BXBX NOVEL Chapter 63 Skeleton
After skinning the corpse, Eisen carefully prepared to get rid of the meat without breaking or cracking the bones, since Eisen would need them as a reference. He started with the limbs, cutting or scraping away the meat on the bones, and then did the same for the meat left on the wolf’s torso, and at last went for the head.
He needed to treat the skull carefully, since he also had a use for the wolf’s eyes and brain which Eisen set down next to the heart.
Once Eisen had every single bone laying down on the ground in a way that showed him which bone belonged where in a wolf’s body, Eisen got a new notification.
[Dismembering Skill Learned]
"Maybe this would have been easier if I had gotten that skill earlier... Well, nothing I can change about that now. First, let’s make sure these don’t go to waste." Eisen muttered to himself and walked over to where he placed the Wolf’s Eyes, Heart and Brain.
He poured the mana out of his body and enveloped one of the eyes in it, concentrating on its shape and what it was made of, successfully using mana copy to recreate it and saving it to his mana copy library. After doing that for the brain and heart as well, Eisen put all three of these body parts into the bucket together with the wolf’s other organs, since he now did what he needed to do with them directly.
"Now, let’s get to work." Eisen chuckled and cracked his knuckles before starting to heat up the forge and then grabbed his Hammer together with one of the High Tensile Brass ingots he made before.
"So, if I hurry up, I should be able to get about... 20 Done by the end of the day? It’s already quite late, so I should keep going for a little bit and then go to sleep." The old man said to himself and then sighed out loudly. At least he would be able to spend the next day just completely making the parts for the automaton without distraction, so it should be possible to assemble it the day after tomorrow, and finish it the latest in three days.
Trying to keep that plan in mind, Eisen placed the first brass ingot into the forge and waited for it to be hot enough, which only took about four or five minutes, and then he placed it onto the anvil that stood next to the forge with tongs.
Eisen activated the crafting space for Blacksmithing, then held the ingot in place and used tool connection on his hammer. What Eisen would be doing now was to recreate the wolf’s skeleton piece by piece through brass, and the first few bones he would be making for now would be relatively small.
So, Eisen took the first bone he would recreate and inspected it closely to remember its shape, and then hit the brass ingot while simulating the same thing he did with his Zweihänder, meaning that he pushed out a little bit of mana with each and every hit to infuse it into the brass bone.
Once the first bone was done, Eisen walked back to the wolf skeleton spread across the ground and placed the brass version there where the real version of it was before, and then grabbed the next bone he would recreate after placing the other bone he just referenced into a bag.
"Well then... One done, only about 300 more to go." Eisen chuckled and began to work on the next brass bone.
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"And that’s the base skeleton done, then!" Eisen exclaimed happily and looked at the large amount of brass bones lying in front of him. He had just finished the skull and placed it down onto the ground to the other bones, and decided to take a quick break.
It took a bit longer than planned to really finish everything, but it was nice, relaxing work, so Eisen didn’t mind. Although others would probably call it dull and repetitive, Eisen truly loved doing just this kind of thing. It was an amazing feeling to him to just be able to hammer onto metal for hours and hours on end, especially with something you could so clearly see progress with like the bones.
But now, Eisen would prepare some special parts of the brass skeleton: The claws and teeth. As these would be the Automaton’s main means of attack, they couldn’t be weak or dull, so Eisen decided to enchant them!
He already made the brass bases for them, so he would only need to put the right enchantment onto them.
The ones that Eisen chose to put on the teeth were, depending on what kind of tooth he would be enchanting right now, a ’cutting’, ’piercing’ or ’crushing’ enchantment.
For the claws, Eisen simply chose ’cutting’ enchantments to help with slash attacks and possibly help in cutting into the ground for more grip during a sprint.
So, one after another Eisen grabbed one of the 42 brass teeth and carved a an enchantment into them. Whenever he finished one of the enchantments, Eisen pressed the tooth or claw against his arm to see how much strength he needed to cut through his skin to compare the sharpness with an enchantment to the sharpness without an enchantment.
And truly, the enchantments were surprisingly effective! Part of that could be because of his Blacksmithing and Crafting Space skills ranking up. The blacksmithing skill might have made it a little bit easier for Eisen to carve into metal, and the Crafting Space skill might have simply increased his control over his enchanting as well.
When the Blacksmithing skill ranked up, Eisen didn’t really gain much beside now being able to work with higher-tier metals now, as well as the regular side-effect of ranking a skill up, which usually made it far easier to use and more effective.
However, when the Crafting Space skill ranked up, the crafting space now affected the whole room he was in, as long as it wasn’t too large. For example, he wouldn’t be able to affect all of the treasure hall that he met Ailren in with the skill, and it would create the regular sphere that has grown about a meter in diameter; but when he was in a room like this smithy, the skill would now simply fill it out completely to allow Eisen to move around without worrying about the area of the Crafting Space.
And of course, the bonus stats were a nice extra as well.
So now that the Brass Skeleton was finished, Eisen would need to create the rest of the automaton, those parts that would support its movement on top of the Beast Golem Core. The Gears.
Eisen already figured out how many he would need for what place, and what kind of joints he would need to create as well.
He even thought about something like a circulatory system to supply lubrication to everywhere in the Automaton’s body at all times. Of course, a storage tank was included in that.
So, Eisen got to work and spent the rest of the day creating gears, joints, tubes and tanks in numerous different sizes, as well as some static pieces to fill in certain parts of the body, until it was around midnight in the game. He was starting to feel quite tired, actually, despite the effect that you usually wouldn’t feel exhaustion while fighting or crafting, and Caria was already long asleep on a small bed that Eisen created for her the night before. It wasn’t really anything special so far, since Eisen simply made a square block out of wood with a slightly lowered center area, and then made something like a matress, pillow and blanket with some fabrics and wool that he bought while in town.
It was really quite adorable, if Eisen had to tell the truth.
But for now, Eisen would ignore that and simply go to bed himself, so that he could start assembling the automaton’s body.
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Eisen sat on the ground and looked at the Brass bones and joints lying in front of him. This would probably be one of the hardest puzzles that Eisen every finished. Well, hopefully finished.
Either way, Eisen got to work and began to assemble the Automaton piece-by-piece. He started with each of the legs, going from the largest bones to the smallest, and placed the different joints inbetween them whenever necessary, using transmutation to make sure they would really perfectly interlock without being able to simply fall apart while still being able to move.
Once a leg was finished, Eisen would push the claws into their respective places around the paws, and then moved on to the next leg.
After all four legs were done, Eisen assembled the skull, and had Caria help him out however she could so that she wouldn’t just have to lie around all day. She mainly handed Eisen whatever tooth he needed to put into the skull next, but that was enough for her to feel proud that she could do anything at all.
And then, Eisen began to assemble the spine, which he would use as the base to then build the torso. After all of the different, small pieces of the spine were conencted to each other, Eisen added spines, shoulders and hips onto it to finish the torso.
Now, Eisen simply had six different parts that he needed to connect with each other to finish the brass skeleton. He first connected the four legs to the torso, and then only needed to properly connect the head to the spine.
At this point, when Eisen tried to let go of the skeleton, it simply dropped to the ground as if it was some kind of model-skeleton one might find at a school, all of its limbs laying in completely weird directions.
But at least it was a perfect start toward creating an Automaton.