Spending My Retirement In A Game

Chapter 922 Aggressive Map-Making

A door appeared in the middle of the workshop, and Eisen quickly stepped through. Just a moment later, it disappeared again, and Sigurd popped up by his side.

"So, what's your plan? Are you going to build an item that can analyse the forest's magic pattern?" it asked, but Eisen immediately shook his head.

"No, that would be far too complicated. The processes that are needed for that aren't something that I can really build right here, at least not in just a couple of hours," Eisen explained, smiling at the dungeon's guardian, "Maybe if Xenia was here, we could figure something out, but my style is maybe a bit more... aggressive than that."

Sigurd raised its brows surprised, looking at the old man nervously, "Are you going to build a weapon to blast your way through?"

Eisen stopped, turning toward it, "Actually... that doesn't sound like the worst idea, to be totally honest. But... no, that might cause some other issues that I don't want to deal with. It's possible that this natural barrier is a two-way system. Something that both stops others from getting in, and those inside from getting out. If that's the case, destroyign the barrier would only cause a ton of problems. Not to mention, I would prefer not destroying the local ecosystem if it's totally avoidable."

The old man laughed a bit as he got all of his materials together, "No, the item that I'm going to make is something that will let us search through all the possible paths."

Eisen smiled as he placed the different 'skill orbs' that he needed down onto the table. He was really quite happy that his collection had grown to the point where he could make basically whatever he needed, at this point.

Though, the three most central skills were ones that he has had access to almost since the beginning of his journey in this world after his memories were reset. Bree's Mapmaking skill, strengthened through her class that was specialized in information-gathering, as well as Eisen's own Mana Double Skill, one of the first magic skills that he created quite long ago, as well as the Truth Seeing Eye skill, which was one of the abilities that was incredibly central to his growth. It almost felt like years since he had first dealt with all that, at this point.

The method that Eisen was going to use for this was quite simple. First, he made an item that created a small wisp of mana that could move around autonomously. This wisp was connected to the 'sensor' part of the mapmaking skill. Basically, at the end of the wisp's lifespan, it would do two things, but Eisen first wanted to ensure the functionality of the latter action, the very last thing each individual wisp did.

And that was to send out a pulse of mana that was used to sense the world around it, creating a map of all that was sensed. This was one of the base functions of that skill. However, this pulse was split up into two layers. One to sense the physical world as the mapmaking skill was intended to, and the second one used Eisen's Truth Seeing Eye to instead sense all the magic in the area. Both were needed to properly calculate the correct path. After all, even if there was a physical path, if the magic didn't let anyone through, that didn't matter. And even if the magic let people through, but the path wasn't accessible, it similarly wouldn't be possible to go through. That was why both needed to be the case.

It was a actually a rather simple enchantment, which Eisen placed into a small crystal orb. Of course, there were a few more complexities to ensure that the quality of the map was correct and the different layers were placed onto each other correctly, plus that the final map would be saved in a way that it could be accessed by both Eisen and Bree, but overall Eisen ended up coming to much simpler solutions than he thought he would going into this project.

Giving this a shot, Eisen poured some mana into the orb, and watched as a small wisp of mana was shot forward at a reasonable speed. Hitting the wall in front of him, mana pulsed outward and scanned the surrounding. Looking at the storage device, Eisen soon saw the map information and watched as the currently connected scroll was filled up.

"Perfect," Eisen smiled. But, of course, the pulse was actually rather small. It only reached a few feet in distance, scanning everything there. At the same time, Eisen changed a few settings to ensure that the pulse only travelled a relatively short distance. Particularly, it should only travel far enough until it gathered enough ambient mana to activate the part of the sequence right before the sensor pulse.

Each wisp was worth around 2 mana points. During its lifetime, it would gather a total of 7 mana points from the air. Luckily, this forest was basically dripping in ambient magic, so that happened rather fast. It would then use the Mana Double ability imbued into it to duplicate itself twice using 2 mana points. The process of that itself drained around 1 mana point, leaving the remaining two points to be used for the final sensing ability.

The two duplicates wisps would move into a completely randomized direction, and would repeat the same exact function. Back at the starting point, Eisen would monitor the continuously expanding map to check if a path has been found, and if that is the case, he could recall all of the wisps at once. Navigating the forest after that should be easy enough.

That being the case, once Eisen was done, he quickly did a test run. He made his way to one of the dungeon's floors, a complex ruined labyrinth. He went into a random spot within it and held forward the orb. With just a twinge of mana infused into it, the item activated.

The wisp shot forward, and then a few steps later, it split into two and sent out two more wisps. Almost at the same time, the sensing pulse was shot out and the information started being sent to the data storage. Slowly but surely, he could see a map being drawn on the parchment in front of him. Before long, the entire floor was mapped out, and Eisen recalled the wisps. After ensuring that there weren't any stragglers that kept duplicating and potentially causing issues, the old man grinned lightly.

"There we go," Eisen said proudly, opening a door to get out of the dungeon again. Out there, he activated the item again and sent out the first wisp, watching as the rest of them were shot outward. The information should be sent into the dungeon without issues, so Eisen just went back inside. Considering the size of the forest, and depending on the complexity of the maze that was the dark forest's barrier, this should take a few hours to properly resolve.

Sigurd popped up next to the old man, "So that's your 'aggressive' method?" it asked, and Eisen nodded with a smile.

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"Yup. Basically, it's like manually searching for the path, just... Sped up a lot. It should make it easy enough to find the right path that will lead us to the center of the forest."

Eisen walked into the tavern at the dungeon's entrance, where the others were currently gathered around, eating something before heading to bed for the night. If Eisen was right, then everyone should be able to at least have a long nap before they had to get going again.

"Did you make what you needed to?" Bree asked, and Eisen nodded his head with a smile.

"Yup. And speaking of, here you go," the old man reached out and gave Bree one of the data receivers, "If you connect this to your mapmaking skill, it should sync with the existing data you have of the forest right now."

With a bright smile, the half-fae looked at the small crystal and quickly imbued it with mana to try and access the information that was currently being placed onto it. Her eyes quickly focused on the system messages appearing before her, and she smiled broadly, "Whoa! It's expanding by the second, and it's so detailed! How did you make this?"

"Well, it's nothing too special," Eisen pointed out with a slight shrug, "It's actually pretty simple. Most people would be able to make something like this. It's self-sufficient, after all. Rather, there's some crazy creative people out there, so I'm sure there'll be a few people that have already found quite a few ways to exploit the system like crazy. It is, after all, not a perfect thing."