Spending My Retirement In A Game

Eisen looked at the glowing, hot metal in front of him, quickly picking it up. The massive hunk of metal was enough to make dozens of armours for people out of, but what Eisen was using it for in this case was a lock. The cost behind it all was a massive reason why, in the giant country, the most massive cities were carved from mountains.

It was incredibly hard to justify using so much material on housing for people that were able to adjust their size basically however they wanted, but like that, they could use the materials that were harvested from the carving-out of what was basically a sort of massive quarry, to further construct other buildings. But even so, seeing things that weren't made of stone or wood was incredibly rare.

That was why the metal that Eisen was using was actually just a sort of mock-metal of sorts. He was using a specific alloy as a base, and then carefully fused it together with mixtures of gemstones and crystals to basically act as a 'filler' for the metal, keeping up its physical strength.

Of course, if Eisen were to actually use this metal to make items, the actual resulting item would be abhorrently weak. It had basically no ability to block damage, simply passing it on to the wearer of any armor made with it, and weapons would have abyssmal damage ratings as well. That being the case, none of that was really needed for something like a lock.

It just had to be physically, structurally strong in a way that it could still provide even with all those 'fillers'. And since the crystals and gems that were used were all things that could be grown through the use of certain magics, it was really the best way to make a strong material at a low cost, at least at the scale of a giant that Eisen was currently working on.

Of course, that also made it a bit more bothersome to work with. When heated up to this point, the texture and strength of the material was vastly different from the original metal's, and in the cooling-down process could lead to a lot of weird results, which was bothersome particularly when it came to a more complex, fine-tuned mechanism like a lock.

Eisen was positive he could stop anything too bad from happening by carefully leading the cooldown, but since he was working at this large scale, there were always a few more issues that popped up, especially when it came to how materials were sitting against each other, or large moving parts.

But for the time being, Eisen really just had to finish the lock, and could fix the rest through some enchantments and magic. Making the casing, chassis, and different bolts related to mounting was the ease part. They were pieces that didn't need much detailed work to them, but then, it came to the actual lock; the part that would interact with the key.

Frankly, since Eisen didn't have too much experience with locks, he just wanted to make a simple cylinder lock and make it work better through some enchantments.

So, for that, Eisen needed a couple different things. The main cylinder for the lock, the rotating cylinder that would be set into it, as well as five pins that would connect those two cylinders to decide when exactly the inner cylinder could be turned. Through some springs set at the base of the pins, they would be pushed into the cylinders' center.

The teeth of the key would then push each of those pins down to the exact level that was needed to allow for a rotation, by properly aligning the small 'cut' along the pins. Once that line that was cut was aligned, the inner cylinder could be rotated, and once the cylinder was back in its original position, they upper half of the pins would fall back onto the rest as they should.

Of course, making these pins was actually fairly easy, since Eisen could just shrink down and work on them at the exact scale that he needed for that massive lock, instead of having to fiddle around with tiny, annoying pins that could get lost at a moment's notice. The cylinders and springs were also done quite easily, but the more important part was really in how they interacted with each other.

Even regular-sized objects had to be greased up to avoid friction and wear on the materials, and that was even more so the case for a mechanism scaled up to basically the size of a person. And so, Eisen needed to use something that would ensure that the lock mechanism, as well as the enchantments Eisen was going to place on it all, would stay perfectly fine even after years of use.

And for that, Eisen actually made a sort of potion that used oil as a base. Not only did the process make it oil last perfectly forever, but it could also be fine-tuned for what was actually needed here.

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And in the end, it ended up as a sort of thick gel that could be applied to a surface particularly easily, and through the use of the enchantments, it would be kept in place exactly where it was needed. Not only that, but this potion-oil would help create an airtight seal as well, allowing everything to keep itself together a bit more, even at this size.

The enchantments that Eisen made were really just quite basic; things to help the motions, keep everything stable and together, ensure that all the motions were happening well, and things like this.

He really was only doing this because of the scale and because it would help with longevity against the strength of a giant, but at the same time, Eisen could add a lot of achievements that would help with the actual security. Achievements that had to link with the key to allow for the pins to actually split up from each other, so that anything like a simple reproduction wouldn't work.

Maybe it was a bit overkill for a wooden hut for a giant who, frankly, would probably leave it unlocked most of the time anyway. Crime currently wasn't really a thing in prototype, and nobody would be stupid enough to break into the home of a giant who was friends with the king. And it wasn't like the lock would be the only thing keeping the house safe.

But this lock was just a bit of a prototype; something that Eisen could use to figure things out at a massive scale so that he could have a closer look at how things worked, and then translate everything down to a smaller scale so that he may end up mass-producing some locks for this place.

Because if he could properly spread the locks around here in prototype, then he might be able to do the same in other places, like the central continent, where safety was much higher concern. Locks were a thing, sure, but it was really, really easy to pick or break them. But that was sort of the intention behind this city. This island. Hence why it got its name; Prototype.

Here, Eisen could test out things that he wanted to bring to other places in the world. Before, it was probably a space that the originals used to figure out how to create arrtificial people, but now that that was done, Eisen was using it as a space of how to better people.

How to make the people of the world better, improve their lives and make sure that this world moved on past this ridiculously long, medieval limbo that they've been stuck in for one-hundred-thousand years.

At this point, they should be much, much more advanced than earth, but because of Samuel, the originals were forced to keep this place as it was forever, to curate and regress it strategically to make it the world that he wanted to market to others.

So, not only was Eisen going to create much, much better safety for the people of this world, him and the others would improve medicine, commerce, communication; everything that they've missed out on. Phones, locks, maybe even something like a rudimentary internet.

Trading routes that would allow for objects to be moved across the world in a matter of days, to allow countries and people to be more connected to each other.

They were going to make this world a better place, and the thing that Eisen was doing for that right now, was make this simple metal lock.