Chapter 137 Soul Strength

Eisen was trying to figure out ways to properly implement his ideas into such a camera bat as he had planned. But since he didn't want to just do experiment on the actual crystal eyes, as they didn't have many of them, he was testing out enchantments on a regular mana crystal while gathering ideas together with Komer.

It seemed like the item that Eisen came up with was actually something that appeared in fiction every once in a while, so he was actually incredibly helpful when it came to such ideas.

There were different functions that they wanted this flying camera to have. First, it should be able to of course relay what it saw onto some kind of screen, which was something that Eisen would have to figure out in itself for a while. Of course, that also included that you should be able to somehow record what you were observing with the camera. Other than that, it should be able to activate different visual skills, such as appraisal, which would be the 'truth seeing eyes', considering that Eisen would enchant it.

That would actually allow for a pretty useful type of reconnaissance, since they would then be also able to observe different types of mana, which could probably be used as some kind of infra-red replacement.

But the Camera-Bat was not the only type of concept of Surveilance-type golem the both of them came up with. The Bat would be great for aerial surveilance, then they had a fish-concept for underwater surveilance, which may come in especially handy in the coastal area that they would be spending some time at, and then there was also the idea of making a small critter-version as well. Maybe some kind of mouse or rat that could be useful in city environments.

Either way, the type-issue was really only something that Eisen would need to create different types of bodies for. The real issue was figuring out how to let the creatures change between different 'modes'. For example, how to change between different types of sight, or types of recording. While Golems could activate enchantments, they seemed to be able to only do so with one at a time.

If it came to something more complicated like what Eisen had in mind, he would need to do one of three things.

One, he could place multiple enchantments on the camera's body, which it would then need to switch between. But that would mean that it couldn't, for example, activate the visual effect of the truth-seeing eyes through one enchantment while at the same time relaying the information to Eisen. On top of that, ability enchantments would need to be placed onto the camera itself then, and that may make it somewhat constant, which was not something that Eisen was going for.

The second way was to create a tiny complex enchantment to activate multiple effects at once. But that would give the problem of properly figuring out the logic behind just that complex enchantment and how to make it properly work when there was an ability enchantment involved, with which there was the aforementioned problem as well.

And the third way was to build some kind of physical activation into it. Like, create a small lens with the truth-seeing eyes enchantment that could simply be put in place when needed and place another small item onto the camera so that it could send out a signal of the feed.

Eisen's favorite was currently the third type, since this was the most probable way to work from what Eisen could see. As such, he and Komer experimented for a while, Komer mainly just giving different ideas while Eisen thought about ways to execute them. To be honest, this seemed more of the type of work that Natsuo or Tony would be interested in. Natsuo, as he was usually tinkering with all kinds of stuff, while Tony was a specialist on logical functions.

While Eisen had some rough know-how on these things, he definitely wasn't an expert. The only reason he could create Automata was that the only area of engineering he really knew about was gear-based engineering like it was seen in Clocks or different types of machines that worked with the same concept. The reason for that was quite simple in itself, and it was because he was working with, and learning from, a person who specialized in just that back in france.

He was a professional watchmaker, and kept fiddling around with different machines that were supposed to come close to actual automata, but in the end never really did. They were just small toys with clockwork mechanisms inside of them that had the shape of animals and people.

But like that, Eisen knew about the concpet of how such things worked, and ended up quite proficient in that area after a while, managing to cross-reference it with other techniques and arts that he had learned over the years.

Either way, Eisen and Komer had figured out most of the theory, and now all that was left was the practice. But for that, Eisen had to do one other thing. He would need to make himself a staff, so that he could boost his Element enough to get his Flame of the Earth Forge working properly, so that he could actually work with the high-tensile brass that he would use for the bodies of the three different camera-creatures.

However, that was a goal that could only be started on another day, since he would be making his staff out of special materials. According to Bree, materials couldn't only be transformed through pure mana, but also elementally infused mana, which already made Eisen excited just thinking about it.

If there were hundreds and hundreds of different elements, wouldn't there also be hundreds and hundreds of different material varieties to one exact material available to Eisen as well? Once he would be able to enchant items with other people's abilities, which seemed to come at Rank 5 of the enchanting skill, then he could make truly incredible items!

But before then, Eisen needed to create the materials for his own items. For that, Eisen grabbed the soul generators that he had created before to use with the large tube and began editing them in a certain way. First, he closed the soul stones up again and removed the small mana crystal capsule around them so that he could fully re-make them into better versions. However, what Eisen did first was to repeatedly make and disassemble soul generators until he reached rank 1 in soul engineering, which would now allow him to basically manipulate the soul itself to an extent, giving Eisen much more freedom to work and make the generators far more efficient.

