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.

He blinked.

“We’ve got options,” Marco said. “And the interface is nicer.”

“Of course we do,” Elisa said, already flipping through a fresh set of notes. “Read them out loud to me as you go.”

Marco decided to start with the least likely option and work his way out from there.

“That won’t work,” Elisa said. “It wants to treat the ship as if it’s mine. It must be some kind of default option.”

“Yeah. Too bad, though. I would have liked to have piloted a fire-ship.” Marco smiled at the image of a flaming ship plunging into other pirate ships.

As if the system could read Marco’s mind, the next option was pretty much tailored to that option.

“That’s good in parts.” Marco rubbed his chin after he finished reading. “I don’t like that it’s slow, but we do end up crashing the ship a lot.”

“Even so, keep reading. My money is on the next one,” Riv said. “It’s a cool name, anyway.”

“The needle, right?” Aethe asked. “You almost have to. What do you think it will look like?”

“I don’t know yet. But we can find out.” Marco reached his hand out to the hull of the ship and pumped some power in. “Here we go.”

The ship flashed gold, then began to morph. The process was jumbled for a moment, like it was caught on itself. Marco moved forward to see if he could help before being caught by the boss. When he looked up, the boss gave the slightest of head shakes before refocusing his attention onto the ship.

One of the shipwrights stepped up to explain what was going on.

“Don’t. That’s normal. It’s sorting out the new materials. Believe me, you should be glad it is. You’ll get a better ship at the end of this. Much better.”

The confusion continued a moment or two before the process righted itself and began to move more smoothly. Through the system glow, there was only so much that Marco could see. He liked what he did observe, though. The ship was elongating slightly, becoming a little less wide compared to its previous profile. The prow especially was stretching, creating a high reverse ramp above the water that just looked fast.

“How many hours before it’s done?” Marco asked.

“Hours?” the same shipwright laughed. “It’s not going to take hours, especially after we’ve done so much work for it and set the guidelines around how it should improve. Think more like fifteen minutes.”

Before long the ship was resolving the last few nails into place. The tree bark had stretched, darkened, and become more uniform until the space between the rails and keel looked like it was sealed by dark, rough leather. More, any place the wood was exposed was smooth and sealed, like it had been painted with molten glass.

“A good look. What did you say her name was?” Kelda was suddenly behind Marco, staring at the ship with muted admiration. “The ship.”

“The Foolish Endeavor,” Marco answered, suddenly immensely proud of the name.

“Ha! It’s a good one. I’m going to ask you to wait until tomorrow to launch her, if you can wait that long. Just now, I had an idea for how we could even out our account books. I want to think it over a little tonight before I spring it on you.”

“Fair enough. For now, I want to check out the ship, if that’s alright.”

“I wouldn’t keep you from it. In fact, I’ll have some food sent down. If I know captains, you won’t be out of that thing until it’s time for bed.”

She wasn’t wrong. Marco spent the next few hours going over every joint in the craft, resisting the urge to touch every inch of it. The workmanship was much, much better than it had been before. Even aside from the difference in materials, the work the shipwrights had put in on it was visible everywhere. The shipwrights followed him around for a while, drinking in the appreciation as he learned every detail of the new design down to the pores in the wood. The boss of the shipwrights even explained the finer details of how their work and system changes interacted in these matters. It was actually a lot like how Marco had gotten his class. He had put in the work, and the system had swallowed that effort to fuel something extra special.

They ate on the ship, then walked their dishes back to the food area and went to bed. It had been a long enough day. The next day would probably be longer, if the soil covering a certain temple had anything to do with it.