“Eggs.” Riv had sat on the deck for a full minute catching his breath, but now he was on his feet looking in the chicken coops. “We didn’t cook them yesterday because we were too busy fishing. That means a couple of eggs for everyone. And fish, and whatever else we can whip up.”

“We could make eggy bread,” Elisa said. “We still have that milk from the last island in the anti-spoil crate. That would make the eggs go further.”

“What, now?” Aethe said. “Eggy bread?”

Marco was not surprised she didn’t know of it, given how weird elf life seemed to be. Something about being collective seemed to have slowed down their development of good things, in a way of speaking. They ate as groups, moved as groups, and existed as groups in a way that went far beyond the human society he was used to. That, somehow, limited experimentation. Every time they ate something even slightly unusual, he could feel her surprise. He never brought it up, but sometimes she did, especially lately.

“Yeah,” Riv echoed. “Eggy bread?”

Riv not knowing about it was more of a surprise. He had grown up a day’s sail away. That made him a neighbor of sorts. A human neighbor.

“This really wasn’t a thing for you?” Elisa held out her hands. “Then give me the eggs. You are about to finally live.”

As Elisa went about the breakfast making, Marco finally turned to his rewards. They had encountered their first temple way back in the settled, mostly civilized inner sea where he was born. It had given them a roadmap to all the others, and not much more. Since then, the majority of the temples had given him some sort of general authority over the areas they were in, a sort of tap into the system-relevant profits of those places that made the entire crew a little stronger over time.

Now that they had a bunch of those passive streams of strength set up, it was likely they were getting pretty strong indeed. Marco had no way of telling, really, since every time they got stronger, the world grew around them to match. Somehow, no matter how many temples they claimed, the world kept up, throwing harder and harder threats at them.

Even so, it was on a region-by-region basis. The inner sea they had departed from was once a deadly place, and now he wondered if anything in it could stand up to them. Quill’s controlled territories were thoroughly under control by the time they were able to take down Quill himself, even though there were people in them that could have given them serious trouble. That was the nature of civilization. They could have been safe there, even if that didn’t mean the ability to subjugate every living thing in the area.

On top of that, they had a few specific rewards from temples that helped them do certain things better. In a controlled area whose temple they had already claimed, the winds would always work with them, shifting to drive their ship at near-top speeds. Fish were much easier to catch. Their cannon range had a permanent ten percent increase. It was all additive to the fact that they were starting to have very high levels indeed.

He figured this one would give them some sort of turtle-related buff, like better defense or the ability to go underwater. Instead, the system threw a curveball.

Marco leaned back on the ship’s wheel and let the sun soak into his skin. This was one of those moments where he felt he needed some time to just absorb the information himself before he brought the others into it. Breaks like this one were rare, in some ways. Right now they had nothing to do except what his message said, and there was no deadline associated with it. He decided to eat his breakfast without any worries at all and dive into the other stuff later.

“I can’t believe this.” Riv was eating his egg-coated, fried bread with butter and honey, enraptured by every bite of it. “It’s a marvel of technology.”

“Really good.” Aethe had less butter and sugar on her breakfast but wasn’t making much slower time demolishing her share of the food. The chickens were out and about again now, pecking up remnant feed from the deck. She reached down and petted one on its feathered head. “Good job, you. You’ve made me happy.”

“What about me?” Elisa dished out Marco’s share, protesting all the while. “For all you know, I invented this.”

“Good job to you, too.” Aethe patted Elisa on the head, enthusiastically. “I appreciate your efforts, and you are a good team member.”

Stolen novel; please report.

Riv froze with his fork not quite to his mouth before they all burst out laughing. The rest of breakfast was taken around a small table they had picked up in some mercantile port, laughing and smiling and keeping the slightest of watch for disgruntled, island-sized turtles.

“Okay, spill it,” Elisa said to Marco after a second. “You absolutely looked at your screen earlier. We all saw it. What did it say?”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that.” Riv said. “This is fun and all, but if we have to fight the sun to keep it from setting or something, I have to get ready for that.”

“It’s not that bad,” Marco answered. “From what I can tell, it’s sending us on vacation.”

