Spending My Retirement In A Game

Eisen sat there, deep in thought as he tried to somehow convey his ideas to Buldor properly while trying to sense what the ground-dragon thought about them. With the help of his Soul Whisperer title and his Soul Engineering-abilities, the old man hoped that he would be able to interact with souls in this manner to at least figure out their feelings somehow.

And in the end, Eisen managed to figure out part of why Buldor didn’t want a full armor like that. And the reason wasn’t the kind that he really expected... It seemed like mainly, Buldor simply didn’t want his scales to be covered up.

"...is that it? Really?" The old man asked, "Is it because you... want to show your scars?" He inquired, thinking that this was the most probable reason. There were quite many people that held the sentiment that scars were impressive, manly, or simply held meaning to them. But it seemed like that wasn’t the case, as Buldor simply huffed air out of his nose and glared back at the old man, which very clearly was supposed to mean ’No’. And then, Eisen tried to figure out how actual dragons thought about their scales...

"Hm..." He hummed, and then realized something he never really paid attention to. Eisen never saw a Dragon with dirty scales. Actually, Fafnir spent a lot of his time simply grooming himself and cleaning his scales... So maybe they were just supposed to be something to show a dragon’s beauty.

And if this was a gift from one of the five that peaked, that meant that it had to be some kind of special creature. Eisen thought about it for a while and then crossed his arms, "Is it just because you think scales are beautiful?"

With a seemingly smug expression, Buldor looked high into the sky, quickly answering the old man’s question within a few moments, "Alright then... Are you alright with it if I just create something that looks like your scales instead?" Eisen inquired, and Buldor slowly looked down at him, "After all, they’ve been weakened quite a lot. They’re scratched up and lost their shine. What if I made you something that looks like your scales in the peak of your physical beauty?"

Immediately, really without a moment’s hesitation, Buldor seemed to accept the old man’s suggestion. He stared him deep into the eyes with a passionate expression, and Eisen couldn’t help but laugh.

"Fine, then let’s do it this way." Eisen said, and started to quietly think about what the scales may have actually looked like in the past, before he got a pretty good idea.

He turned over toward Gran, "You probably still have your memento, right? Is it connected to Buldor, by any chance?"

With a surprised expression, Gran nodded his head as he quickly ran over toward the center of this large, open area. He pulled the leather-sheet off the hay that acted as his bed and grabbed a small item. To Eisen’s surprise, it looked like a pendant, something that Eisen really didn’t expect Gran to have as his memento. But when he took a closer look at it, and then looked at Buldor’s head, where he had two small horns curved around at the side of his forehead, neatly hidden by Buldor’s puffy feathers. It seemed like one of those horns was missing about a third of it that simply shattered off, and that had seemingly been turned into the pendant that Gran was now holding, "This gift by you. Made when Buldor dead." The warrior explained bluntly.

It seemed like Gran really did remember Eisen, and just when the old man wanted to see if it sparked any memories for him, the Warrior spoke again, "When Buldor dead, Gran came to life-man... Life-man no bring back Buldor. You made pennent for Gran."

As Gran spoke, Eisen just smirked at his mispronounciation of ’pendant’ and took the small item to get a better look at it.

"I see..." He muttered. It was obvious that ’Life-man’ was supposed to be Jyuuk. While it was possible to resurrect living beings, there seemed to be a lot of restrictions on it, so Jyuuk most likely wasn’t able to just bring him back. And if Buldor’s soul stone had not been gathered quickly enough, that meant that the soul moved on already and it would have been impossible for Jyuuk to animate him and turn him into an Undead.

Sure, he would have been able to animate Buldor’s dead body, but that most likely wasn’t what Gran would have been looking for.

With a smile on Eisen’s face, stuck between the weirdly nostalgic feeling of hearing Gran explain the situation and the sentamentality that came with it at the same time, the old man closed his hands around the pendant and took a deep breath as he initiated his meditation.

The old man let his thoughts flow through this item, and he tried to activate his item-memory skill. He wasn’t sure how it worked exactly, but hopefully, since it came from a living being, he would be able to see Buldor while he was in his physical peak.

