Spending My Retirement In A Game

After going for a run together with Sophia, the two teenagers swiftly logged back into the game. Now, Tony would be spending his time taking care of Sean and Katy, so Sophia had more than enough time to go back to being Alnico for a while. And quite coincidentally, the young woman had similar plans as Stahl did, as she also wanted to get a few more lessons from Evalia about different musical skills and how to use magic together with them. And so, the two cousins swiftly greeted Evalia together.

"Huh, you two wanna come and learn stuff together?" She asked with a grin, and Stahl swiftly nodded his head, "Yeah, I really just need to learn the basics and then grind for proficiency anyway, so I’m sure you’ll be able to correct any mistakes I make while you’re giving Al a few direct pointers." He answered, sitting down at the table in the corner before Evalia smiled at him.

"Alright, sure. Do you wanna keep going where we stopped last time? I’ll just tell Stahl what he needs to do, and then I’ll join you." She suggested, and Al nodded her head with a smile before making her way to the other corner of the room where most of Evalia’s instruments were kept.

"So, we said we’d get to Scribing next, right? How much do you know about the skill?" She asked with a smile, before Stahl just scratched the back of his head and shrugged. "Not too much, it’s just writing, right?" Stahl asked a bit confused, and Evalia swiftly nodded.

"Sure, but there’s much more to it than that. In order to gain direct proficiency in it, you need your writing to have a purpose. For example, Komer’s leveling his Scribing skill up nicely because he’s writing down calculations and notes for everything merchant-related. I leveled up mine through Caligraphy and Poetry. So you’ll really have to find your own way of doing stuff, I guess. As long as you’re not writing random words without purpose, you should be able to get it to rank up to 1 in an hour or so. I have some brushes and ink here as well if you want to try that type of Caligraphy." Evalia explained, so Stahl slowly nodded his head.

"I see, thanks! Sky lent me a pen, so I think I’ll at least use this for a while." He answered, before Evalia nodded and turned around, heading over toward Alnico.

"Okay... so I need to write something with meaning?" Stahl muttered to himself quietly, just playing around with the pen in his hand as he looked down onto the sheet of paper. "I guess... I can turn this into a Journal or something?" He asked, and just ended up shrugging a bit. He was at the start of his ’Journey’ throughout the game, so he still remembered basically everything that was going on. As such, maybe doing something like that would really be a nice idea, just to keep the memory somewhere at all times.

"I guess that’s a nice idea then." Stahl lightly shrugged, before swiftly starting to write into the small book that he made, from the moment that he ’appeared’ in the world, from the perspective of an NPC. After all, if an NPC happened to find this book and ended up reading a ton of game lingo, that might end up getting Stahl in trouble, so he preferred not taking that risk.

And so, Stahl started writing about his ’background’ information from within the game, just as Eisen had come up with, as an introduction to the journal, before he started to actually write about what happened the past few days. About the town he appeared in, and what he did until his grandfather and the others came to pick him and the other ’Alphas’ up, and how they were then brought to the ship and ended up meeting everyone.

Stahl even continued writing when his Scribing skill reached Rank 1, because he was getting somewhat caught up in it and really just wanted to continue writing about everything that happened so far up until this very moment, before he swiftly looked up from the paper and toward Evalia, who seemed to be trying to take a peek at what he was exactly writing about from over his shoulder.

"Hey! Don’t look into a Gentleman’s Private Journal!" He complained jokingly, before smashing the book shut and standing up. "So, you peeker, next is sculpting, right?" Stahl asked, and Evalia swiftly nodded her head with a lightly wry smile.

"Yup. I have a little bit of wood and a carving knife for you, so go ahead and get to work." Evalia answered, pointing at the nearly two meter tall log of wood and the tiny knife in his hand, before turning to Evalia with a frown.

"Seriously? You want me to carve something out of that, with this?" He asked with a wry smile, and Evalia nodded her head immediately. "Mhm. Have fun!" She exclaimed, and Stahl looked at her with a sigh.

"Somehow I feel like you gave up on me since yesterday."

"Oh, it’s not that at all! It’s just that this is so straightforward you don’t really need any pointers. It has the same rules as Drawing, just in 3D. Depending on what you want to accomplish, you will get more proficiency the better you accomplish it. Easy as that." Evalia answered, so Stahl slowly nodded and stepped up to the log in front of him, that he most likely wouldn’t be able to pull his arms around completely even if he tried.

And so, Stahl swiftly got to work, and did that with two first steps. One, cutting off a thin, flat surface vertically up the whole log, and two, setting the log down to be horizontal, using the flat surface that he had just cut off so that the log wouldn’t end up rolling around now or ever. As such, Stahl swiftly sat down in the corner with that log in front of him, somewhat walling him into the corner as if he was trying to build a fort, before he started to work on some wood.

