Spending My Retirement In A Game

Chapter 947 Oasis Lanterns

The air was waving back and forth from the heat emanating from the ground. Molten rock was flowing from the cave's ceiling, dripping down like water into lakes that one could only imagine from hell otherwise.

Monsters crawled around in here. Beetles that had magma clinging to their mandibles, and moths with scales that could light ice on fire. There was just a single area in here that was completely devoid of these traits that were offensive to life itself – a small camp, where the air was cool and crisp. Wisps of cool blue flames floated through the air, protecting the folk inside.

Inside of that camp, an elderly man with an appearance that seemed to hint at him being from a hell quite similar to the one outside of the camp's borders was carefully placing a gemstone inside of a small metal lantern.

It was a cool blue stone, the same colour of the chilling wisps of flame floating around. The moment it was set into place, it began emanating a bright light. The surface of the metal lantern began to gather a thin layer of frost quite instantly.

"Hm... Maybe the output is a bit too strong..." Eisen muttered to himself, wiping the thin layer of ice off the metal, "If I do it like this, then it's going to be hard to handle..."

A loud yawn came from the other side of the tent that the man was sitting within, "Can't you just, like, put an anti-frost enchantment on there or something?"

The old man looked over at Brody, who was sitting on a small chair with his legs up on a wooden crate containing a number of different materials for Eisen to work with.

"No, I can't. I don't want this to be a single-use magic tool if I have the opportunity to make it more useful. A frost gem would be useful in here, but if the next zone is some kind of frozen wasteland, I'll just have to make a completely different item," Eisen explained, "Plus, if I make this prototype work like this, it'll be easy to sell."

"Money-grubber," Brody laughed.

"What, do you have any idea how much money I need to revive Silber?"

"Aren't we rich as hell already?"

"Of course we are, but this is a sum that you can't just use without disrupting things. Most of my personal funds are tied up in things, like with Komer or the development of the country and guild," Eisen let out a long sigh, "Not to mention all the high-grade materials that I buy all the time..."

"... You sure you don't want to use Asgard's treasury to revive 'im?"

"I refuse to do that. He's my brother, and I have the money. I just need to come up with some new ways to make more money so that I don't screw something over for Komer," the old man stood up and walked across the tent, grabbing a small vial filled with a fine off-white powder.

Brody just sighed and looked at the old man's back as he slowly sprinkled the powder into the inside of the lantern, using his transmutation to spread it in a thin layer across the glass panes, "So what are you doing now? Does baking powder block frost or somethin'?"

Eisen smiled, shaking his head, "No, they're ground-down scales from a moth that lives in the giant country. Surprisingly enough, each individual moth is just a little bit larger than the bigger types here on the central continent, but they're incredibly hardy. Most of their body is made from certain crystaline structures that are extremely resistant to almost anything. But it just so happens that their scales are also an extremely powerful irritant. I remember them being called the 'scourge of the home', because back when barely any giant ever shrunk down for any reason, way back in our more rudimentary tribal era, literally nobody could even see them because of how small they were, and they caused extremely annoying rashes."

"Rashes? On giants? Don't giants take baths in boiling water?"

"What? No, of course not. That's just the fire clan," Eisen joked, "But yeah, you're right. Anyway, those scales are an extremely toxic poison to most species of people. Because the moths are so plentiful in the giants' country, you can get a ton of the scales, and if you were to coat armour in it, you could easily boost any sort of elemental resistance imbued into that equipment. With just one issue..."

"It's poison."

"Exactly. There is one way to neutralise that poison, but it makes any coating using the scales extremely brittle to the point where you absolutely cannot use it for most cases where it's useful. But here, on the inside of a lantern, I can detoxify the lanterns without worrying about that. Plus, with them as a base, I can create an elemental defense on the lantern's metal."

"If it's on the inside, why detoxify it in the first place?"

"Because it's extremely deadly. Most people without any resistances at all will be completely paralised almost immediately. A few minutes later, they'll be dead," Eisen explained, "But it's just the most efficient material when it comes to adding blanket elemental resistances to an item. Plus, I've been wanting to use it for something for quite a while."

"Ah, so it's just an excuse, huh?" the demon-orc halfling let out a loud laugh, while Eisen finished applying the moth scales to the inside of the lantern. Since they were perfectly transparent, especially when they were flattened with transmutation, they weren't going to block any of the light, though that wasn't the main use of this lantern.

Eisen stood up and smiled lightly, making his way to the edge of the camp. He stepped outside of the protective barrier and soon walked on the scorching hot stone. Breathing became harder almost immediately, but Eisen could deal with it.

He carefully pressed the button at the side of the handle and held it down for a few moments. The frost gemstone in the center of the lantern lit up, and Eisen could feel the air around him cool down. A bubble of cool air formed around him, and immediately began to protect him from the heat.

"Perfect," Eisen smiled happily. Now he just had to make one of these for every person in the group so that they could move independently. That was really the biggest trouble of these hot floors. Eisen could cover them in a bubble of cold air with some magic items, but everyone was going to be restricted to the fairly limited range. If everyone had their own bubble that encompassed just them, they could move and fight however they needed to.

Plus, the lanterns were small enough that they wouldn't really get in the way, and could just get strapped to one's belt without much trouble. The frost magic stone in the middle could also be mass-produced. It was a mixture of different stones that were well-attuned toward ice magic, and the rest was just pure enchantments. And because of the way that Eisen constructed the lantern, it should be easy enough to swap them out.

A weaker version of the frost stone to traverse the desert, maybe mixed in with some water magic to increase the moisture in the air and some dark magic to provide shade. With some air magic, with some actual barrier magic to provide a more rigid boundary, you could use this lantern to travel underwater. And using fire magic, you could get even through areas of the world obstructed through snow and blizzards.

If Eisen made a stronger version of this, he could make something that could cover a whole campsite. Maybe he could just do what he did here at this camp. He had basically just deployed his domain and cooled down his magic enough to balance the heat of the air. If he made a magic item enchanted with the ability to create a domain, it could create a pretty great safe zone or oasis in the middle of an otherwise terrible place.

It might be worth building a prototype in case the rest of the zones continued becoming harsher and harsher in ways that Eisen couldn't do anything against. But for the time being, he just had to make the portable ones for the soldiers.