Under Manala’s guidance, Riv chiseled out a half inch of deck in a rectangular shape about the size of one of Elisa’s larger notebooks, then another at each of the remaining three corners of the ship. Once they were done, Kuzai approached the first and frowned.

“I hate this part.” He unloaded a pile of pulp the size of a barrel onto the space, then held his hand out. “What I wouldn’t give for a presser.”

Kuzai’s hand started to glow, causing a sympathetic shine to rise from the pile of pulp. The entire lump of potential paper started to compress in on itself, taking on a slightly more square shape as it did.

“What is going on here?” Marco whispered. “I can’t figure it out at all.”

“He’s making a paper block. Imagine one piece of paper that’s a foot thick. How many potential sheets is that? That’s what he’s putting together here. One big block of paper, enough for ten books,” Elisa explained.

“Isn’t that just the same as a block of wood?”

“Not as far as the system is concerned.” Elisa pointed back into the outpost, where Manala was returning with what looked to be an entire cart full of notebooks. She ruthlessly conscripted Riv to move them all to the deck while Kuzai finally finished the first block of paper. It sat there in the hole Riv had carved, white as bleached bone. “I can’t imagine how much power that takes. He really is high-level.”

It took a five-minute break in between the formation of each block for Kuzai to recover enough for the next, but a half hour later the ship had four new shock-white blocks of compressed pulp on it. Kuzai joined the rest of the crew, motioning to Manala to take over the project.

“That’s more pulp than you’d think. It was already pretty compressed,” he explained to the crew.

“Should we be paying you?” Marco asked.

“I have some ideas for that. For now, though, just watch. You won’t ever see something like this again.”

Manala strode over to her big pile of books and knelt in the center of them, laying her hands on the stack with her eyes closed.

“She’s a Utility Runist. Best I ever met,” Kuzai said. “She writes down runes in those books and loads them with power. It’s how they level. The runes degrade over time, but only so much, and she has dozens of duplicates of each.”

“Which means?”

“It means, Marco, that those are books of magic,” Elisa said. “Years worth of work, just waiting to be applied to different objects to make them better. Or one object that is designed to hold all of them at once.”

“The blocks of paper?”

“Exactly,” Kuzai said. “Each one of those is about as expensive as your sword, I’d say. Not too shabby as raw materials go. Oh, here we go. The show is starting.”

Manala suddenly shouted, and every one of the hundred books on the deck bounced into the air as she did, levitating a few feet above the planks and disgorging rune after inked rune into the air. They gathered above the ship like four separate flocks of swallows, weaving through the air with lightning-quick coordination before finally taking up their positions above each book.

Marco figured Elisa would have told him if it was a bad idea. He assented, and that served as some sort of signal for the runes, which all slammed downward into the paper, drilling into it like a whirlpool of water going down a faucet. The paper began to glow and darken as every inch of it took on its own rune.

“That’s happening all through the blocks. Every layer is getting its own collection of runes. The weak ones are superimposing on each other, reinforcing the work.”

“Which means what?”

“Who knows?” Elisa giggled. “Good things, though!”

When the last of the runes had been pulled into the blocks, each of the rectangles of pulped wood pulsed once, straining the ship with a massive expression of energy. As that happened, another notification popped up in Marco’s eyeline, this one demanding immediate attention as well.

Control was a no-brainer. Marco told the system yes, then felt an odd wrestling-match sort of sensation from his skill as it exerted its influence on the four blocks, slowly stripping some kind of control from them. It only took a moment before the blocks were his.

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“What is this?” Marco said. He could feel the ship suddenly working on several different tasks, all of which drew on his power slightly. He couldn’t sense exactly what they were yet, but the constant pull on his magic was impossible to ignore. “What’s it doing?”

“Lots of things,” Manala said. “There’s a rune in there for almost anything you’d want a ship to do. There are different kinds of cleaning runes, health-promoting runes, dozens of runes having to do with smoother or faster sailing, runes that keep you from capsizing…”

“It’s a library of buffs and utility spells, Marco,” Kuzai said. “I’d like to say she’s exaggerating when she says there’s something for everything you might want to do, but she’s not. The runes will automatically choose actions they think are appropriate in the moment, diverting power from the battery to make things better.”

“Not just that.” Manala nodded towards Marco while looking at Kuzai. “He took control of it somehow, right at the end. He’ll be able to command them a bit. Even I don’t know what that means.”

Kuzai looked shocked, then smirked at Manala. “Told you he was a good choice.”

“I gained two levels,” she said. “Two. My last two ever, I’d wager. I passed my grandfather, finally. I never thought I’d do it.”

