Chương 506: B8—Chapter 13: A Use for Forgotten Treasures

When we left Mili (the capital), we sailed on the enormous river heading north again. I still had trouble calling it a river. It really should've been called a loooong Great Lake. Any other description felt underwhelming and didn't properly convey the size of the thing. In the capital, it was less noticeable. The river split into countless deltas and wrapped around islands on which the city was built, so the scale seemed almost normal.

But further upriver, once we passed the last clusters of islands, the river opened up again, and its sheer size made me dizzy. Mid-river, we couldn't see both banks at the same time. Not even close. I actually had to fly up more than a hundred meters just to spot thin dark lines on the horizon. That was when the size really sank in. We sailed for over a month, only rarely going ashore. On the previous leg of the journey, we stopped in towns and cities along the way.

I wanted to heal and sell the light plates, and Mahya and Al wanted to sell their stuff too. But after the summer we spent in the orphanage, we just wanted to travel in peace and enjoy the ride. Or, well, the sail. Most days, we played board games, fished, messed around on the jet skis and the E-foils, and barbecued on the back deck. We weren't total loafers. I made some more light plates and twin ward pendants, at least until I ran out of iron and gold plates.

Mahya made some small items from wood, and Al took over the galley and cooked various stinky concoctions. But that was about the extent of our drive and dedication. After a very intense summer, working sixteen hours a day, day in and day out, we just wanted to take it easy. And even though they liked to call me the lazy one, they showed the same tendencies and loafed around right alongside me. At some point, Mahya left the major river and turned into one of its tributaries.

When she did, I was busy in the galley, experimenting with the big pink fruits we'd found on the islands with the cannibals. The fruit was strange. Or rather, it wasn't strange in itself. The strange part was what happened when I cast Identify. All I got was: Pink Fruit That was it. When I followed up with Appraisal, I got the strangest message so far. Pink Fruit Value: Whatever a person is willing to pay. I made smoothies with it, and those came out great, but the pie didn't.

It turned kind of runny, like a cooked melon. I was just about to make a loaf cake based on a recipe I had for a banana cake when I looked out the window and saw the bank. For a moment, I thought Mahya was heading for a shore break, but when I looked out the other window, I saw the opposite shore. That needed investigation. I joined her at the helm and took in the view. We were sailing through a narrower river now. Narrow was a relative term, though.

It was wider than the Yangtze back in China, and there wasn't a single village, town, or city anywhere on the horizon. I leaned on the railing and squinted ahead.

"Where are we?" Mahya kept one hand on the wheel and eased the throttle back a notch.

"A tributary of Mili." Yeah, I forgot to mention. The river was also called Mili. As I wrote earlier in this diary, they had a serious problem with names. I glanced from the water back to her.

"Why?"

"I spotted a good place." I pulled the Map up and looked. Nothing stood out.

"Where?" She nodded toward the mountains rising in the distance.

"Find this river, follow it through the mountains, and zoom in." It took me a minute or two, but I found something. Further up the river, the water split into another channel that led into a lake. The lake itself sat cradled by a chain of six mountains. Beyond those mountains, on the side opposite the lake, stretched a wide gray open area marked as the Stone Plateau.

"The Stone Plateau?" She nodded, adjusting the wheel slightly as the current shifted.

"Why?"

"I want to work on my ship, and if it's actually stone, it'll give me a solid base to work on. The lake's for having fun, and the mountains are for winter." She wiggled her eyebrows.

"Ski!"

"Don't you want to get to the Gate?"

"I do. But we won't make it before winter anyway." She shuddered.

"Sailing while it snowed was a nightmare. I'm not doing it again." She was right. The place looked nice on the Map, but amazing in reality. The lake was so calm, its surface barely rippling as it connected to the river, that it looked more like a mirror than a lake. The air smelled clean and sharp, pine and fresh water mixed together. Sound carried oddly here. The low rush of water echoed off the mountains, but everything else was muted, as if the place swallowed the noise.

