Chapter 136 Bats

"What a nice little surprise!" Eisen exclaimed happily with a small whistle as he read through the notifications, glad that he now gained two effects that he had been waiting for.

With Alchemy, he was now able to combine crystals or gems together perfectly, but not anything else. At later ranks he would be able to combine any material with any other material, to basically replace the whole distillation process while making potions.

From what he was told, he would still need to extract the essence that made up the materials, for example the healing properties of amran petals, but then he could simply combine that essence with mana crystals and water to create potions.

For now, he would be able to skip the step of combining different crystals with each other, for example like he would need to do when making golem cores and needed to combine a mana crystal with crystals to give the core a fake 'soul' and 'mind'.

The benefit that Eisen now had by being able to quite easily combine crystals and gems with each other was pretty simple. He wanted to figure out a way to combine gems and mana crystals in a similar way as he did do with crystals when making golem cores, by simply grinding everything down and mixing it with water, before then boiling that water away.

But it wasn't as easy as it sounded in his head. To start it off, Gems aren't really the kind of thing that can easily be ground down, as they are usually quite hard. It's easy to form them with transmutation nonetheless, but altering it with physical means is just not easy, as it's pretty hard to get an evenly ground down powder. And if it's not perfectly evenly done, the resulting crystal structure will simply have 'chunks' of the gem spread all over it instead of actually combining with the crystal.

But now, Eisen was able to simply combine crystals with gems, which would help in very simple ways. For one, placing an enchantment onto a mana crystal that has been combined with a fitting gem will increase both the efficiency and effect of the enchantment. As such, if you placed a flame enchantment onto a mana crystal that has been combined with a fire-gem, it would work much better.

As for his new ability in enchanting, that was also something that he was looking forward to gaining, since he was now able to erase enchantments that he had made before. This maybe wasn't something that sounded all that amazing, but now Eisen was able to simply remake important enchantments at later ranks. No matter how well done a Rank 2 enchantment was, it still seemed to be nothing compared to a Rank 5 enchantment. Not only that, but it would allow Eisen to experiment with enchantments a lot more without wasting any materials.

"I'll keep that in mind then." Eisen muttered to himself quietly as he continued to work on the parts for the wands, choosing to do this first and then playing around with his new abilities later.

For now, Eisen continued to simply create the mana batteries and mana crystals enchanted with Mana Manipulation for a little while longer until he had everything that he needed.

Once these were done, Eisen started to make different wands using various types of woods, adding in mana batteries and mana-crystal spirals into each one. He still had a lot of wood that he could use for even more wands, but for now, Eisen didn't want to simply use all of the precious magic wood that he had, considering how long it took to get them to this stage.

Once the dozens of wands were finished, Eisen began working on general packaging out of wood that he carved with different decorations as well, although they were still just small wooden boxes lined with cloth in the end.

But after everything was done, Eisen and Komer stacked everything up next to the other products they had, and Eisen began working on other items, staffs, using the larger pieces of wood that he had put into the tube.

However, since these required a lot of material and large base pieces, Eisen only made five staffs in total, that each had a relatively simple look as well. Once more, they had gotten a mana battery as a core, and a mana crystal spiral along its body. The effects were quite high, so Eisen was happy with it, but in the end these would end up costing quite a lot. Considering everything, it seemed like Cial really had quite a lot of money if he could throw it away on a staff like he had back then. Although, it wasn't really 'thrown away', it just seemed somewhat showy more than anything.

Now, at last, Eisen finished a large part of the products that would be sold in the Magic City, and the old man felt like he could play around with a few different things for the rest of the day. And then, the next time he woke up, they will probably have reached their destination already, and since he was sure to become busy for a little while then, Eisen wanted to make a few other items for now. And for that, he wanted to use those special items that the group seemed to have gained from the 'Crystal Bats' that Kiron had mentioned before.

As such, Eisen once more went to the front of the carriage to ask Bree about them. And when he did, the Fey-Kin girl began her explanation basically instantly.

"Ah! Yeah, those were pretty cool~! Now, how should I explain… There are some special, rare types of monsters that don't have regular mana crystals, but rather special ones! Those Crystal Bats had those special types~. Crystal Bats basically just look like flying eyeballs, and their eye is their mana crystal! I dunno what you can use them for, but I'm pretty sure you can make a lot of special items with those rare mana crystals. We put them into a separate box next to the other materials." After Eisen listeend to Bree's explanation, he actually got quite curious about what this 'sepcial mana crystal' might end up working like.

If it was able to be used as an eye of that bat, it was sure to have certain special effects. As such, Eisen excitedly went looking for the crystal eyeballs, until he found the box that Bree was just talking about.

