Chapter 601 Bai

Eisen turned his head over toward Hephaestus with a deep glare while he was holding the Ego-Multitool in his hands in the form of a simple hammer, "Please tell me that you didn’t just risk destroying, no, basically killing, my Multitool just because you were annoyed by the fact that it wasn’t listening to you as well as you wanted to? If that’s the case, then it’s about time I turn you into a lump of scrap metal, bud." The old man said with a light growl, although Hephaestus was just looking back at him and the multitool, focusing much more on the latter.

"Dude, the fuck are you on about? Shouldn’t we focus on the fact that it can just fucking transform like that right off the bat?" The ego-item pointed out, and Eisen crossed his arms with a frown, "No, I don’t think we do. Although I do think that we should talk about that part of it. Because that means that you were expecting that it would be practically impossible for me to use it from now on. Why would you ever think of doing something like that?"

"What, it’s not like there’s anything special about it, you can just make another one..." Hephaestus pointed out with a frown, thinking that he was completely in the right here, although Eisen was of a slightly different opinion, "You know, for someone that utterly despised me, or maybe still does, for abandoning you, you’re very quick to writing others off as useless."

With that, the old man slowly turned around with the ego-multitool in his hands, trying to figure out how he was supposed to calm it down. Because it seemed like through what Hephaestus just did, the multitool was acitng even more erratically compared to before. It mad sense, there weren’t many people that could handle getting a full consciousness and a different kind of body within a few seconds of barely having some form of ego. Not to mention that this multitool wasn’t a person, but an ego-item.

Eisen placed it down onto one of the tables that now stood in front of him, and then stood in front of it, "Alright, erm... Multitool... Ah, what was it again... Bai?" The old man suggested, "Yeah, let’s go with that. Bai sounds good... Bai, can you try and change into that other form from before again?"

Just a few moments after Eisen asked this, the form of the Multitool, now officially named Bai, changed into that of the same Androgynous, thin, frail person as before. Its hair was covering its face completely, and it was barely looking through them at all. From his perspective, Eisen could barely see a glimpse of Bai’s pupils.

"I’m sorry about what just happened, but I don’t think we can fix it. So, you can stay in whatever form you may want to be in. The only exceptions are when we need to work on an item, which is when you will have to be in the form of the tool we’ll need, as well as when we need to speak to each other, which is when you will have to be in the form you’re currently in. Understood?"

Slowly, Bai nodded its head, seemingly understanding what Eisen was trying to tell it, before it turned its head over toward Hephaestus, "Why don’t... use him?" Bai asked, before Eisen turned around and looked at the other ego-tool, who was standing next to a workstation with a frown while grumbling to himself.

"Because he’s useless for the creation of most types of items, he can only make very, very special ego-items, and nothing else. Those are not the kind that you will be able to make, I’m afraid, but you can make anything else that he can’t. So, I’ll switch between you two if I need to, alright? But it just depends on the item I need to make at the moment, alright?" The old man tried to explain as well as he could, and the Ego-Multitool just glared at Hephaestus before noddings its head.

"Me better than him?" Bai asked, and the old man slightly sighed, "Well, at the very least you’re nicer than him. But I can’t say if you’re better, you two are just rather different. Don’t worry, I’ll probably be using you more than him in the future."

The moment that the old man said this, Bai practically ripped its own eyes open and stared deeply at Eisen, "Are you sure? Are you telling truth? Complete truth?" Bai asked while staring deeply at the old man, who just nodded his head immediately. And without hesitation, Bai nodded its head as well and practically glared at Hephaestus with a smug grin on its face.

Then, before Eisen even noticed, Bai held its hands against its stomach and looked up at Eisen, "Can eat?" It asked, and Eisen slowly raised his brows before moving his fingers through his beard, "I mean, you do have a mouth and a proper throat, so you probably ’can’ eat, sure, but I don’t think that food will sustain you like it does with us."

"Not food." Bai said, shaking its head immediately, before turning its head around a bit more just to spot a pretty heavily-dented hammer laying on some workbench. Eisen randomly picked it up somewhere, just because he wanted to take a look at it and figure out of there were any specific differences in its structure compared to what Eisen knew. Surely, within a hundred thousand years, such things should develop at least a little bit, but it didn’t change much in the physical department. So probably, most change happened in the area of magic and skills and such things.