“Vacation?” Aethe asked. “A leave from duties?”

“Something like that. It wants us to go to an inner sea somewhere and sit around for a week. I’m not sure why.”

“No mention of fights at all?” Riv started gathering plates and putting them into the washing bucket to soak clean. “Doesn’t seem like the temples I’ve known.”

“No mention of fights. Just general waiting. I agree that it’s weird, but there’s not much we can do about that. The bigger problem is that I don’t even know where an inner sea is. We haven’t been to one since we left home. We haven't even seen one.”

“Oh, that’s not a problem.” Elisa reached into her pouch and pulled out the green book Marco recognized as her navigation journal. “We keep stealing maps from other pirates, right? We’ve never been all that far from an inner sea during the entire journey. We just tend to go from temple to temple, and those have all been in outer sea territories. We’ve been sailing around them.”

“How long to the nearest one?” Marco asked. “Days? Weeks?”

“Days. If you’ve got that wind buff from the temple…” Elisa looked up to see Marco nodding that he did. “Then we should be there pretty much overnight. Tomorrow night at the latest.”

“Then let’s get moving.” Marco walked to the wheel. “I’ll get the course set.”

—

Marco had gotten a lot of buffs from killing everything that had come to destroy them over the last few months, but his absolute favorite was what he got from the giant jellyfish. It wasn’t the most important for their survival, and it almost didn’t have a practical upside at all. It was a quality of life thing, he had decided, and he would take any of those he could get.

Elisa had immediately received permanent control of the new conquested skill, which she used with mathematical precision to draw down on Marco’s magical output at a just slightly lower rate than his magical regeneration. At any given time, they were going as fast as they could without him drawing down on his magical resources, a balance he had always found tricky to maintain with conscious control.

The real benefit wasn’t related to not having to think as hard, though. It was in not having to think at all. The remainder of the day’s sailing passed with him not at the wheel but playing various games and just generally spending time with the crew. It was satisfying a need for rest that all of them ignored the vast majority of the time, and when Marco went to sleep that night, the rest he got was deeper and more profound than any he had in months.

The next day was more of the same. They ate, sailed, and made their way across the waters in record time. Riv took some time to repair what little had broken on the ship while they were wrestling a giant turtle out of the ocean, but the rest of the time was spent in remarkable safety.

“Why aren’t we getting attacked by anything?” Marco asked Elisa, halfway through the morning. “We are covering a lot of territory. Something must have seen us by now.”

“What could catch us? Something would have to see us, immediately decide to destroy us, and then catch up or intercept us. Most things couldn’t do that unless they were directly in front of us. This ship really moves, Marco.”

“I guess so. Still, it would be nice if something happened. I’m a little bored.”

“That’s what lunch is for, captain.” Riv slapped a bowl of food into his hand. “Eat that. I’m going to talk about upgrades.”

Riv ran him through the current status of the ship. Since they had left Quill’s territory, they had not had a real, true upgrade. Twice the ship had slightly increased in size, something the system referred to as a kind of class update, but it had been far from the transformative, all-over retrofit they had before. Riv had been expecting something bigger from the ship for a while, and had just completed a full hour of examining the ship to see why, exactly, it had failed to give that to him.

“I think there’s probably just a hidden factor the system isn’t telling us about. Remember last time? We put that rudder on, we added some magic storage metal, and it was almost immediate. Both of those things were things we weren’t supposed to have yet. The rudder especially. It was so good there was a mismatch between the ship and it, remember?”

“I remember,” Marco said.

“I think we’ll need something like that. Some material that’s so special the ship has to remodel around it.”

Marco frowned as Riv’s words clashed with his memories. “That doesn’t make sense, though. I remember captains coming into port to let their ships upgrade on Gulf Isle. Tatric ran the docks, I lived with Tatric. I saw all of it. There were captains who went through twenty upgrades. I don’t believe they were always finding something like our rudder.”

“I think those were probably a slightly different situation, Marco. Do you remember our upgrades? Not the first, but the second and third. It was like we got a whole different ship. Were the upgrades on Gulf Isle ships like that?”

“Not usually. Sometimes they were, though.”