Singer Sailor Merchant Mage

Chapter 77: Smooth sailing

"We plunged into the deep waters and all was dark. Cold it was as the tide of death: almost it froze my heart."

J.R.R. Tolkien.

“Come on Kai, I mean Callen, where are the fish today?” Father asked.

He was just happy to be out sailing and even happier to have me out there with him. It didn’t honestly matter if the fish were biting or not. He just enjoyed sailing. It was hard to argue with him over the enjoyment of skimming along the top of the lagoon. I loved it too. We both revelled in speeding along far faster than walking and running. His skills kept us skidding along the top of the water angling the boat to catch as much of the wind as we could.

It had been deemed acceptable, by the family, for us to go out on the lagoon. The condition was that it was ok as long as we returned to the island again by the crack of dawn. This was all to keep me out of sight and therefore out of the minds of the other islanders. They knew I had been born but we were keeping our interactions limited to our closest family.

We had edged out of the hidden blue cave in the early hours of the night and set sail across the lagoon. There was little to watch out for, other than the island we were living on, and the far shore. Father was not afraid to sail in the early hours of the day under the silver moonlight that sparkled on the water. His stats clearly helped him to sail without care or concern. While my stats and traits allowed me to sail as if it was daylight, albeit a world of blacks and greys as opposed to the full-colour spectrum it would be painted once the sun rose.

Still, his enjoyment of sailing didn’t preclude a desire to catch some fish to keep us fed and earn a living. Yes, the family had diversified and was making significantly more through other endeavours. But Father was not going to give up his early morning fishing. Once we were far enough out, or rather after he had a moment or two to enjoy sending us scudding across the top of the water, he turned his mind and mouth to the task at hand. “While you are looking for the fish don’t forget to shout out if you see any pearls.” He reminded me as if I would forget!

Pearl farming was my baby and with it being completely my own idea it meant that the majority of the proceeds were considered mine. Not that everyone did not take a cut of it for facilitating it all. Especially over the last year, when I had been limited in my functionality. While my sister, who floated the idea of collecting salt meant that she was far more in control of the wealth distribution from that enterprise. Initially, I had held my own with how we were producing the salt being completely dependent on me. Now though the salt flats extended all the way around the island so I was not strictly needed to produce the salt with magic any longer if I didn't want to maintain my slice of the pie. Des and Sinis did the majority of the work and the local market was so saturated that they struggled to sell it on the Wester Isle. We still stockpiled it for when Mercurio would return but we were now dependent on him to sell it for us. The main problem with being on the wrong side of a monopoly was being unable to set the price and we would have a weaker bargaining position for the moment.

Humming I leaned over the side of the boat. My lashing pulled taught and I ran my hand through the water as the boat banked against the wind. Hummmm. I had yet to achieve a sonar skill but I was working on it. My echolocation filled in my minimap with black and white representing the lagoon bed below but still far from completely accurate. While my Mana sense allowed me to see the mana of the fish sparkle below us their mana sparking as blue blobs within the image my echolocation helped me make. Their movement was too quick and erratic for echolocation to form a solid picture of them before they were gone again. Hopefully, in time I would be able to see them clearly with it but for now, it was enough to combine the two.

“Starboard ho,” I shouted. I had no idea if I was shouting it correct but Father had come to enjoy my idiosyncrasies over the last two years and turned the boat to follow the fish I was sensing. Understanding my random words even if they had no counterparts in the language of Bussola I now spoke. “Nearly there, nets now!” I added telling him when to throw the fishing nets as we coasted to a stop above the small school of fish.

The fish within the lagoon were apparently small fry compared to the fish in the open sea although they seemed plenty big to me. It was unknown if fish levelled like sapient beings but seeing as the larger the fish the more experience was gained for catching it they maybe had something similar to sentient beings. He told tall tales of how he had dared to fish on the open sea to become strong enough to woo my mother but now he was married and with two kids it was far safer and simpler to fish from the lagoon. The tales he told sounded terrifying and I was far happier sailing here on the lagoon rather than venturing forth on the sea. Mercurio and Cadmus had never mentioned any monsters on their visits but maybe it was a normal natural part of any sea voyage and therefore not mentioned in particular.

Father enjoyed fishing with me because he could catch an entire day’s worth of fish in a single trip. He could catch a day’s catch before dawn, drop off some with our family, before selling the rest to the town. Leaving far more time for other pursuits.

In line with the idea that we would be a noble family one day, he had taken to hunting for pearls to fund this, for the rest of his time. Something else I was able to speed up his search for, now that I was mobile once more. He joked that he would be a true noble as well as us, a man of leisure. He even threatened to take up weaving and sewing with mother in his spare time. While she enjoyed him singing along with her once in a while he apparently did not have the dexterity for the fine patterns she was making and was unable to help with the magical method by which she was singing us a veritable palace from the mountain. This left him looking for other projects to focus on.

Father quickly hauled his catch up onto the boat and we set sail once more. This time looking out for oysters and sea snails rather than the fish that swam above them. Closing my eyes while leaving my hand running through the water I concentrated hard. Finding them was a lot harder than finding the fish.

