Spending My Retirement In A Game

Eisen stood in front of the rock wall, with his size fully increased and his body changed through the draconic demon transformation. He held the multitool in his hand and watched as it moved its parts on its own to turn into its pickaxe mode.

Without further ado, the old man cloaked the tool in highly condensed mana so that he could properly make use of his mining ability. The one that let him break rock just through his mana alone. Eisen swung the pickaxe forward and toward the rock wall, making it immediately crack up while a few pebbles crumbled down here and there.

After the next swing of the pickaxe, more parts of the wall crumbled down, but it still mostly stood. But with the third swing, the parts that Eisen already cracked up completely dropped onto the ground in front of Eisen.

He swung the pickaxe into the edge of the hole he just created and swiftly managed to expand it. More and more, a larger space opened up in front of Eisen, until he was even able to completely stand inside of that space with his full height of 25 meters.

Of course, since Eisen was so large, he couldn't just go ahead and do what he wanted to here, or else this whole quarry might end up crashing down onto him. Instead, what Eisen did was to harden specific parts of the wall as much as he could to create support pillars for everything.

Since Eisen was able to pretty easily remember which parts exactly he changed like that with his Crafter's Mind skill and visualization, Eisen could continue on digging out this space. Or rather, this long tunnel, because that's really all it was.

Mining was really just something that would require a fair amount of time to properly level up. There weren't proper ways to really cheat the system with this one. All he could do was to just dig away at the wall of this quarry and build up different types of rock and ores that he could then use his extraction skill on after he was done ranking the mining skill up.

And any of those pieces of rock were being gathered in the center of the quarry, where really nothing was happening at the moment. Brody and the others had properly cleaned up the whole Field Dungeon by now, so there wasn't any threat around here either. Eisen was actually pretty curious as to why exactly Komer bought this place. After all, there wasn't anything special here.

Sure, the metals that could be found in this place were relatively valuable, but the main reason for this quarry's existence was the type of rock here. It was simply ornamental rock… But it was a type that wasn't expensive. It simply wasn't profitable for Komer in the slightest to buy this kind of place. It wasn't like the monsters were especially high-rank either. It was a Rank 4 Field Dungeon, meaning that the average rank of monsters here was 4, while the boss was usually a rank higher, so at 5. The only things that were really salvagable from the monsters were the low-quality ores on their bodies.

There was literally more worth running around on the Golem Island no matter where you looked. It just seemed a bit weird to Eisen. But in the end, he figured that Komer probably had some sort of reason for it. Komer wasn't the kind to waste his money like that, after all.

Either way, for now, Eisen was glad that he got this chance to level his mining skill up here, since the proficiency he could get for it in the dungeon was at most a third of what it was out here. It was kind of annoying, thinking about how long it might have taken to rank the skill up if he didn't have the chance to gain proficiency for it here in this quarry.

But again, mining was something that didn't really require much thought to it beside making sure that the walls were really stable. So, for the next two days, all that Eisen did from morning to evening was work on expanding the 'tunnels' in the walls of the quarry to easily rank his mining skill up.

And finally, toward the late evening of the second day, just before Eisen was going to go to bed, he finally ranked the skill up after crushing up a particular vein of copper ore that he happened across randomly.

With a satisfied mind, Eisen chose to just head to bed for now. The next morning, Eisen then chose to get started with his extraction skill and start ranking it up as much as he possibly could like this. The old man sat in front of the mountain of rocks, of which a bit would always be given to him by the others. Whether it were the half-dragons, the monster children, or Bree, Sky, or even any of the three other originals, all of them basically took turns trying to help Eisen with this.

Particularly using his Crafter's Mind skill combined with his Truth-Seeing eyes' appraisal ability, Eisen tried his best to properly split everything up into what Eisen thought it to be. He took one of the rocks into his hand, and then one after another extracted the specific types of soil or rock that could be found in this whole mix of things.

Since Eisen's alchemy skill wasn't limited to just combining crystals anymore after Eisen 'mastered' it, he could basically split one material off of the rock and then merge that material onto a boulder of that exact material that he was forming behind him to keep a bit of an 'order' to everything.

And at point, those boulders obviously became too large to keep here in the same spot, but… Eisen simply compressed them when that happened, and they turned to have roughly the same volume as Brody's whole body.

Actually, Brody and the half-dragons made it a bit of a competition to see who could actually move any of the boulders that Eisen was making first. They were too heavy to actually be properly moved after all. Although Brody and Kiron both managed to push the boulders around after finding the proper way to grip onto it and the ground around here. Morgus was getting pretty close to it as well, but he still wasn't able to fully push any of them away.

And it didn't get any easier for him either, since Eisen kept adding onto all of the boulders constantly. The small contest actually boiled down to seeing who amongst Brody and Kiron would be unable to push the boulders first to determine a loser between the two of them.

Meanwhile, Eisen spent as much of his time splitting up the rocks as he could. When he got the skill to rank 3, he was able to actually get everything done far quicker. For one, he was now able to extract things in larger quantities. And he was able to extract more than just one material at once, so the speed at which Eisen cleared out all of the materials that needed to be split up into its raw parts was immense later on.

And so, Eisen managed to split up all of the rocks that it took him two days to mine out within just a single day. But even though this was the case, Eisen's Extraction skill was only at level 60 for Rank 3, so it would still take a while to properly finish everything.

For the rest of the day, of course after sorting everything into the dungeon, the group made their way back toward the harbor town with the help of the wood-giant. On the way, Eisen got started leveling up another one of his skills, the Drawing Skill. It was one of the more annoying ones to level up, but at least he was able to get it done by just transfering the numerous blueprints he created with his Crafter's Mind skill onto paper. He didn't rank it up within a single day though, but it got into the upper Rank 3 range at least.

When the group reached the harbor town again, they of course caused quite an uproar. After all, a 40 meter tall Wooden Golem wasn't something you saw all the time. It was especially surprising to people when they saw the rumored living dungeon's gate sitting right inside of that Wood-Giant's chest.

Some seemed to want to try and fight the Wood-Giant, since they thought it had to give them a lot of experience, but nobody actually had the guts to actually try it, especially not after Eisen had the wood-giant swing the giant Katana a couple of times.

Eisen thought about what to do for a little while, but in the end, he chose to do nothing at all and just go about his business however he wanted. Komer had already prepared the ship so that Eisen and the others could travel to the islands again.

Of course, the ship that they were going to use wasn't one of the regular ones that Komer had been using to ship things back and forth from the islands, but rather the enormous ship that the originals and the people from the church built together in Handor back then.

And the wood-giant would be sitting in the middle of it. Of course, it would be risky, but as long as it was laying down as much as possible, it shouldn't be too much of an issue. Especially due to the stabilizing enchantments placed onto the ship's body.

Once Eisen arrived at the islands, he would be able to properly work on his last few skills to rank up as well. The drawing, cooking, masonry, and extraction skills.

Eisen was pretty sure that he would be able to get his magic-based skills done within the trip. After all, he wouldn't actually be riding the ship for this. Rather, he would work on another level-up condition. The condition to spend a total of 3 days in complete flight.

Since the magic-based skills could really be used anywhere without any real issues, Eisen was confident that he would be able to get them done pretty quickly. And at Rank 5, the mana manipulation and flame of the earth skills would also probably evolve. Eisen was actually pretty curious at what his new element could be.

As far as the old man knew, the element skills were the only ones that gave you choices when you reached Rank 5, similar to what happened when Eisen first unlocked his element in the first place. So of course, Eisen would take a little bit of time to make a good choice, but either way, he was quite excited to find out what his actions over the past few months would be represented as in the form of the new element.