These eyeballs really were just perfectly round, fist-sized, white balls. If Eisen saw these without knowing what they were, he really wouldn't have been able to guess that they were mana crystals. "Anyway, let's just take a look at them." Eisen said with a smirk as he activated his truth-seeing eyes and looked at this material's description.

[Crystal Eye]

[Quality – High][Rank – 3]

[Description] A crystal eyeball that has been harvested from a Rank 3 Crystal Bat. It is highly compatible with uses in visual-related areas.

"Huh, I see… Visual-related areas?" Eisen asked himself out loud, catching Komer's attention. After a little bit of thought, he gave a suggestion at what that may mean. "I guess… Something like Cameras?"

Immediately, Eisen turned around to look at the young merchant with a grin. "Exactly that! Just how… wait, I have an idea! Komer, can you grab the small box at the top of the shelf there?" Eisen asked in a bit of a hurry as he looked for a large enough mana crystal for what he was about to do, and then grabbed a little bit of regular wood.

Confused and curious at what Eisen was about to make, Komer quickly grabbed that small box and handed it to the old man, who grabbed two different crystals out of it, which he would now use to test out his new Alchemy ability.

First, he grabbed one of the small crystals with his left hand and then the mana crystal with his other, before filling out both items with his mana completely. After that, he pressed both of them together, imagining the mana in the crystals as different entities, despite them technically being the same exact thing. Now that he had 'split up' his mana into two types, he imagined the mana in the smaller of the two crystals to move toward the one in the mana crystal, mixing both together as good as possible.

And soon enough, the artificially split-up mana had become one again, and the mana crystal gained a fake 'mind'. Once Eisen repeated this same process once more to give it a fake 'soul' as well, he had finished an important part of making a golem core, far quicker than he had been able to do up until now.

Now he simply needed to enchant the mana crystal properly and then it would be a finished Golem Core for the prototype that Eisen was planning on creating. It's been a while since he's made something that he's been excited about like that.

"What did you make a Golem Core for, Eisen?" Komer asked curiously, but Eisen simply told him to wait and see while he worked. Now, Eisen grabbed some regular wood and began carving different shapes out of it, that simply ended up as gears and bars, that were quickly assembled into wooden mechanical wings.

Once those wings were finished, Eisen attached fabric to the front and back surfaces so that it would actually be able to create something like an updraft. But he didn't simply leave those fabric surfaces as is, but he even enchanted them. That was quite hard to do, and Eisen was worried that he would accidentally rip everything up, but to fix that issue he placed another, round patch of fabric on the front of each wing so that he would have a good thickness to carve something into.

The enchantment that Eisen created and added onto the wings were quite simple, making sure that just enough updraft would be created with each flap of the wings to keep the body steadily flying.

After that, Eisen transmuted the Golem Core to be the exact shape and size as the Crystal Eyes, before attaching the wings to the sides of the small sphere, before then pouring his mana into the core. And apparently, that action was enough to prompt a rank-up in his golemancy skill, and he was now able to simply command his golems from a large distance.

But Eisen didn't care about that right now, what he did care about was to see if this small Golem Bat was actually able to fly!

At first, it was simply flapping around on the ground, but then Eisen told it his first command. "Fly."

Immediately as the small bat heard its master say this, it began swinging its wings up and down and quickly began to float in the air, staying nearly perfectly still in the center of the carriage.

"Woah! That looks really cool, it's just like the crystal bats!" Komer exclaimed excitedly, before Eisen began to laugh loudly. "Haha, perfect! That's what I was going for! However…"

Only a few seconds later, you could hear creaking coming from the bat Golem, and the source of that was quite clearly the wings. "The material that I used for the gears just now was wood… Well, at least I know that it can properly recognize that as a proper body." Eisen muttered to himself.

From how he was aware, Golems weren't usually as complicated as Eisen made them. Usually, they would be animated lumps of a certain material, for example a walking man out of rock. For that, you would need to first construct that figure so that the golem core would see that as its bodytype, and then you could basically grab the golem core and have it construct a new body itself with whatever given material. That meant that Eisen could, for example, grab the golem core inside of Aulu, and have it construct an identical body out of dirt.

The benefit that Eisen's golems had with their gear-based body was that they had a far larger freedom of movement, and that their body was under their control far more easily. If regular golems were dragging their body around in a way that simply worked alright, Eisen's Automata were expertisely controlling their bodies to do what they needed them to.

And now that Eisen had this golem bat prototype, he could start working on his actual product.

Flying Camera Bats.