First, he worked with a small block to simply get the skill. And for that, he simply created a small carving of a cat sitting on its butt. As simple as that. It was neither much, nor was it especially good, but apparently at least enough to get the skill, which was all that Stahl wanted.

And because he already had the woodworking skill, the task of then working on the large log became much easier, because the knife slid through the wood more smoothly. Just like that, Stahl began to work on his epic display of wooden art, where he once again created a detailed copy of the ship they were currently on, but in a much grander way. On the ’surface’ he created a stormy ocean with giant waves, some even reaching the same height of the ship’s tallest mast, while below the surface a giant ocean monster about twenty times the size of the ship was moving around peacefully, most likely creating those giant waves in the process.

And that was really it, there wasn’t necessarily much going on, but instead of Complexity, Stahl went for detail. Not only did he try to create a texture to make it seem like there were actual bubbles as well as seafoam on top of the water, but he even went so far as to create detailed versions of people he knew walking around on the ship. Obviously he also gave the monster a large amount of detail, and individually created some finely detailed scales, taking the patterns he saw on the scales of Fafnir as a reference. And in the end, Stahl was quite happy with the result as well.

[Ship in a Monstrous Storm Scultpure]

[Quality - High][Rank - 0]

[Description] A wooden sculpture created by a nameless sculptor. It displays a large ship sailing on wild waters created by an enourmous underwater creature.

[Artistic Value] 78

"Oh, nice!" Stahl exclaimed as he checked both the description of the sculpture as well as his status, noticing that he not only created something with a higher artistic value than he managed on his paintings last night, but also managed to gain more than half the proficiency levels needed to rank the skill up to 1.

"Well... It did take nearly three hours..." The young man then sighed as he stood up and stretched, before Evalia walked up to him. "You worked quite some time on that. It does look pretty nice, gotta admit. ’Ship in a Monstrous Storm’ is an interesting name too, and that artistic Value is more than I expected your first proper sculpture to have." She said impressed, and Stahl nodded his head with a grin.

"Oh yeah, same! I didn’t expect that either! Wait, why are your eyes colorful like yesterday again?" Stahl asked a bit surprised, and Evalia chuckled.

"Well, I inspected it with my magic. As long as it has an artistic value, I get a pretty large benefit to appraisal as long as I have my eyes infused, and I get some neat special info as well." She explained, so Stahl slowly nodded his head. "Huh... nice. Anyway... Is this really the easiest way to rank the sculpting skill up? I already spent a lot of time on it." He said with a sigh, before Evalia accompanied him, overpowering his sigh.

"’A lot of time’? You did that in three hours, you never would have normally been able to make something like that in just three hours. Be glad the game assists you with that stuff, otherwise you’d still be sitting there in a week. Scultping is just something that takes a good bit longer than other things, so you need to be patient. Even painting took you longer to rank up than the other skills, right?" Evalia asked with a lightly wry smile, before Stahl nodded his head.

"I’m pretty sure that’s the case with any ’Item-Based’ skills... Although you need to ask your gramps about that, he has the most of those out of all of us. They take longer to level up, but the direct pay-off after doing so is larger compared to ’Action-Based’ skills." Evalia explained, while Stahl curiously listened. And after Evalia explained a bit more, she just pointed behind herself at a few more, smaller logs of wood.

"Just work on those for now, those should be enough to rank the skill up completely." She suggested.

"Alright, will do! Oh, and anything with an artistic purpose will end up leveling my Sculpting skill up instead of woodworking, right?" He asked, once more just to make sure, before Evalia nodded her head and returned to helping out Alnico. "Mhm, basically." She answered with a smile, so Stahl sat down and cracked his knuckles as he took a look at the wooden blocks and logs with a grin.

"Then let’s get to work." He muttered to himself. First, he grabbed the smallest blocks of wood he could find, carving out actually pretty tiny pieces. Luckily, because of his thoughts and intention, which the game was perfectly able to read as long as he thought about them strongly enough, they were actually seen as the part that they were supposed to be despite not actually being recognizable as such without any help from the creator.

So, one after another, Stahl continued making small pieces of wood in peculiar shapes, then numerous spheres, before moving on to other parts, which all also had a pretty unique and weird shape individually. But because they were seen as exactly what Stahl intended, and he carved intricate patterns on the surfaces to make them artistic, they became not only fuel to rank his Sculpting skill up, but a perfect piece for the big ’item’ he wanted to create with numerous skills, that he started working toward when he started trying to fix Eisen’s suit.

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