The water parted smoothly around me as I focused on my boat status screen.

Slappy - Rowboat

Autonomous Intelligence

Component

Weight - 121/750

Durability 8/10

Enchantments 3

Mana Saturation 15/22

Hull - Wood

Navigation

Listening

Oars - Wood

Automation

Now that I was inspecting it critically and not just taking its existence for granted there were a couple of things that stuck out to me. The first was the description of ‘Autonomous Intelligence’. It wasn’t wrong, per se, but I didn’t know why it was listed there. From what Lirillin had said, the only enchantments he had put on the boat were the three listed further down in the enchantments column. Whatever he had used to bring me into existence as a power source was probably what led to the boat being an Autonomous Intelligence, but it still struck me as odd. Why didn’t my existence count as an enchantment? I was formed by Lirillin casting a spell on an object, had an indefinite duration, and provided a magical effect, namely being the motive force. Since changing my Spirit attribute increased the Mana Saturation attribute, I assumed that being a magical battery was the main reason Lirillin had made me, but from what Adam had said most boats needed a human navigator of some kind.

It was a puzzle that didn’t have a clear answer. Lirillin was far, far away and unavailable to question for more information, and the screen itself was equally informative, which is to say not at all. The screen stubbornly refused to change, or give me any options, or any other little helpful windows to tell me if I was doing something wrong or what was reasonable for me to use it for. It was possible that the summary screen was nothing more than that; a summary meant to give me access to information without me having to go looking for it. The regular system had started off as something similar,if I remembered correctly. It wouldn’t be horrible if that was the case, since tracking my durability and magical status was useful enough, but I instinctively felt that there had to be more.

It had responded to me when I tried to ply it with experience. It hadn’t done anything with it, but that reaction suggested that the potential was there, that inputs and outputs existed that I could use to make the boat screen do things for me. And considering it took the space to detail that I was made of wood, that suggested it was possible to be made of things other than wood. Something mentally twigged at that thought. It was a different sensation from anything I had felt before, and I took it to mean that I was on the right track.

Of course, I would feel a lot better about that accomplishment if I actually had any resources on hand to work with. I was a rowboat out at sea, and the only thing I physically had available to me was the water around me. Testing to see if the screen would respond to that didn't cost me anything, but seawater was obviously not a good building material for making a boat out of, and nothing happened. If this worked like I thought it would, I needed wood, or metals, or magical ingredients to really test what I was capable of. Unfortunately, it would be tricky getting those resources on hand, or on oar as the case might be. I was more or less stuck out on the water, with virtually no ability to harvest materials by myself, and while I potentially could offer service in trade for what I wanted, finding people willing to enter into that agreement with me would be difficult. It was a problem I would have to work around, and one that had complexities that made it an unlikely target for fixing with a Skill.

In the end, I had to admit to myself that I had reached the limit of my ability to test things. I really didn’t have all that much I could bring to bear, so I would need to leave things as they were. At least I didn’t have an immediate need to figure out my boat screen. Other than not having enough mana to power my enchantments, I’d been good treating it as a summary for the last few months, and didn’t see that changing in the future.

Tucking the mental window away for the moment, I returned my attention to my surroundings, only to freeze in place, my oars coming to a standstill as I slowly glided to a halt.

Originally I had just meant to leave the dock Adam had left me at with the intention of figuring out where I was heading next a little bit later. Then I got distracted with my mental windows to the point of ignoring my real world senses, and now I was lost. Not really lost, Navigation was still working perfectly fine, and I almost activated it to let it take me back to Dirint, but I shut it back down again before I could begin to move.

It was one thing to have the academic knowledge that this world was made of mismatched pieces of reality. It was another to have left a relatively normal city an hour or so ago and to be able to travel to somewhere completely alien in that time.

The water around me had turned unnaturally still at some point. Perfectly flat, the ripples from my oars were somehow smothered inches after they formed, and my wake didn’t show up at all. For all I knew, I was stuck in one place, not moving at all even as my oars passed through this strange platonic ideal of a body of water. Except I had managed to reach here by rowing, and when I tried to row using just one oar I could feel the drag of the water pulling on the one that was supposed to remain still.

The little pockets of void underneath me that told me where fish were had vanished as well. The air was quiet, with not a whisper of a breeze to stir the water or even make a noise. The eerie silence wasn’t magical or anything, I was able to smack my oars against the water tor create as much noise as I wanted to, but he moment I stopped the world returned to absolute silence. This was simply a place of stillness.

Even as I idly wondered how a sailing ship would handle coming across a spot of ocean like this, I began to row forwards again. Asking Navigation to take me somewhere safe had been met with silence, and while it was a small comfort against the vast mystery of the world, it was enough to give me the courage to proceed. The larger factor when encouraging my newfound source of bravery was my experience tracker, which was increasing at a visible rate.

Being here was a completely new adventure for me, my first experience with a truly magical place. Life in my old world had always been focused on getting things done, on getting to the future as quickly as possible. It wasn’t until I had terminal cancer that I finally had the chance to ‘stop and smell the roses’. Here I had nothing but time on my hands, but it was so easy to get caught up in my own problems and thoughts, to have my mind spend all of its time jumping from one insurmountable problem to another in hopes of finding a solution that I sometimes didn’t even keep track of time passing in between Lirillin taking me to Shellpin. It didn’t help that my connection to the world around me was so limited. I could hear and get a rough sense of what was in the water around me, but I’d never see another sunset, or taste another well cooked meal. I could eavesdrop all day, but telling someone else good morning was a laborious process.

I didn’t know what exactly was the cause of it, but this place was somehow more present. It registered slightly more intensely on all my senses, drawing my attention in a way that grounded me in reality. The world might not react to my actions in the way that I half expected it to, but it did react. And so, with senses pushed to their limits to take in the weird wonderland around me and to give me as much warning as possible I rowed forwards, curious as to what I might find in this weird place.