Eisen concentrated as hard as he could on this piece of a broken horn. And before he knew it, Eisen felt like something around him had changed. He slowly opened his eyes, and he stood in front of the corpse of Buldor as it was laying there lifelessly with blood-covered, dirty scales. Eisen sighed lightly as he looked at this, but he figured this was a good chance nonetheless.

Slowly, Eisen squatted down in front of Buldor and inspected him, before he took notice of the horn that he had seen to be broken on Buldor’s soul before. At first glance it looked to be completely whole, but when Eisen pushed the feathers to the side, he noticed that this really wasn’t the case at all.

A mixture of blood and mud had seeped deep into Buldor’s feathers and hardened while they were basically wrapped around Buldor’s horns. It seemed like Buldor’s blood was rather special, and hardened to be basically like concrete, or so it seemed all around the ground-dragon’s body.

Eisen pulled away the feathers and saw that the horn had already broken off and that it had only been held in place by these feathers. For the next little bit, Eisen tried to remove the feathers from the piece of the horn without having to cut through them, and then placed the piece to the side.

And then, at that point, Eisen just grabbed a jug of water that he imagined to be standing next to him in this imaginary space in Eisen’s soul realm, before grabbing a piece of cloth and starting to just clean Buldor’s body up.

It was quite disgusting right now, and that wasn’t really the kind of sight that Eisen wanted to see when looking at him... After all, until a moment ago, he was rubbing Buldor’s snout and interacting with him. And it simply was something to do out of respect in Eisen’s opinion, at least... Most importantly, though, it just felt right to do it, so there was no reason not to.

When Eisen was done cleaning Buldor’s body, the old man started to clean up the piece of the horn that he would be turning into the pendant.

First things first, of course, Eisen got started with cleaning this piece as well, scrubbing over it vigorously until it was practically shining. When he was done with that, Eisen started to slightly shape this piece. In general, there wasn’t really much to the shape of the pendant that Gran had shown to Eisen. It was a roughly ten centimeter long piece of a horn that had its base covered in some metallic decoration, while the numerous little damages all over this small piece, which probably came from battle as well, were filled in with mana-crystal, considering how durable it was.

First, Eisen grabbed a small file and started to file away at the edges of the horn’s base so that it wasn’t as sharp there anymore, trying to round and flatten it a little so that he could attach a proper metal base to it.

There were small parts in the damages on this part of the horn that Eisen figured to fix up similarly. Like for example, small bits with cracks that were loose or wiggling around were just removed, and Eisen tried to make sure that there was really nothing at all, like dirt, blood, or worse even, bugs stuck in these little damages.

For the most part, Eisen’s hands were really moving on their own again, though. It felt different to before, since everything that Eisen’s hands did was exactly the way that Eisen wanted to do it in the first place, which made sense if he was the one that made this pendant originally.

Eisen cleaned everything up as well as he possibly could and then set this horn to the side for now while Eisen fired up the forge in front of him. It seemed like, as simply as Gran was, the metal that was used as the base was just simple, durable steel on the pendant so that Gran didn’t have to worry about anything breaking while he was carrying the pendant around. The old man just created a small half-sphere that he then properly attached and fused with the horn, before starting to pull a mana-crystal thread through a small hole in the metal, although the mana-crystal thread was fused with the bit of shavings that Eisen got from fixing up the horn a bit more.

After that was done, Eisen filled all the damages in with mana crystals and then cleaned everything up a little more. And with that, it was already done. There wasn’t anything special about this, just like the old man had figured from the start. Once more, no enchantments or magic inscriptions or anything like that. It was just a simple item that was meant to let Gran remember Buldor properly simply by looking at it.

But once Eisen finished the item, he watched as Gran received it from Eisen in the past. And the old man followed Gran as well, simply watching him wear the pendant around his neck while he was fighting. It seemed like many people thought that this was a horn taken from some kind of enemy that Gran had slain, which was what most would most likely expect from someone of this Warrior’s stature and behavior, but it was surprisingly much more sentimental than that.

Eisen was able to watch Gran throughout his last few battles that he took on himself, before finally dying. Eisen wasn’t actually able to see anything but Gran, though, and he was able to hear a few things some poeple said to him, but he wasn’t even able to see the area around the Warrior or the figure of who he was speaking to or fighting, so he didn’t know how Gran died. Eisen just knew that he did, and that he was grasping the pendant with a smile as he passed on into the afterlife.