Even the cut of the boat through the water seemed quieter. The mountains rose high, their slopes rough with rock and patches of greenery, with snow at their peaks. They blocked the wind almost completely. That was probably the reason for the lake's stillness. When I flew up, I saw the Stone Plateau stretching out just beyond them. Rue jumped off the boat, splashed a short way toward shore, then stood up on the water with magic and sprinted the rest of the way, barking his head off.

I shaded my eyes and caught sight of small furry shapes scattering between the trees. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Mahya dropped the anchor, and we flew over to shore to take a closer look. The black shapes turned out to be demon rabbits, the same ones we'd seen before in the grasslands near the previous Gate. We also ran into a few bear derivatives. They were smaller than any bear I'd ever seen, even back on Earth, and clearly terrified of us.

The moment they spotted us, they scrambled up nearby trees faster than cats. I stared at the first climbing bear, tracking it up the trunk.

"Do bears climb trees?" Al tilted his head, watching it vanish into the branches.

"It would seem that they do." I shot him a look.

"I see that. I mean normal bears." Mahya snorted.

"Does it matter?" I shrugged.

"Not really. Just curious." The water was freezing cold, probably from all the snowmelt off the mountaintops, but aside from that, the place was perfect. I gave Mahya a thumbs-up for the find, and Al hummed in agreement. For the rest of autumn, we got back to work on a reduced schedule. For a few hours each day, I helped Mahya finish the outer hull of the ship, and we even covered it with the potion Al made. It was a coating potion, not a mixing one.

We also made some progress on the inner frame, but didn't finish it. In exchange, she helped me produce more metal plates for engraving, iron and gold. I had helped Mahya with the hull before, but back then, we worked on it in sections. This time, we focused on the missing parts and tied everything together into a single, complete ship body. Once the hull was finished, I could finally see the ship's full size, and the first thought that popped into my head was that I should have known.

With her daydreaming about Versailles as her future home, I really should have expected something big. The ship was oval-shaped, wider than it was tall, and I was pretty sure it was larger than Babylon 5 from the TV show. When I pointed that out to Mahya, she kicked my shin.

"Idiot. Of course it's not. That thing is as big as a city. My baby is as big as a house." I stared at her and pointed at the monstrosity, which could probably house a hundred people.

"When was the last time you saw a house this size?" She waved me off.

"Don't exaggerate. It's not that big." I wondered how many times she had to expand her Storage to house a space station, but kept that thought to myself. In the afternoons, we mostly lazed about or just had fun. Rue hunted or chased the demon rabbits, terrorized the tree-climbing bears, and played on the jet ski and the Skyrush. We joined in too, messing around on the jet skis, playing our invented game of airball, fishing, exploring the area, and eating a lot of wonderful food.

One day, Al surprised me by asking me to teach him how to cook basic things. We started with an omelet, and it took him three days to master it. I said nothing, but was shocked. After watching him make six different potions simultaneously back in Quassior, I expected better. After the omelet experience, he made a disgusted face and said, "It appears that cooking is not my calling." Once winter set in, it took about two weeks for the snow to build up enough to create perfect skiing conditions.

After that, we worked a lot less and goofed around a lot more. Skiing, sledding, and, after the lake froze, day-long games of cheat hockey. The only real progress I made during the winter, aside from improving my slap shot and slalom skills, was a new enchanted item. That one took me almost the entire winter to design and finally lock down. It started with a simple thought. One day, while sledding, it hit me that as a Healer, my first serious enchantment project should probably have gone in that direction.

I actually had to stop and ask myself why I hadn't thought of it earlier. Once the idea settled in, it refused to let go, so I got to work. That was when I ran into the main problem. I had never come across a rune for healing. Even working with magic script, which was more like building a symbol puzzle than using fixed runes, I still needed a basic sign to anchor the concept. There was none.

I burned through more than fifty pages of parchment before I finally admitted I was getting nowhere and that we were running low on supplies. After that, I switched to making thin wooden sheets from the surrounding trees and used those for sketches instead. It wasn't elegant, but it let me keep going without guilt. The process was long and exhausting. Instead of a single healing symbol, I had to build a chain of effects that achieved the same result indirectly.