“I gained four, but I passed my grandfather when I was eighteen.” Kuzai laughed. “More levels don’t help someone like me anymore.”

Aethe prowled the ship suspiciously, looking at each block in turn as if it might pose some sort of hidden danger. It was only when she got around to poking her head below decks that she found a problem worth mentioning.

“Our supplies are gone. All of them,” she said. “It’s just empty down there.”

“It would be. Storage spells are cheap and easy, at my level. Elisa, if you’d get into the ship’s system screen, I think you’ll find the answers your Scout wants.” Manala stood from the deck, cracking bones as she stretched out and looking a little unsteady after all the exertion. “I think you’ll be pleased. At any rate, this old woman is going to bed. Kuzai, I owe you one.”

Marco popped open the ship’s screen as the old woman retreated, finding what she had done wasn’t that hard to understand.

“That’s nice.” Marco raised his eyebrows. “We’ll have so much more room for activities.”

“Not just that, Marco. If I know Manala, the bulk of her runes were combat related, not quality-of-life enhancements. When you fight on this deck, when you try to make a turn, all of that is going to be enhanced.”

“How much?”

“It’s impossible to say. But trust me when I say that it won’t be nothing. People use runes for a reason. They give more than they take.”

“It’s already cleaning and fixing things,” Riv said. “I can tell. Now my question is why we aren’t paying you for this.”

“Because you couldn’t. It’s okay, though,” Kuzai said.

“Why?” Riv said. “We just talked to an old merchant who didn’t give us things for free. That made sense. Why isn’t the same true for you?”

“You’ll probably understand when you are older.” Kuzai held up both his hands in a circle. “Call this an inner sea. Inside, things are limited. People fight over a finite amount of resources. Out there, in the outer sea? It’s not like that. A few years out there can accumulate so much wealth there's nothing to spend it on anymore.”

“We never accumulated like that.”

“You never stopped moving forward.” Kuzai hopped over the railing back down to the docks. “But eventually you will. Or you’ll sink.”

“Those are the only two options?”

Kuzai smiled. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll keep sailing until you finally catch the horizon. Someone has to, eventually.”

—

They spent the night in the hotel, which turned out to be excellent. The initial plus of the hotel was the food, which was both free and freely given. A stream of sustenance began the moment they sat down at the table and was refreshed again and again as the night wore on. They had fresh bread, fresh fish, meat, and vegetables in as many formats as Marco could imagine.

His favorite configuration of the food was a kind of bread invention the innkeeper called an Everything Bun, a sort of baked pie containing what must have been a dozen ingredients stewed in either a thick broth or a thin gravy. Marco found he didn’t care which. Each one of the buns could have served as a decent meal by itself, and Marco found himself unable to stop eating them. He had torn through five or six of them by the time the night was through, not to mention the ale, desserts, and various fillers mixed into the process here and there.

The team had a great time eating and joking, especially as crafters and merchants of all sorts began to join them. Tables appeared from nowhere as the inn filled past its normal seating capacity, then more were dragged in as the greater part of the outpost’s common area became an extension of the tavern.

Marco found himself telling stories, of all things. That alone was a flustering experience. People wanted to know where they had gone and what they had done, and experiences that had become irrelevant for him and his team once they survived them were now taking on a life of their own via the retelling.

“Then I look out and Marco is on the damn thing,” Riv was saying. “He can’t fall off, because…”

“Because it was too big. You can’t fall off something the size of a town.” Aethe laughed. “But it looked like he was trying. He slipped everywhere.”

“The worst was when he was on its eye. Like a gnat in the eye of a farmer. It took him a minute to get out and to the jewel.”

“It was slick, alright?” Marco laughed and mimed a climbing motion. “I had to use a hand knife to get a grip. That was the trick I eventually learned. So I started making progress, inch by inch, towards the jewel.”

“Why the jewel?”

“If you see something bright and shining on a monster, it’s usually either where it’s vulnerable or where it generates its most dangerous attacks from. Sometimes it’s both.” Elisa patted the questioner on the head. He was one of the few children at the outpost, a seven- or eight year old boy who was spending a season learning his uncle’s trade to better inform his class selection when it came. “That’s where you hit them if you can. It’s almost always worth it.”

“From our point of view, Marco’s hardly moving, and the monster is trying to hit him. Aethe is shooting down arms as fast as the horrible thing can grow them, and Elisa was shocking it with lightning left and right, and every now and again we’d look up and Marco would have moved an inch.”

“Which for me was fifteen feet.” Marco continued pretending to climb. “And finally I made it to the jewel, lifted my dagger, aaaaand….”