The System Seas

“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.