Bit by bit, I assembled a magic script sequence that bypassed the missing rune entirely. The final result was unusual. It wasn't a magic circle at all, but a long string of symbols meant to be engraved along a cylindrical surface. The first half ran along one side, then the script made a single coil around the cylinder to smooth the mana flow, with the second half continuing along the opposite side. The sequence started by absorbing ambient mana, then converting it into life and nature mana in equal amounts.

I had tried each on its own earlier, and neither worked as intended. Together, they did. From there, detection scripts scanned the body for injuries and physical abnormalities. Once it identified something, the enchantment pushed every relevant body system into overdrive, accelerating natural regeneration as long as there was enough mana available and the activation rune remained engaged. It didn't perform miracles like regrowing limbs or fixing fatal damage.

But as a sustained regeneration effect, built entirely from existing principles, it worked. The only serious limitation was broken bones. Someone still had to align the bone properly before activating the sequence, or it would fuse crooked. The next issue I ran into was material. Iron was a no-go, and not just because of rust. The shortest I could make the device was about twenty centimeters, and it had to be in full contact with the skin to work.

That was also the reason for coiling the enchantment around a cylinder in the first place. The scanning and detection sequences needed direct skin contact, but the mana absorption and the conversion into life and nature mana absolutely could not touch the body. Everything had to stay connected in a single sequence, just carefully layered. Strapping an iron rod to someone's skin was unpleasant and would only make the rust problem worse. On top of that, the more mana that flowed through it, the hotter it became.

I never let it get hot enough to burn, but that wasn't really the point. Either way, the idea died quickly. Next, I tried wood. That didn't work either. Mahya even handed over one of her best trees, taken from a high-level dungeon, the kind you'd expect to handle just about anything. It still burned. Not immediately, but inevitably. The amount of mana running through the enchantment was simply too much for it. Leather was just as bad.

I used the hide of the wyvern we'd taken down in the mana portal in Zindor, thinking it should work since the monster had been so strong and such a high level. But alas, it held up slightly longer, though not by much. By that point, I was seriously considering giving glassblowing another try, just to have something solid to work with, when Mahya wandered over. She took one look at my latest ruined prototype and tilted her head.

"Why don't you use bone?" I looked up from the workbench and stared at her.

"Bone? Seriously?" She shrugged and rested her hands on the table, leaning in to inspect the scorched remains.

"Of course. Bone has excellent conductivity, and if it comes from a high-level mana beast, it can handle the flow easily."

"Thanks," I said and took out a wyvern bone. Mahya snatched it out of my hand.

"No. No. No. You're not using those bones for that. They're too good." I spread my hands.

"I don't have anything else." She shot me a look.

"What did you do with the snake bones?" I stared at her like she'd lost her mind. Since when did snakes have bones? Well, aside from the weird spine. And since when did we even collect them? She rolled her eyes.

"Don't look at me like that. The snake bones from Tuonela."

"Huh?"

"From the nest mother's cave." She crossed her arms.

"Did you sell them?" I winced.

"Shit. I forgot about those. No. I still have them somewhere." I inspected my Storage twice from top to bottom and side to side, but didn't find them. Eventually, they turned up in wood crates stuck at the furthest end of the storage hall in the house. Mahya was right. The conductivity was perfect, and the bones didn't burn out. They held up without any issues. With everything finally figured out, I created the first prototype, and it was a success.

Mahya and Al even volunteered as test subjects, cutting their hands to try it out. The wounds healed quickly. Not potion-fast, and definitely not spell-fast, but still good enough. Mahya made a relatively shallow cut, and it healed in about an hour. Al was more thorough and cut deeper; his wound took a bit over three hours to heal completely. The biggest win for me was that it didn't leave any scars, something I had been unsure about when creating the enchantment.

Bolstered by the success, I spent the snowy days making my new healing artifact. On the clear days, the slopes and the lake were just too damn tempting.