Spending My Retirement In A Game

"Hmm... Rudia, try to shoot it." Eisen said, slightly turning toward the red half-dragoness archer, and without hesitation she pulled on the bowstring and shot an arrow at the ego-potion that was walking toward the group.

The arrow hit the slow glass body and put a crack in it, making the arrow get stuck in the glass. Immediately afterward, Bree took initiative and swung her hammer toward the arrow and pushed it in deeper. The glass cracked and the blood red liquid inside of its body spilled out of the hole that formed.

The moment that the actual potion touched the ground, the grass withered away as if all life was drained out of it. But instead of just spreading out on the ground, the potion soon gathered together. For a moment, Eisen was wondering if maybe it wasn’t actually that the potion was an ego-item, but that the glass was, but seemingly both was the case.

The potion flowed onto the glass, completely shattering it apart into numerous sharp shards. Once more, the bottle and potion formed a body, just this time in a different form. The body had regular proportions, but was simply made up of the potion. The lower arms and hands as well as the lower legs and feet were made up of amalgamations of glass shards with the blood red potion seeping in between them.

The red potion’s head split apart horizontally in the center into a large, gaping mouth that soon let out a high-pitched shriek. Eisen looked at the figure in front of him and sighed rather annoyedly, "That’s not that great..." The old man muttered quietly, and before he even had to ask, which he was actually just about to do, Rudia already shot another arrow at the ego-potion’s body to see what the potion would do to physical objects.

And before it was even able to properly penetrate the liquid, the arrow was already disintegrated. With a deep sigh, Eisen extended his hand forward. Through his body, starting from the center of his chest, toward his shoulder, past his elbow and right out of his hand, his elemental spirit flew out.

It flapped its wings and spiraled around the potion’s body, while Eisen watched it with a slight smile. Since the elemental source inside of the spirit’s body was also Eisen’s own elemental source, he was able to control it as if it was inside of his own body anyway, despite that currently not being the case.

Eisen supplied mana to his elemental spirit, and it was soon surrounded by cold blue flames. Flames that extended outward and grew colder and colder, creating freezing mist the whole time. Eisen pulled them toward the ego-potion and tried to push them directly onto the actual potion. Bit by bit, its body was freezing while taking very little actual damage, but that didn’t matter too much right now anyway.

All that needed to happen was that the potion needed to be taken out of comission, so that someone could actually kill it by destroying the area surrounding the soul core.

Eisen even marked it outside by changing the color of his flames into a target, and before he knew it, Rudia shot another arrow toward the ego-potion and shattered the red ice apart. After the area around the soul core was destroyed, all the ice shattered and fell apart completely, before the potion was properly announced dead by the system.

"So..." Komer muttered quietly, "What the hell was that?" He asked. Immediately afterward, Sky added, "Yeah, seriously. I didn’t know you could make ego-potions... What kind of use would that even have?" The fey-kin boy asked confusedly. Eisen slowly thought about it for a while, but even he couldn’t really tell.

"I guess maybe it would be able to change its effects depending on what’s currently needed based on its own judgement? It seems kind of wasteful to do it like that, though, except maybe for very, very rare potions. And it’s not like it can really be trained either, now can it...?" Eisen thought quietly, looking at the ego-sword that he was currently holding in his hand.

"Although, maybe..." The old man muttered, "Depending on what kind of soul you put into it, like what grade it is or how well of a match it is, ego-items may start repairing themselves. So it’s possible that an ego-item would be able to replenish itself."

"But doesn’t that only happen really slowly? Like, after a day, small scratches may disappear from ego-items?" Bree pointed out. She had been watching Eisen very intensely, and because of her Analyst abilities, she was able to figure out what state Eisen’s items were in very easily whenever she wanted to, and as such pretty quickly noticed the fact that ego-items could heal themselves as well.

Slowly, Eisen nodded his head, "Yeah, but even then, if it’s a potion with unique materials that could take literal years to gather, it might be a good idea to make an ego-potion that was capable of repairing itself and it would make sense." Eisen was deep in thought, trying to figure out what was actually going on and in what way something like an ego-potion would actually make direct, logical sense, but soon, Argon the bronze half-dragon asked a question that Eisen weirdly hadn’t directly considered yet.

