Spending My Retirement In A Game

"Okay you two, so as I told you before, message me in the game if you can, and otherwise log off real quick," Benjamin told his grandchildren as they made their way to their rooms to lay down in their capsules before the old man swiftly did the same. Soon enough, Benjamin noticed the inside of the capsule fade around him as it slowly turned into the inside of his workshop in the ship.

Slowly, Eisen stood up and stretched, before making his way out of the room to look for Caria and Melissa, who he soon found laying down in the meeting room, where currently Xenia, Jyuuk, Brody, and Evalia were all still sleeping as well. And soon enough, as Eisen was picking his two tamed monsters up from the ground, a notification appeared in front of his face.

[Announcement! The last pre-launch player-phase has just been commenced! A total of 1000 Players from numerous streaming and video platforms are now joining the game! Only another week until the Launch of the Game!

Enjoy your time!]

With a smile, Eisen quickly read through the notifications and then waved them away, before making his way to the place where they stored the carriage inside the ship to prepare Cabarum for the trip while also grabbing a few small materials so that he could work on smaller items while riding his horse.

And then, a little while later...

[Two Players you recommended have joined the game! Stahl and Alnico have been added to your friendslist]

With a smile, Eisen looked at the names of these two and could only grin. He wasn’t sure if Benji was trying to one-up him by using ’Stahl,’ which is German for ’Steel,’ as his username, but ’Alnico’ fits Sophia quite well. After all, it was a material used as magnets for loudspeakers, for example. And since Sophia was quite talented when it came to music, primarily electric or remix music, that was a good fit.

Eisen swiftly waited for the message from the two of them, and soon it came, so the old man immediately opened the chat and began to read.

[Stahl] Waddup Gramps, Soph and I are in a town called ’Banar.’ There are three other players here with us, and I think they were also recommended

[Eisen] Alright, I’ll let the others know, then. Wait for a message from me about how far we’re away from you

Immediately, Eisen hooked Cabarum back up to the carriage and began to clear it out a little bit more so that there would be enough space for everyone to fit. The Dungeon Core was already hidden in a more secure place, so he didn’t need to worry about that at the moment. And after bringing the carriage out to the road next to where the ship currently was, Eisen made his way back inside and went up to the Meeting Room, where Brody, Jyuuk, and Evalia were already talking.

"Morning, all of you." Eisen greeted them, and Jyuuk immediately turned to him, "Good morning, Eisen. The three people we recommended are all in a town called ’Banar,’ is it the same as you?" He asked, and the old man nodded his head.

"Mhm, they are there as well. I already brought the carriage out, and we have enough food in there for everyone to last a few days. We only need to figure out where Banar is." Eisen told them with a smile, and the three of them nodded, making their way down to see Sky and Bree, the ones who would probably know about small places the most. Before Eisen left the room as well, he turned to Xenia, who was leaning her head on the table.

"While we’re gone, go ahead and take a break and do whatever you want. You don’t need to be the only one working on the Homunculus’ body." Slowly, Xenia looked up at the old man before nodding her head, returning to putting her face onto the surface of the table.

Confused and a little bit worried about how Xenia was acting right now, Eisen made his way down to the main deck as well, thinking that he should just let her deal with it. Maybe she wasn’t feeling too well, or something private happened in real life. Either way, Eisen would only ask her about it if it lasted for a while, as he didn’t want to intrude into her private life.

He chose to move on and look for the two young Fey-kin as well, who he quickly found already surrounded by Brody, Jyuuk, and Evalia.

"Oh, it’s just about four or five hours away from here with the carriage. We just need to exit through the northern gate and follow the main route. Banar is a pretty small town though, so why do you want to go there?" Sky asked with a good bit of confusion, which Eisen could understand pretty well. He couldn’t know about it after all, so while the three other players were freaking out to come up with a reason, Eisen handled the situation quite quickly, as he thought this situation through already.

"Ah, you see. Apparently, another wave of ’Artificial’ people was created. Although that’s just a guess because we all just got memories of people that were close to us back then, Brody remembered his wife, Evalia a friend of her’s, Jyuuk’s younger sister, and I remembered two of my grandchildren." Eisen explained quite swiftly, already freaking out the others because of a small detail.

"Jyuuk’s Sister? But how?" Sky asked confused, and Eisen shrugged. "I have a guess. All of them passed quite a while ago, centuries even. Maybe because it was our experience that was used, their souls were a good fit for the artificial bodies, just because they were so close to us. So they were most likely somehow ’revived.’" The old man added before Bree tilted her head to the side.

"Isn’t that kinda far-fetched?" She asked, confused, although not suspiciously, as she fully trusted in Eisen and whatever he said. So she immediately accepted it when Eisen shook his head. "Not really. You know about the ’Chat’ ability the artificial people, and we have, right? Well, we could message them as well. So it would make sense, at least to me. They told us where they were, after all, otherwise we couldn’t know about that either." Eisen explained, and Sky slowly nodded.

