~Right now the most immediate thing is creating the weapons. Forming trade relations with Grenovarish will get me one step closer to trading with the High-Behemoths. Though I should also try to finish up the quests each day, and steadily progress towards evolution,~ he surmised, before opening his skill tree.
New skills seemed to come at random, and he had no sure way of unlocking one. Thus far, he had only unlocked photosynthesis and catalyst conversion through natural means, and the poison skill branch by gaining the shri'killian.
Which meant that if he continued evolving, he would naturally unlock more skills. And if he wanted to force unlock a few more, he would have to go after world items like the shri'killian. No doubt there were a few myths shared amongst the creatures here that would point him towards that.
However, this was just something he would keep in mind. Perhaps after he was done with his magical weapon creation, he would start hunting for them.
~Though my poison skills are lacking behind everything else,~ he thought to himself. Analyzing his fight with the necromancer, one of the major reasons he had lost was because he had relied too heavily on his magic.
And although his hand-to-hand combat was good, it did little against the necromancer.
As he was thinking about this, he began pacing around the room.
~For me to say that I'm fully prepared, I have to have a form of long-distance attack, as well as something to defend myself. Those spells that the necromancer was casting clearly can't be blocked with normal shields though,~ he thought to himself.
Yet another answer lay in magical weapons.
~And as for long distances, I have my poison. Though it'll need to be increased by a few more levels for it to be effective against something that strong,~ he thought to himself.
And the answer to this was obvious to him.
If he wanted to get stronger poison, he had to devour creatures who had stronger poison than him. Or at least that's what he had gotten based of what Asclepius and the shroom chiefs had told him,
"There's no time, I have to get moving," he whispered to himself before moving towards the storage containers.
It was the first time he had properly sat down for self-reflection, something that he supposed he ought to start doing more often.
However, all this thinking had gotten him riled up, and even though he was exhausted from all the work he had done today, he pushed on and decided to get everything set up.
~The first thing I need to set up is a stone sharpening machine. Something like a stone grinder,~ he thought to himself, as he began searching through the container labeled 'stone'.
He removed the smallest rocks from it, before knapping them onto each other, creating sharp edges for tool sculpting. From the several rock edges he had created, he selected the ones with the hardest properties before placing them on one side and putting the remaining ones in a corner.
Next, he removed the largest rock from storage, before using the rock edges he had made to begin sculpting the rock. He was aiming to get the rock as close as possible to a wheel-like structure as his current tools would allow.
After 30 minutes, he had done all he could to achieve this.
From there, he began creating a hole at the center of the wheel, and once that was done he put it aside.
Next, he removed several vines and used Elmando to strip them, before intertwining the strips to create a stronger length of rope. Once he had a few dozen meters created, he began collecting some mushroom material from each of his containers and molded them into a base structure for his machine.
The only parts missing on them were the center wheel -on which the stone tools would be sharpened- and the ropes that would be used to create torque on the wheel.
After running the rope along the holes he had created -connecting them to the paddles at the bottom of the machine- he placed the wheel at its spot before creating a stopper that would prevent it from falling out of place.
What would've taken him a few hours without Elmando had been reduced to just under an hour.
~Now to see if it works,~ he thought to himself, before slowly stepping on the paddle.
With that, the stone wheel began turning. However a moment later it came to a sudden halt, and he heard something come loose somewhere inside the machine.
~Huh?~ he thought to himself, before inspecting where he had gone wrong.
It seemed that there were a few parts that he had accidentally molded as a single structure, when in fact they should've been two independently moving parts. So he quickly fixed the error and tried again.
After this, there were a few more very minor errors. After all, even though he now had what could be considered intermediate mastery at Elmando, he wasn't quite an expert, so even though he had an image in mind, it didn't mean that his Elmando would be able to create such a complex structure in one go.
~Next time I should just create the parts one by one to avoid these incidents,~ he thought to himself, after fixing the last error.
With this, the stone sharpening tool was ready.
He quickly got to work, taking the smaller -less hard- stone edge he had created earlier, and sharpening each of them into spearheads. Of course, he wasn't planning on giving these to Grenovarish, but instead, they were to better equip the people of the den.
With the stone sharpening tool, work carried on quite quickly. The only hindrance to progress was the fact that Lucius was a novice at tool creation, so there were times he had misaligned edges. And other times when he put too much pressure on the stones and caused them to break.
However, when all was said and done, he managed to create several acceptable spear edges.
~That was good practice,~ he thought with a sigh.
It wasn't as if the work was tiring, it was more mentally straining than anything else, as he had to pay a lot of attention to how thin he made each edge. Which was quite difficult due to his high strength stat involuntarily putting too much pressure more often than not.