That was the case since Eisen could now basically completely remove the soul stone's solid, crystal-like part around it and simply have the soul itself inside of the generator without anything else around it. That would not only decrease the overall size of the generator,but also increase the mana that could be 'stolen' from the soul at a time, as the possible access-area was increased greatly.

But Eisen couldn't simply place the soul in the center of a hollowed-out mana-crystal, as souls can only really be blocked through the material making up the soul-stone. The only reason that the soul didn't escape outward through the mana crystal needles piercing through the soul-stone was that the soul stone had a sort of inward-force that kept the soul in its center at all times. Luckily, Eisen already had a way figured out through which he could make sure the soul couldn't escape through the mana crystal.

As the soul-stone was also a crystal-like substance, he could simply combine the raw material of the soul stone with a mana crystal, and it would probably carry over the effects that the soul stone had of keeping in souls, while maybe even boosting the mana-steal efficiency.

But for that, Eisen needed a soul stone without a soul, meaning that he would need to get rid of a soul to use the raw soul stone. Although it felt somewhat wrong to Eisen to waste a precious material like that, in the end he had no way to contain the soul from the soul stone while he fused the stone itself with a mana crystal.

As such, Eisen simply split open the soul stone in the center and released what was kept inside into the air, however… it seemed like it just sat there, not doing anything, simply a misty, football sized sphere.

"Huh?" Eisen muttered out confused as he looked at this thing in front of him. And that was when Eisen realized what his rank-up in the soul engineering skill actually meant, on top of what he had thought of until now. In the end, he probably would have been able to execute the plan he had until now even with rank 0 in the skill, but there was another thing that he probably couldn't have done.

Slowly, Eisen extended his hand forward toward the blank soul floating in front of him, and the moment that the tips of his finger made contact, a notification popped up in front of his face.

[Blank Soul][Rank - 5]

[Soul Strength - 300]

[Integrity – 10][Mana Generation – 10][Thought - 0]

[Form – None]

[Requirements not met, soul can not be edited]

[Requirements not met, soul can not be refined]

[Requirements not met, soul can not be given a form]

[In order to create edit, refine, or give a form to a soul, user has to have a soul stronger than what they are working with]

[Soul Strength will now be displayed in status]

[Soul Strength (SS) stat acquired through special action. This stat cannot be increased directly, and will grow or shrink over time as the status grows]

[Soul Strength stat has been calculated as 202]

Utterly confused, Eisen looked through themany notifications that were giving him all kinds of new information. 'Soul Engineering' did sound rather like you were supposed to change the soul itself rather than make something that utilizes the soul, but apparently, there were more conditions to this than simply having the skill.

With a disappointed sigh, but glad that Eisen could at least somewhat drag the soul around and that it wouldn't be lost, the old man opened his status to look at the new stat that appeared to the right of his charisma stat.

What did this stat display? It couldn't be an average of his stats or something like that, since INT was his highest stat at 147 at the moment, so the SS stat would need to be lower than that to be an average.

And for some reason, even if Eisen asked Bree, the Fey-kin that usually knew everything couldn't give an answer to what it was either. She said that she had 'never heard of it before'.

From what Eisen could tell, there wasn't any actual change to what he could do now either. It was simply a display of something that seemed to have always been there, but was hidden before then.

Since that was the case, Eisen simply needed to accept that this was the case, and keep going with what he was planning on doing before discovering this particular part of his Soul Engineering skill.

Eisen combined the crystal from the soul stone with a regular mana crystal quite quickly before then 'scooping up' the soul that was floating in the air in the center of the carriage.

Once that was done, Eisen formed the mana crystal containing the soul into a cylinder, before quickly enchanting both ends with a 'mana steal' enchantment, carving different regular runes into the body that would hopefully also help with this.

And it actually did help quite a bit! While the Soul Generators before only generated 1000MP per hour, these generated 2500MP per hour! And Eisen had ten of these in total! That would still mean that it would take a few days to turn the materials Eisen wanted to be changed through mana infusion into their new, magical version, but it would happen far quicker!

After that, Eisen quickly took out all the leftover wood from the large tube that he was using before, and added another step inbetween where all the mana taken from the soul generators would be infused with Eisen's Flame of the Earth element, before that infused mana would then be given to the materials.

At last, Eisen would just need to place the materials he wanted to use for different things inside of the tube. And that wasn't only wood. To the brim, the tube was filled with all kinds of material. Different types of wood or metal, mana crystals of different ranks, or even simple bones, claws and fangs taken from monsters.

Like that, Eisen hoped to create the first batch of elementally infused materials that he would then end up working with.