"I see... That would make sense... There’s so much we don’t know about this phenomenon so that anything can happen, right?" He asked into the group, really confused about all of this, and Eisen placed his hand on Sky’s head. "Exactly. We will be going to meet them now, so will all of you please take care of the ship, okay?" He asked them before Sky slowly nodded his head.

"Sure..." He muttered quietly, and the four players, plus two tamed monster girls, made their way to the carriage.

On their way, Brody turned to Eisen. "What the hell, man? Could you at least tell us about this story you came up with before spreadin’ it?" He asked the old man, who could not help himself but just reply with a chuckle.

"Sorry about that. But well, it sounds right, doesn’t it?" Eisen asked the others, and they couldn’t help themselves but admit that it was an outstanding and safe story in the end, because if they were asked questions, they could just reply with ’We don’t remember.’

On their way to the carriage, Eisen messaged both Komer and Kiron, the latter of which gained the chat ability after becoming Eisen’s Knight, to take care of the ship as well and prepare everything for an early departure tomorrow morning, including to let everyone from the Church know about it. And just before everyone properly sat down in the carriage, Eisen remembered something.

"Wait, Evalia, didn’t you say your friend didn’t want to come with us directly to enjoy the ’starter content’?" He asked, and Evalia just shrugged.

"Well, that was the plan, yeah, but she changed her mind last-second. Don’t know why, but I don’t mind either." She explained, so the old man simply accepted that and sat down on the bench at the front of the carriage.

"Alright, you guys have everything?" Eisen asked the others only once before he would start driving the carriage toward the eastern gate, and once he received their answer, immediately told Cabarum to get moving while beginning to reply to Stahl that they would be there in a few hours through the chat window.

After the small group made their way out of town, they simply traveled along the main road for a good few hours, just as Sky had said. While they were doing that, Jyuuk was keeping Caria and Melissa a bit busy and had his bird-squad lookout for possible danger, Brody simply meditated again, and Evalia was carving some small wooden figurines to level her skill up a bit.

They soon found themselves in front of the town, and Eisen stopped the Carriage by the side of the road and sent Stahl a message so that they would come to meet him. Not even two minutes passed since then, and Eisen could already hear a certain young man’s voice yell for him in the distance.

"Graaamps!" Stahl yelled out as he came sprinting at Eisen with four people directly following him, all of them wearing the same starter outfit.

Stahl and Alnico themselves looked completely like Benji, and Sophia respectively did in real life, just that Stahl now had bright green hair, and Alnico’s hair had something like a ’Universe’ coloring, with different shades of dark purple, pink and blue. Now that Eisen managed to get a closer look, he noticed that Alnico had lightly pointed ears, meaning that she was probably some kind of half-elf.

"Hey there, kiddos." Eisen loudly laughed while Alnico looked him up and down in surprise. "Huh... You’re actually wearing that in here?" She asked, and Eisen replied with a grin, before jerking his head toward a spot that the guards couldn’t see. "Let’s go over there for a bit for some introductions, shall we?" Eisen suggested, before clicking his tongue to make Cabarum follow him and pull the carriage behind him, while the three other originals were greeting the ones they invited.

Once the group reached the spot that Eisen was talking about, the old man swiftly summoned his staff from his Soul Storage, immediately surprising a quite thin, white-skinned and short black-haired and -eyed girl, which Eisen immediately recognized to be Jyuuk’s sister. Similar to her brother, she had a thin Monkey-tail at the bottom of her back, although as she didn’t have anything else, Eisen figured that she was a Half-Beastperson. "Wait, where did you pull that out from? I thought we don’t have an inventory!" She complained in nearly accent-free English before Jyuuk nudged her shoulder.

"Nezu- I mean, Kyla, don’t be that rude, please." Her brother told her, and Kyla looked away with a pout. "But it’s not fair, Onii!"

"Haha, don’t worry, Kyla. This staff wasn’t in an Inventory, and I can only store a few specific items. Once you level up a bit, I’m sure you’ll get a similar skill. Take a look at your Brother’s arm, for example." Eisen said before Kyla tilted her head to the side and looked at her brother, who was holding his arm over to her. Currently, he had a few tattoos of Bluebirds and a Single Redbird on his upper arm, one of a bear, and one of a stag, as well as some bone-tattoos on his hand. Swiftly, Jyuuk waved his arm to the side, and a black mist poured out from his palm, rapidly forming a large skeleton, while at the same time Aotori appeared on Jyuuk’s shoulder.

"There are a few unique storage methods like th-" Jyuuk began to explain before Kyla grabbed her brother’s arm in shock. "Aah! Onii! When did you get Tattoos, Otousan is going to kill you when he finds out!" Kyla exclaimed before Eisen, Brody, and Evalia began to laugh to themselves quietly, and Stahl asked something that was on his mind for a little while now.

"Actually, Kyla... You’re speaking almost perfect English, so why are you still saying things like ’Onii’ and ’Otousan’ in Japanese?" He asked quite bluntly, which was just part of his personality, and Kyla was immediately distracted as she placed her fingers in front of her face in a peace-sign and grinned back at him, telling him the reason as if it was the most natural thing in the world before cheekily sticking out her tongue.

"Oh? I do it because it’s cute!"