The System Seas

Riv handed his pack off to Aethe, rolled up his sleeves, and started digging. The forest floor gave way to him like it was made from marshmallow, and his shovel cut through roots and soil alike with ease. A few minutes later, the obsidian-like rock had grown from the size of a few fists pressed together to a bigger domed surface about the size of a kitchen table.

“This is worked.” Riv ran his hands across the stone. “It’s smooth. Consistent. This is man-made. Judging by what I’m seeing, it goes down pretty far.”

“Are you sure?” Marco asked. “It couldn’t just stop just below the point we are at?”

“I’ve built a lot of stuff. This is the top of a building, and judging by the size, it’s not a small one. We’re talking at least as big as the shipwright’s workshop. Probably bigger.”

“How wide?” Elisa knelt beside him, brushing the dirt with her fingers as if she could uncover it all right then. Her eyes were sparkling with curiosity. “I just got a level up. Just from discovering this. What do you think it looks like below this spot?

“Hard to say. We won’t get much further today, anyway.” Riv shouldered his shovel. “Unless you want to walk back in the dark. My advice is we talk it over during dinner.”

They walked back with a little more urgency than they had coming. Nobody was more excited than Elisa, who babbled on and on about the possibilities as she saw them.

“There’s just no way this isn’t special, Marcos. No way at all.” Elisa was on her fourth trip around that exact sentence. She had gotten into a book-girl loop. Marco let her talk as he ate, both because it had been a while since he saw his friend get that excited and because Aethe seemed to enjoy the excitement. “And there’s really no chance that it isn’t connected to this island.”

“But who made it? Marco finally set his spoon down.”Who buries a temple so deep that it leaves no trace on the surface?”

“That’s not what happened. It was ruins before, remember?” Elisa tore a piece of meat off a larger portion of animal and barely chewed it before she continued on with her mouth half-full. “The question is who can build something like that and then have it appear out of nowhere. Who can set it to regenerate when the island does.”

“What do we do with it, though?” Riv asked. “We could uncover it, but if it’s big, that’s going to take some time.”

“We’ll just go back tomorrow and see. If we need help, we need help. But if we don’t, I’d rather have the first crack at it.” Elisa rubbed her hands together greedily. “Who knows what’s in there?”

It was not meant to be. Before they had even finished dinner, the shipwrights found them, moving as a group of excited, sawdust covered craftsmen until they saw Marco, then practically dragging him out of his seat.

“The retrofits are done, then?” Marco asked.

“All done! The boss sent us to get you,” one of the craftsmen nearly yelled.

“It didn’t take as long as I thought.”

“He worked on this project himself. The boss can do an awful lot you wouldn’t expect when that happens.”

They made the walk back in record time, the shipwrights nearly tripping over one another as they raced back to the shop. Marco tried to temper his expectations, but as soon as they rounded the corner and the warehouse doors swung open, his breath caught.

The Foolish Endeavor looked reborn even without any system interference at all. The lines of the hull were unchanged, but almost every outer board had been replaced with the darker, stronger wood. That was something he had to infer from the deck and joins, since the entire bottom hull had also been lined with the tree bark, clamped down tight like copper cladding over the boards to remove any seams at all.

“Wow.” Marco meant it. “Really.”

Marco stepped up onto the gangplank, hardly noticing the others falling in behind him. The deck creaked differently beneath his feet, not weaker but more responsive, like the whole ship was alert and listening.

“He’s in love,” the head shipwright said. “Don’t blame you. We did a lot of work on this. It’s better than before, worlds apart from what it was. But the real show is about to start.”

The system pinged him then, apparently eager to get involved.