Chapter 640 Special sort of armor
Eisen cracked his knuckles as he started to get to work. First things first, he started taking patches of Buldor's scales off of his body. Of course, he didn't want to make it so that Buldor had to sit around there basically naked, so he worked on everything a bit at a time, simply by taking five pounds of scales off of Buldor's body at at time and then working with them.
The old man grabbed the first patch and proceeded to grind them down into a fine powder. Eisen did the same with some different metals that he simply shaved down as finely as he could. With that, he made a mixture of steel, some silver and gold, and a bit of brass, and then he mixed in a few different crystals and gem into it as well.
To start it off with, Eisen just made sure that all of these powders were mixed together properly before slowly starting to heat them up while mixing everything around still. Of course, without Gran knowing, Eisen was doing this so that he could properly mix in different elements and aspects of alchemy so that he could make something like a metallic potion out of this. This was the best way to properly create amazing scales for Buldor's body, and Eisen was trying his best to make them as good as he possibly could.
The mixture slowly started to melt and clumb up in different parts, all the whilst Eisen was just stirring everything around and making sure things were mixing together properly. Soon, Eisen had the mixture ready and just poured it out into some molds that he made with his element. Those molds were really just small ingots, each large enough so that Eisen could turn one ingot into one scale.
After the small ingots properly cooled down and hardened, Eisen got to work and grabbed one of them before it fully cooled down so that he could try and work with it first. He used his hammer and flattened the small ingot, quickly folding it over itself a few times so that he could pour some of his mana into the metal as well.
Eisen deliberately made sure that the metal would be a little bit too dark, so that, with the added mana while folding the metal, it would take on the perfect color. After he reached that point, Eisen just flattened the scale and set it to the side to let it cool while he worked on the next scale.
And then the next, and then the next, until this batch of scales was done being shaped. All that Eisen then did was sharpen some certain parts of the scales with a grinding wheel, so that Buldor might be able to cause a bit of damage just by ramming into others, and then Eisen just tempered the scales in Mythril-Flames.
It was obvious that Gran didn't know what Eisen was doing exactly, so he didn't freak out over the fact that he was using something magical in order to create Buldor's armor, but in the end Eisen really cared very little for Gran's opinion on this anyway. This was something that was made for Buldor's body, and while Gran didn't have any mana, Buldor was basically overflowing with it.
It was obvious that he was some kind of creature with a high amount of innate magic that he simply never learnt to use due to being partnered up with Gran. It seemed like a bit of a waste, but it was obvious that Buldor was able to make use of its abilities amazingly anyway, even without using his innately high mana.
After the scales were done and had a beautiful shine to them just beind held toward the light that the forge gave off, Eisen figured that it was time to return these to Buldor's body.
Somewhat nervously, Eisen squatted down in front of Buldor and pressed one of the scales right against Buldor's skin in the spot where it was supposed to connect, and then applied a little bit of health-jelly.
Buldor's body accepted the scale and properly pulled it into itself, holding it steadily in place. Satisfied, Eisen did so again with the rest of this small patch of scales. And obviously, since Eisen mixed some other materials in with the ground-down scales, the old man ended up with more scales than he started with. This was so that Eisen could properly cover the parts of Buldor's body where there weren't any scales to begin with, like the areas where Buldor had deep scars that replaced the scales that were supposed to be there.
The old man would try and 'repair' those parts a little bit by adding scales to the areas that had lost them before. But for now, Eisen would just work on replacing the scales that Buldor actually did have with new ones while putting the scales that Eisen had left over to the side for later.
He quickly started to work on the next patch of scales afterward. This in itself took quite a long time, just due to the sheer amount of scales covering Buldor's body, and the old man spent nearly the whole day just making the same thing over and over again.
And then once all the scales that were actually on Buldor's body had been replaced, Eisen sat down at the side of Buldor's body and started to try and work with the areas with so many scars on them that there weren't any scales anymore.
Eisen tried to cut Buldor's skin open in those areas to use health-jelly so that he could at least somewhat improve the condition of those scars, since they hadn't healed all that well. Actually, surprisingly, it seemed to work pretty well. Better than Eisen had expected at least. Maybe it had to do with the fact that he was working with the soul directly instead of a physical body, but Eisen really couldn't tell. He didn't know all that much about how souls worked, maybe he should try and ask Jyuuk about this the next chance he got.
But for now, Eisen stopped letting his mind wander and instead continued to work on repairing the scars a bit more. Obviously, Eisen wasn't able to completely get rid of the scars, but at the very least he was able to bring Buldor's skin in those areas to the point where Eisen could re-attach the scales, just like he was hoping.
And then, he started to reattach the scales properly, and soon could take a step back as he looked at Buldor, standing there as if he was in his physical peak again. Gran slowly approached Buldor with a broad smile on his face, "Buldor! Young again!" He exclaimed, and in response to the warrior's comment, the ground-dragon just huffed some hot air out of his nostrils with a smug expression on his face. Or so it seemed, it was hard to tell with that draconic snout of his.
Eisen looked at Gran and Buldor with a slight smile on his face, before stretching a bit, "Alright then, the first step is done. Let's move on to step two." The old man pointed out, and Gran looked over toward him with a surprised frown, "Step two? Buldor already awesome enough!"
With a smirk on his face, Eisen just stepped past the warrior and made his way back into his smithy, "Of course he is, but he can still be a lot more awesome than now." Eisen said, "Don't worry, this is just an idea on my part. You don't have to go with it if you don't like it, but I want it to be a surprise." The old man stated, "So no peeking."
Eisen shut the door to the smithy, leaving out Gran and Buldor for now as he started to gather all the materials that he needed. He put everything together and started his mental process of figuring out the best order of things, and then figured he should get started with one thing in particular first.
The old man started by grabbing a few different pieces of metal, similar in ratio to the metals that he combined Buldor's scales with, and then put them into a crucible so that he could melt them down.
Meanwhile, Eisen grabbed a piece of special leather that Eisen grabbed from a monster on Trygan's island, and then cut it into the right shapes. Basically, they were just things like long strips though, or something like belts since they were supposed to be closed around something.
Once those long leather strips were done, Eisen took a deep breath and prepared to do something that he hadn't done before, but wanted to try out for a while now. He wanted to figure out as many different techniques as he possibly could with his new abilities, after all.
He grabbed the first leather strip and walked over toward the large crucible, before just pushing the strip into the mixture of molten metal, trying to cover every surface as it just started to burn to a crisp, basically. But of course, to prevent this from actually happening, Eisen started to slowly fuse the leather with a bit of the molten metal, as if to make it resistant to the heat just to the point where it wouldn't burn directly, but would obviously still be affected.
Now, it could neither melt nor burn, so it reached the perfect point for Eisen. As his hands were also right inside of the molten metal, Eisen could proceed to properly rub the molten metal into the surface of the leather strip, fusing more and more of it into that strip while the heat of the metal affected it in an actually pretty interesting way.
Soon, the old man pulled the leather strip out of the molten metal and then started to clean it up a bit, removing all the bits of molten metal that hadn't been fused into the leather.
Once this was done, Eisen was holding something in his hand that was basically a metal bar that wouldn't be able to melt, but was able to be slightly bent when heated up.
And like this, Eisen started to form borders for Buldor's body that the old man could use to 'split' Buldor's feathers off from his scales. It would make everything look a little more artificial and armor-like, so that it may be possible to confuse opponents that were looking for weak-spots on Buldor's body. That, and these strips would end up covering some parts of Buldor's body that were actually especially vulnerable to attacks and save them from being cut into that easily.
And so, the old man completed a special sort of armor for a special sort of mount.