Chapter 305 - Soul Refination
A few more minutes later, Eisen carefully detached all of the mana-crystal tubings from the infuser, and then opened the small container up, grabbing the metal from inside of it. Outwardly, it didn't seem to change in the slightest, but just judging from the feeling it gave off when Eisen was touching it, it completely changed.
Before, the Maroon was cold, nearly freezing, although its temperature wasn't really that low. It was just the feeling of losing the mana to the metal which caused something like that, and now, it seemed more like the metal was both hot and cold, the same feeling that Mana itself had, simply more pronounced. From what Eisen could tell just right off the bat, the natural flow of his mana sped up in response to him touching the Margon, which seemed to be exactly what its function was supposed to be.
Basically, it was the glass-fiber cable of magic materials. At the very least, that was the initiate magical effect that Eisen could feel. Other than that, while Maroon was quite soft and gold-like in its texture, Margon seemed to be incredibly tough.
"Hmm…" Eisen muttered to himself, before he activated his element in its most basic output after pouring it into the Margon, which seemed to be basically heavily strengthening it by a few times. "This is a serious change, isn't it?" The old man said with a smirk on his face, and especially Xenia nodded her head excitedly.
"Yeah, that's amazing! D-Do you need all of it..?" The High-Elf asked with a wry smile, but Eisen just smiled before scratching his cheek. "This surprisingly ended up as… Average Grade?" Eisen answered in surprise as he looked at the information on the material, quite surprised, before he quickly continued.
"Well, it's a lot higher than I needed it to be… So I probably don't need to use just as much. I can probably spare some for you, don't worry. I'll work on something." The old man said with a wink, before taking the Margon with a broad grin and crossed his arms. "You were hoping I'd make a staff for you with it, right?" Eisen asked, and Xenia slowly nodded her head embarrassedly.
"Alright, then just think about how exactly you want the staff to look, and if you have any certain functions you definitely want it to have. I'll finish up the Core Guardian first." Eisen answered with a chuckle and then turned around before making his way to the Door, excited to finish this project up.
On his way to the workshop, Eisen stopped by the material storage to grab a few different items and ressources he would be needing, and then excitedly opened the door to the workshop with his monsters following behind him.
"Let's get started, shall we?" Eisen said with a smirk on his face and summoned his staff to prepare the three furnaces needed for glassblowing, although he first needed to take care of something else. He needed to figure out if the Margon could be molten through his elemental flames, or if he needed to use some other way to heat it up.
Slowly, Eisen created a small flame on the tip of his finger, basically using it like a blowtorch, and then held that flame against the surface of the Margon. Luckily, the flame didn't disappear, but rather became hotter than it was before through the influence of the Magical metal, and swiftly began to heat the margon up. It seemed like it was still technically similar to noble metals like gold or silver in the way they acted when being molten, just like before when it was still Maroon, and the melting point was still relatively low, making it perfect for fuming.
"Perfect…" Eisen muttered to himself before letting the Margon cool down again and setting it to the side, before mixing everything together for the first small batch of glass that he would be needing, melting the silica, limestone, and soda ash down together to create the rather beautiful material, mixing it together with a few different materials as well. After he finished it, he swiftly began to shape the glass into the form he needed it to be, most of which was just thin tubing in different lengths, and then set everything into the annealer until he had everything ready.
But now, instead of using the annealer too cool the glass down to room-temperature, Eisen used it to cool the glass down to a good temperature to have it fumed, which was the point at which glass was still roughly moldable, although not easily. Simply, it was on the colder side of glass that you would work with in glassblowing.
Then, Eisen swiftly creating something like a stationary blowtorch with his element, with a little shallow indent right where the opening was on the inside. And after forming some of the Margon into a tiny pellet, Eisen placed it into that indent and prepared to melt it down, although it took a few moments to figure out the proper temperature considering that the Margon naturally strengthened any type of magic as if 'Upscaling' any and all of the magic's qualities.
Either way, it didn't take long until Eisen got used to it, and at that point the Margon had already molten down into a small drop and was ready to be used for fuming. With an actually rather excited smile on his face to see what the fumed glass would look like in this way, Eisen swiftly began. And, while trying to specifically not touch the outside of the glass, Eisen changed a bit about the flame, to make sure that the actual 'core' of the flame didn't leave the magic blowtorch, and only the outer layer of the fire was outside of it, carrying the margon, which had turned into a fume-like state due to the high heat, with it into the inside of the glass tubes.