Eyes closed I listened to what echolocation was telling me. While looking with Mana sense to see if could add anything to the picture I was building. Now in theory having made my own heads up display to do all this for me this might have seemed a little redundant. But I had found that even though my Heads Up Display, or HUD for short, was amazing at everyday awareness, it did not outperform what I could achieve when I levelled all of my focus and stats on a single skill and task at a time.

We were sailing slowly now, no longer skipping over the water. My father was giving me the extra time to spend searching the lagoon floor with my mind. We continued to coast slowly across the water the sails only pulled tight for turns as we crisscrossed the water. We had a pattern and a route and were working our way across today's grid. The idea was, that we would work our way around the lagoon in a grid pattern to ensure we had covered every area of the lagoon floor. This way we would scour the lagoon bed as we searched for what drove us to still be sailing out here despite having already caught today’s catch, pearl oysters!

“Anything yet?” Kaius whispered as if somehow talking normally would dangerously disrupt my attention and stop us from finding anything forever. While he knew it wouldn't affect my searching loud noises could certainly disrupt my concentration. The oysters always took us a lot longer to find than the fish mainly because they were generally smaller and deeper than the fish, but most days we would be successful before we had to return home with the light.

It was not that I couldn’t go anywhere or move at all in front of our extended family. It was just that, as a family, we were trying to keep the extent of my mobility and development somewhat secret from them and the town at large. That being said, they were already predisposed to the fact that I would a be a little monster much like my deceased older brother ‘Kai’ so they wouldn’t hopefully be too surprised when I started to show similar traits.

For the last year pretending to be a fully dependent baby was not a particularly difficult challenge crippled as I had been. However, now that I was capable of so much more it was suddenly all that much harder to stay still when they visited.

I loved our morning sails not only for the fish and hopefully pearls and purple it would provide us but simply to be up and about with someone who knew what I could do and was happy to let me do it. Father's early swimming lessons had not been particularly enjoyable to start off with but at the same time, he now trusted in my ability to float, dive and swim only ever stepping in if I was genuinely in trouble.

“There,” I shouted as I pointed.

Within my mind and the map that I had built up of the lagoon floor, I could see their hard shell shapes bouncing back from my echolocation skill and the soft blue and yellow shimmer of water and earth mana collecting somewhere down below within them. Their stationary position and budding organic mana gem helped to catch my eye as we coasted along above them.

Father dropped anchor to keep the boat in place while we went for a little dive and a swim. If there was one aspect of our early morning sails that disagreed with me, it was our skinny-dipping-free-diving in the middle of the night without the hot sun to warm us up afterwards. It was not freezing by any means but it was hardly pleasant. What was worse was that it took the two of us to do this in the middle of the night. Father could easily dive down there. However, in the darkness, he would take ten times longer to find the shells.

“Are you ready?” He asked me before double-checking. “Are you sure you have enough stamina for the dive?”

A quick check, a flash of my eyes to the corner of my vision and I nodded back, "I'm sure."

While I was back on my feet so to speak, I could easily fall off them. If I ran out of the stamina required to power my new trait of Celerity which oftentimes demanded more stamina in order to keep my body working at the same level as my brain. It had not happened yet but the idea of running out of stamina while underwater was not a good one and a daily fear of my mothers. So we did this together for more than one reason. The final check was something that mother had insisted father do every time we had to take a dive together.

Father could see well enough in the moonlight to sail. Diving deep underwater and attempting to find oysters or snails on the other hand was another matter. He didn’t have the magic stat let alone the skill to sense mana so to him the depths were dark and impossible to search quickly or easily. I on the other hand could see well enough above and below the water. Furthermore, with the skill mana sense to highlight the growing pearls collecting mana from water as well as the plant or earth-based impurities floating in it, they were simple to locate.

The only problem was the depth at which they were located. I could swim, yes. I had breath control, true. I was finally mobile again, but making it down to the lagoon floor and back again, was far easier for my father than it was for me.

The solution was for me to hold onto my father as he dived below the black waters holding tight with my arms around his neck as he quickly powered his way down to the seafloor his strength, endurance and dexterity stats sending us down with celerity. Then once down at the bottom, holding onto him I led us to the oyster's location. The colony of pearl oysters were hidden just around the corner of a column of stone and there at the base of a rock on the lagoon floor they grew.

Between us, we quickly grabbed as many as we could before my air started to run out and I headed back to the surface on my own. Father would last a little longer down there and gather as many as he could. I had already cherry-picked the ones with the pearls growing in them. But any more new oysters to add to our farm were always welcome. It was not necessary to take every single one indeed I was somewhat worried that our efficiency in both catching fish and finding the oysters would upset the local biome of the lagoon. At what point would our stats and skills harm the local wildlife beyond recovery. It was impossible to tell for sure but it was certainly a future problem to keep an eye out for. So we left a few each time we found a patch and we only stopped at the larger patches that were worth harvesting.

