingers over the grain and the bark of each one, trying to figure out their individual properties and the changes to the properties of the dead treant's wood. There wasn't anything that seemed like it would help Eisen with his goal of creating independently moving parts, but he did notice something else.

The treant wood turned considerably tougher as the mana escaped it. Not harder, just less malleable and giving. As if it were undergoing something like rigor mortis, the stiffening of a dead body's limbs. Of course it wasn't completely the same, but it was the best comparison he could think of at that moment.

It didn't take all too long for the dead treant's wood to be completely devoid of the monster's mana, instead just having the same level of ambient mana as any other wood. However, of course, there was something that one had to consider here still; mana infusion.

If a material was exposed to mana for a long time, it was going to become infused with it and its properties. Even the flesh, blood and bones of high-rank monsters underwent a similar process, attuning more and more to their mana and strengthening them the older they are, even without the need to actively level up. Discover hidden tales at m v l'-NovelFire

Even the five 'Originals' probably underwent some form of extreme process like this in the past. A hundred thousand years of being exposed to a peaked individual's unique mana really must have changed his body rather intensely. His current body was clearly slightly adjusting to what it used to be like.

Either that, or he was adapting to the mana flowing through him extremely fast, which was also a possibility.

The growth of Eisen and the other originals was sped up after they had given up their 'experience' to reset themselves, so if that was the reason he could feel the effects of his mana infusing into his flesh, then that same thing was likely going to happen with the artificials, the players, as well. They also had boosted growth by nature of being created from pure 'experience' in the first place.

That being the case, obviously, everything in this world was slowly infused with mana to some degree. It was almost impossible to find someone or something that didn't hold some kind of mana. Even Brody, who technically possessed an energy different to mana, still held some ambient mana in his body. Though, it was mostly at the same level to that of a small animal or toddler.

"I see... so do I just have to infuse the wood with the treant's mana?" Eisen wondered. That could be a solution, though he couldn't say for sure. While you weren't able to acquire someone's skills for the use of enchanting without that person's explicit permission, that could rather easily be circumvented by just making use of the treants that Jyuuk had tamed.

Then he could put some different types of wood into infusion chambers to see what would happen.

But he still felt like there was something... different about this wood. Its rank didn't only come from the age, health, quality, and accumulated mana of the tree that it was harvested from, as was the case with other materials, but it also came from the fact that this wood had undergone evolution together with the actual treant.

The mana inside of the tree awakened into a monster, and in that process, even the initial evolution must have changed the wood quite a bit. At the very least, according to Jyuuk, the forms of treants did change quite a lot during evolution. The wood had to become tougher and more resistant to the elements, on top of the sudden change in size of the tree, obviously.

But compared to what other monsters went through, Eisen wasn't actually sure that the changes in the wood really matched up. Due to the nature of the treant that Jyuuk had explained to him, Eisen was sure that the wood not only changed to be physically stronger, but also to be easier to control.

And maybe that process, or a combination of both the evolution and the infusion of mana into it over time, would allow for Eisen to access something that he could use for the autonomously moving parts.

However, first and foremost, he would have to try two other things. First, using the material once the mana subsided, and second, using the material after it had been infused more deeply with the treants' mana. The rest would have to wait until Jyuuk figured out how to breed the treants.

After first figuring out how to make them awaken into monsters in the first place, Jyuuk would also have to figure out a way to get the treants some monsters weak enough for them to reliably kill, while still being strong enough to give them the experience that they needed to evolve.

Eisen remembered that Jyuuk was trying to turn one of the islands into a 'Monster Evolution Facility' where he would match up different types of monsters in a way to evolve specific individual monsters or specific species to a higher point while pushing them into certain evolutionary directions.

He might have to wait until then to get a decent supply of treant wood that he could actually make proper use of.

With a slightly disappointed sigh, Eisen picked up the dead treant's and took out Bai, turning the ego-tool into a carving knife before getting started. He really just needed to turn it into something that he could properly test out. The easiest way to do that was to turn multiple spheres, because this way, even small impulses could be noticed. He carved the wood into some differently sized balls.

From half an inch all the way to half a foot, just so that he could have different reference points to test out. And since he had yet to figure out the exact type of enchantment that he needed to make, he also made half a dozen one inch balls that he could test some different enchantment approaches out on before transferring them over to the different sizes.

With a thin needle, Eisen started carving a simple enchantment into one of the one inch balls. This one was really just a simple force enchantment, the kind that simply added a specific type of force onto the enchanted object. Eisen already had some regular, non-treant oak balls that he enchanted in the same exact ways that he would test out here, just as a reference point.

After all, it was possible that, while not reacting in the exact way that Eisen was hoping, the treant would still reacted better to this sort of control and could be manipulated more precisely.

Eisen had very little information about the item that he was trying to make. He only vaguely remembered that the base material was treant wood, but there was nothing else in that memory, as it was only tangentially related to that item itself. But that was fine. Eisen could figure it out on his own, without being handed the knowledge by the past Eisen.