And as he was doing so, Eisen was actually following rather specific instructions that he read about on the blueprints, using transmutation to properly carry the Margon fumes along every part of the tube. And there was another bit Eisen was paying attention to. Knowing that the Margon was of a higher grade than initially needed, the actual effect of the Margon was obviously also higher than needed, so the glass tubings needed a lower density to properly work as well, meaning that Eisen could save a little bit on the amount of material that he would be using. Either way, after only a few moments, the glass was starting to change color due to the Margon fumes that were forming a small web around the inside of the glass tubes, while coloring the surrounding glass in different colorful shades surrounding the color red. Some parts were orange, some were purple, but all in all it was just quite a beautiful thing to look at.
The dark red webbings were moving in a relatively stable way, meaning that they were forming something like a uniform pattern. And the same thing happened over and over again with the other tubes, and Eisen also expected this to happen with the central piece of the structure. The spherical glass golem core that Eisen would be creating next.
And as he needed a few crystal-parts of Soul Stones as well as the actual strengthened soul that Eisen would be creating with the help of the souls contained inside those soul stones. For that, Eisen would be needing the special pot, and luckily, he had everything that he would be needing for that recipe.
First, he needed some clay, which he could create with the help of his element, and then make a bit more mendable and moldable with a little bit of water to then mix the clay with some other materials, and then he could use that new type of clay to form the special type of pot, add the carvings to the outside, swiftly dry it with his element, and then use that pot to strengthen the souls.
And that was exactly what Eisen then did. The materials that he mixed into the clay were some ground-down soul stones and mana-crystal powder. And as this was going to be a very basic pot meant to strengthen blank souls, that's all that needed to be done, and Eisen could swiftly move on to shaping the pot. As the clay was made of his element, it was possible to shape it quite easily, and he soon had the special clay pot in front of him. After that, Eisen used one of his molding tools that he made to more easily shape mana crystals to scrape along the surface of the clay to put the carvings onto the outside, where were really just quite simply patterns which the old man copied from the recipe he wrote down after looking into it a little while ago.
When that was done, all that Eisen needed to do was to have the clay heat and bake itself, which was something that could happen since Eisen ranked his element up the last time. And soon, Eisen finished the special pot and gained another new skill at the same time, the Pottery skill.
With a smile on his face, Eisen then waved the notifications away before moving the souls that were floating next to him, as he had to 'Free' them to use the soul stones for the pot, and then moved the first one inside of the Soul-Refinement pot, and then tried to activate the refining process.
[A Blank Soul has been set as the core of the refination. It will have the benefit inside of the pot, but you still need to be careful not to place any souls with a higher soul strength inside, otherwise the central soul will be devoured and control over the process will be lost]
Eisen nodded his head and then looked at the other souls next to him again. Luckily, the soul he used as a base already had a rather high soul strength, and now he could simply start to feed it starting from the blank soul with the lowest soul strength.
He slowly led the soul along toward the openning of the small pot and pushed it inside, where he could see something like a low light before the information screen about the refination process changed a little, increasing the central soul's soul strength by about 5 points, while the 'Integrity' was raised by 1.
"Hmm, this might take a little longer than I thought…" Eisen muttered to himself as he moved his fingers through his beard.
The soul that he would be needing for the Core Guardian was rather specific. It had to be a Rank 0 soul with 100 Soul Strength, something that couldn't normally be a thing naturally except when using refination, while all of the soul's "Stats" needed to be at 10, the limit for Rank 0 blank souls.
And if the change continued to be so minscule, then Eisen would probably need quite a while to finish the soul refination. Although the old man didn't really see why he couldn't try to speed the process up a little bit.
Instead of placing one inside of the pot, Eisen swiftly placed two inside of there, although he made sure that the sum of their soul strength wasn't higher than the central soul's, just in case that also messed things up somehow.
And soon, noticing that the soul perfectly absorbed the other two, Eisen grinned and just one after another placed a steady flow of blank souls into the pot, making sure that there really wouldn't end up being an issue or conflict with the soul strengths.
Just a little under an hour later, Eisen managed to look at the soul which had literally reached the very peak of Rank 0, and was now finally ready to start putting the Core Guardian together.