As I crested the water's surface I contemplated the oysters I had in the bag on my belt. I had only just discovered since regaining my mobility that the pearl oysters were not the oysters we normally ate. A rather unfortunate and miscalculated experiment on my part had proven that the pearl oysters were highly unpalatable, completely inedible and according to the rather severe tummy troubles I had experienced afterwards just a little bit poisonous.

Ding! Poison Tolerance (Lv 1)

Ding! Pain Tolerance (Lv 14)

If I had not confessed my curiosity and stupidity which nearly killed this cat. My mother would still be shouting at Grandfather over the assumption that he was to blame for my new skill, shakes and shivers. If I had not been desperately retching at the time it would have been incredibly entertaining. Unfortunately, it was not. In retrospect, new world means new rules and I should not put things in my mouth just to see if they will go down well. I mean that is something any old baby would do. One that needed watching and looking after. Suppose in some ways I am still an old baby in more ways than one.

The whole experience quite put me off the idea of any further poison tolerance training other than alcohol which I have been reassured is possible. But in this new world much like my old world, it is somehow known that alcohol for infants is not the brightest of ideas. The silver lining to me struggling to hold my insides inside was that the fairly strong pain that came with the cramps and retching was enough to push my pain tolerance to lv 14.

Still, that was not something to be considered as I floated at the surface. Father would not be far behind and would help me into the boat if I needed assistance getting in but I liked to try by myself first. I failed. I might have grown significantly over the last two years but not enough to haul myself over the side of a boat floating too high up in the water. It was not my strength, dexterity or endurance that was the problem this time. It was simply that my arms and legs were still too short to reach and pull me up out of the water. Still, I was sure that the effort counted even if the system did not allocate points for the step or failure.

Floating on my back in the lagoon I looked up at the stars above they were slowly disappearing as the sky lightened. I contemplated life in general and found it good to be alive again while I waited for him to re-emerge from the depths. A short moment later he did. Even sooner I was hefted up into the boat alongside our precious pearl oyster cargo. Once aboard, he bundled us both up, and wrapped us up nice and warm in towels, in an attempt to help us warm up at this ungodly hour.

It was cold without the sun and even chillier when you added a light breeze to our situation. While technically I knew that if the experience was suitably terrible and chilling then I could possibly, potentially gain both greater experience as well as some sort of cold resistance. But, I was too much of a baby to do that. Plus I was encouraged not to by my father a man who despite his lack of magic seemed to delight in its use all the more.

“Come on Kai, Callen, Kal, heat us up.” He said as he pulled himself onto the boat.

Over the last year, it had finally been explained what the Silverwood family amulet, I had been given when I gained the trait source of mana, actually did. Obviously, it had been absorbing all the excess mana that I had been producing. Mana that was far beyond what the meagre amount my vessel could hold. However, that was not apparently all that it did or even what it was initially designed for. It had been absorbing it and holding it. All that mana for over an entire year was stored within it. Furthermore, that was not actually its main function at all.

According to Grandfather, it had been a grand gift to the Silverwood family by a northern noble family from the northern kingdom of Tramontana. The precise reasons behind its gifting were lost to the waves of time. The amulet looked much like a Viking Compass Amulet, a Vegvisir, with a green, emerald gemstone at the centre of the compass. A gem that must be sitting on several tens of thousands of points of mana all carefully stored away within its multi-faceted faces. How that worked precisely, I could not yet tell, but I had been taught how to access some of it and apply it to the runes the bracelet held.

One of which was able to produce hot air.

The original northern amulet would have been powered by the individual but apparently, the green emerald had been added to it to act as its power source before it was presented to the family in the Kingdom of Maestro, to fit the country it would be worn in. Apparently, blue sapphires were the gem of choice within Ponente while green emeralds were the gem of choice for Maestro. Possibly due to their Royal family's elemental power being over wood or simply the preponderance of the gemstone in question within the kingdoms. Although perhaps our homegrown pearls could and would one-day power similar enchanted jewellery if we could gain a jewel smith and enchanter to work for us becoming the gem of choice within the archipelago.

Anyway, around the outside of the amulet were eight symbols and by rotating the central piece with the gemstone attached you could align it to the spell you wished for. There were some intrinsic runes and the corresponding spells contained within but the eight gem powered rune spells were the only ones that I had used so far. With a burst of released mana a strong hot dry wind whipped around us forming a hot dry shell of air, a shield of air that quickly dried our cold wet bodies while we were within it. Before I turned the amulet once more breaking the rune's alignment with the gem and ending the use of mana.

Father laughed as our clothes dried, smiling at our sudden windswept appearance, particularly the way my hair was unbound as it was now stuck up in all sorts of directions. The only problem with the spell was that. His hair was bound back behind his head in a short queue and looked no different dry or wet. Mine though, after it had been shorn for our deception, was still growing back out and now looked crazy beyond belief.

“Kai … Callen, time to head on home. The sun will be up soon.” He said once he had stopped laughing, still tripping up over my name. Our haul for the seabed already squared away on the boat, we sailed for home.