Either way, Eisen slowly picked up the old hammer and gave it to Bai, who was continuously staring at it. The moment that the old man gave it to the ego-multitool, it practically ripped its own mouth open and simply bit into the metal. Or so it tried at least, and Eisen was just about to pull it away from Bai, but before he could, the multitool managed to rip off a piece of the metal that made the hammer up.

And then another, and then another. Slowly, the old man turned around toward Hephaestus, "So, what’s going on now?" Eisen asked, and Hephaestus slowly looked back with a wry smile, "Ah, right... Well, the thing is, instead of just regular food I can live off of other sorts of items as well. I can eat food, sure, but most of the time I would just eat failed items that I worked on over the years... I think it might be the same with this one, just that it can’t eat food at all, and just other sorts of items? That’s a quality that’s only transferred to ego-items I give life in that way, so you don’t gotta worry about these others... but with that one..."

"If you’re not careful in the future, I’ll be feeding you to Bai, understood?" Eisen asked, and Hephaestus slowly nodded his head, "Sure you will. I’ll try not to mess up then, I guess."

"I think you mean that you’ll try not to mess up even more." The old man sighed, and then looked back at the recently-reborn Bai, "So, do you want to try and eat anything else, or just that hammer?"

"This." Bai pointed out inbetween bites, simply stuffing the rest of the hammer deeper into its mouth without a moment’s hesitation, and Eisen slightly sighed.

"I guess we’ll need to feed you tools then..." Eisen sighed, although someone amongst the three that just entered the room together only a few moments ago, after kind of doing their own thing like so often lately, had another question to ask, "I think that’s called Cannibalism, right?" Caria asked with a slightly weirded-out smile on her face, while Melissa was just curiously waving at Bai. Meanwhile, Sal walked up to the ego-item turned special living-ego-item and deeply stared into its eyes. He even opened his six hidden eyes to take a good look at every part of Bai’s body, before coming to a final conclusion.

"Yeah, I don’t like it. It’s stealing my look." Sal pointed out, although Caria just looked at him with a light scoff, "Sal, ’pure white’ isn’t a look."

The Spider-Boy slowly turned around and glared at her, "Oh yeah? You know, ’Bitch’ isn’t one either, but it seems to fit you pretty well."

"Sal." Eisen interruped before this whole thing got out of control again, like it often did when the two of them were speaking to each other, "Stop it. Like Caria said, it’s not a ’look’ that Bai went for on purpose. and then looked back at Bai, who seemed rather satisfied after simply eating up that whole hammer within a few moments, as if it was some small insignificant snack.

"Bai, can you transform back for now? Just so that we can see if we can properly work on items together again. Let’s hope that nothing went wrong just now. If it did, I’ll repair you with Hephaestus’ parts." The old man said as he stretched his hand out toward the ego-multitool, before it somewhat nervously nodded and then grabbed the old man’s hand before turning back into its multitool form.

First things first, Eisen tried to switch between all of the different modes manually, and then had Bai do it a couple of times itself to see if everything was really fine, bore the old man grabbed a piece of steel. It wasn’t a special kind, and Eisen didn’t have any specific purpose with it either, he really just wanted to quickly heat it up a bit and then hammer onto it with Bai in its hammer-form.

And while Eisen was doing that, Brody logged back into the game as well, and quickly approached Eisen from behind before placing his hand onto the old man’s shoulder with a slight laugh, "Heh, one moment you’re bleedin’ out of your mouth after cutting your tongue up with your own teeth, and the next moment you’re back at work, eh?" The Demon-Orc pointed out, and Eisen grabbed Bai’s handle tightly. The old man immediately turned around toward Brody with a deep stare, before thick white mist started to stream out of the amulet around his neck. The next Eisen knew it, Kirisho stood in front of him and took Bai out of his hands, "Sorry... Bai, right? You will have to wait for a moment."

"Hm? Bai?" Brody asked, before watching the ego-multitool slowly turn back into a humanoid form, and the demon-orc then stared at it with a wry smile, "Yo, why the fuck can it turn into a person? And why’d you give it a Chinese name of all things?"

"Brody, please be quiet for a moment." Kirisho said with a light glare sent Brody’s way just with the corners of her eyes, before she looked back at Eisen, "As for you... please explain now."