Chapter 112: Catch the Horizon
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.
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