"Erm... Does there really have to be some sort of reason for it?" He asked, and Eisen looked at Argon with his brows raised just so slightly, "What do you mean?" The old man inquired. Argon slowly closed his eyes and thought about how to best word it, and then explained his own view on this situation.

"You see, sometimes, things are ambiguous. Even with my ability to sense truth that I have gained from my god Trygan, there are times when even I can’t tell whether or not something is the truth or not. And it is not because my ability is too low, but rather that there simply is no direct truth, or because something is made up of both truths and lies. Maybe it’s a truth that is changing constantly, or it is simply so unimportant that in the mind of the person speaking to me, it can’t even be recognized as being worthy of the title of ’truth’. To us, it may seem illogical to hear something like this, but the one that created this ego-potion may not even had any sort of reason for creating it. Instead, it was just an arbitrary idea. Just because." Argon suggested, and Eisen slowly looked at the bronze half-dragon while deep in thought and in the end just nodded his head.

"Honestly, that doesn’t even sound that far off." Eisen pointed out, and Komer looked at him with a wry smile, "It doesn’t? Seemed like nonsense to me..." The merchant pointed out, and Eisen immediately nodded his head, "Exactly. It’s nonsense, making these kinds of ego-potions is just that. Complete and utter nonsense, nothing more, nothing less. We may come across items that would logically never really make sense as ego-items, like maybe food, or things that can just barely count as items. Because in the end, anything can be turned into an ego-item. Most things probably shouldn’t, but it’s still possible. And whoever or whatever is making all these ego-items probably doesn’t care about ’why’ anymore."

"That means that we’ll have to be more careful, right?" Kiron asked, trying to see if he understood his grandfather right, and the old man slowly closed his eyes and thought about it for a few moments, "I wouldn’t exactly say we need to be more careful, just prepared for more unique encounters. These more ’extraordinary’ ego-items most likely won’t be too hard to handle, but we can’t directly be sure either. We just need to be aware that we can’t expect things to happen the way we expect it to anymore." Eisen explained.

The others slowly nodded their heads, and Eisen started walking forward, "Then let’s go. We should try to get to town by tonight." The old man pointed out, and continued walking, quickly followed by the others.

They started encounter more and more ego-items. Most of them were the regular kind, things like armor, clothes, weapons, and so on that were turned into different forms of ego-items. Sometimes they took on humanoid shapes, other times they had the body of an animal. And sometimes, they looked neither like anything that did live, or was even supposed to live, nor like the regular item they were supposed to be.

But every once in a while, they came across special ego-items. There were some potions, some that even benefited the group after they killed the ego-item. The potions may be anything from healing potions to corrosive ones.

And just like Eisen thought, or rather joked, they actually encountered some food-based ego-items. A large boar made of hot, roasted ham. Actual two meter tall gingerbread men that went ahead and attacked everyone like maniacs.

It became rather annoying to deal with all of these different kinds of items after a while, especially because there wasn’t the slightest sense of order to them. It felt like they were fighting a completely different creature every single time, so they couldn’t get better at fighting them after a while either. It was more than just annoying, really.

But even then, none of the ego-items in particular were especially hard to beat, as they weren’t especially intelligent. They were more like mad beasts than anything. And sure, the closer they got to the town, the stronger and smarter the ego-items became, but they still weren’t a challenge. As they didn’t fight in groups, they were easily defeated after not even a minute each. Eisen and Bree tried to grab some of the materials and components making up the ego-items’ bodies, although for the most part, they were never really of high quality. Bits and pieces, sure, but most of the parts couldn’t really be reused.

But that wasn’t really why they were here either, tehy just wanted to find the town ahead of them. Just a few hours after starting to walk at the beach, Eisen already managed to spot the town, and what he saw there was rather surprising.

It seemed like even the buildings were ego-items in some way, shape or form. Of course, a house wasn’t directly an item, but there were still ways to integrate different special effects or techniques into the construction of a house, including the fusing of the materials with souls.

As far as Eisen could tell, the houses were somewhat humanoid in form, but were always just bodies from the torso upward, so they never had legs. And that was to be expected to an extent, since it wasn’t really possible to turn the ground into an ego-item, even if it somehow succeeded with the house.

But that didn’t matter much. They were rather large in comparison to the others, but to Eisen, they were actually just small-fries.

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