Chapter 850: Khan's House
Eisen looked at the cube of metal in front of him. It had a slightly golden, almost brass-like colour to it. The energy that it gave off, however, was completely and utterly... strange. Just from looking at it, Eisen felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
It certainly wasn't how he felt when in the meeting room, but something told him that it was exactly this feeling that was the conduit for Samuel's interference to be blocked. Either way, this cube was evidence enough that Eisen was able to handle the process, and he got some good practice in as well for when the materialsf or the large-scale production all arrived.
Some of the materials Eisen was already going to be able to get going, and he might even be able to prep a few of the steps before all the rest arrived.
The old man picked up the cube, and walked over to the door where Serio was already waiting. Eisen handed it to the town core guardian, "Thanks for taking care of it," Eisen said, but the guardian just quickly nodded his head, "Of course. It takes just a second."
Serio disappeared into a cloud of blue mist as he moved over into Xenia's study. There, she would be able to practice her part of it all with the help of this complex base material, engraving it with the patterns she had analyzed. But for the time being, Eisen was able to move on to something else.
The materials for Khan's new home had finally been prepared. Ever since they arrived here again, Khan was sleeping out in the open, though he said he was fine with it. Eisen had offered to let him stay in the castle for a while instead, but it really did seem like Khan enjoyed the freedom of being outside, which was also taken into account for the design of the hut Eisen would build.
The old man spread out is wings and lifted himself up into the sky, quickly flying over toward the free plot of land where Khan's house was to be constructed. The materials themselves weren't anything all too special, at the end of the day, it was just that a ton were needed due to the sheer scale. Eisen landed down on the plot and increased his size. Khan himself was nowhere to be seen.
It was mid-day, so he was probably out exploring the island a bit more. Eisen pulled out Bai and watched as the ego-tool turned into a handsaw.
Immediately,the old man started getting the materials actually ready for use. That mostly included sawing the massive logs into the correct lengths, and then he split them up into a few planks each. Since the house would be relatively simple, and made mostly of wood, there wasn't a lot more that he really needed to do in regard to preparing the materials for the house.
The plot itself was quite rocky, so it was easy to flatten it all into a stable, flat surface to build on. Eisen dug the holes for the large wooden pillars that would act as the main vertical supports. Those holes were created by compressing the stone with alchemy to a certain degree, and then once the pillars were set into them, Eisen decompressed the stone again, tightly holding the wood in place.
Then, inbetween each of those pillars, Eisen created the basic frame. However, due to the sheer scale that Eisen was working on, this frame would be incredibly unstable due to its own weight being too much. This was partially mitigated due to the rank and quality of the wood, so that it was going to be strong enough, but that still had its limits.
To keep everything held up, Eisen added a few more vertical supports to make sure the frame itself was stable enough before Eisen added in the actual walls. Through those vertical supports, Eisen also had something to more stably connect the planks of the walls to, which was what Eisen was doing next. He did the outside first.
The wood in question was one that was particularly conductive to magic while still being physically strong.
This was a result of Jyuuk's crossbreeding experiments between trees from the giants' country and woods that existed here on the central continent, so that it wmight be possible to keep the unique properties of the different trees that existed on the central continent while giving them the massive scale of the giant-trees.
Not only would that give Eisen a lot more things he could work with for items at a giant's scale, but it was also going to increase the raw amount of materials that could be gathered.
After all, even if you planted regular trees as tightly as possible next to each other even in double the area that the giant trees took up, they would still provide just a fraction of the useable wood that a giant tree did, just due to the difference in the trees' height.
At the same time, those giant trees could also act as a great source of food, as the amount and size of the fruit growing off them was also vastly greater. Due to this, Eisen had some great materials to make use of for Khan's new house.
Eisen placed the planks onto the outside of the frame and hammered them into place properly. The nails themselves were also a bit more unique than regular nails.
Due to the size and weight of everything, Eisen was worried that simply scaling the nails up wouldn't be enough, so he made it so that, upon supplying the nails with a bit of mana, small spikes would dig into the wood they were driven into, making them a much more stable solution.
Of course, that made the process a lot more time-consuming, but Eisen was luckily able to just prepare a mold for the nails and could then use a marble work-surface to mass-enchant them, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
The nails didn't have to be of any particular rank or quality, after all. They just had to be pysically strong enough to do their job well.
Soon enough, the outside wall of the house was fully done. Next, he prepared the doors and windowframes, which of course weren't anything too complicated either. For now, Eisen really only did the wooden base; the door's lock was something he was going to add later. It would be installed with some extra safety- and convenience-mechanisms he wanted to add for Khan.
But for now, he just set everything into place with some simple steel hinges, which also had been massively strengthed by some enchantments so that they wouldn't be bent out of shape due to the weight of the door itself.
Since Eisen wanted to finish the outside of the house first, he quickly started working on the roof; since it would be completely flat, there really wasn't much that Eisen had to do but add the frame of planks around everything.
The center of the roof would have a pane of glass placed onto it so that Khan could keep stargazing even while inside of his home, though things like glass would only be added later.
Next, Eisen filled the walls with a thick layer of insulation; wool from a particular sheep-like monster species that had been found on one of the nearby islands. Due to the monster's massive size, it was fairly easy to gather everything that was needed.
Once the insulation had been added, Eisen began to place the inside-wall, which was less focused on being strong and weather resistant, and more focused on its visual appearance, natural scent, and once more its mana conductivity. Eisen was going to add a lot of quality-of-life things to the inner walls, so he wanted to make sure that the wood was going to be able to handle that well enough.
By the time the day was mostly over and night fell, Eisen had started putting in the hut's floorboards. There was a bit of a hollow space between the stone platform the house was built on and the actual floor, so that Eisen could insulate it properly as well, and of course, so that he could add some other materials inbetween to make sure that Khan's weight wouldn't damage the floor.
After all, not only was he a gaint, but a giant inflicted with a curse that made large parts of his body turn to stone, increasing his weight massively.
And then, before long, Eisen was done with what was essentially the base for the house, and he was ready to add glass, enchantments, the locks, and then at last, the furniture that Khan was going to need to live here.