I took the time to observe my new surroundings, not wanting to rush into new problems so soon after escaping my previous ones. The water itself seemed relatively normal, with average sized waves slowly making their way forwards to crash against the nearby shore. Underneath the water was a different matter. There were more than a few rocks scattered about, large enough to be permanent fixtures of the terrain and just far enough under the surface to be out of sight, while perfectly placed to catch and shred at an unsuspecting hull. I wasn’t too worried about those obstacles. Unlike most sailors, I had perfect insight into what lay in the waters around me. It would take me some care to move around them safely, but unless a sudden storm were to appear I would be able to compensate for the currents and waves easily enough. My real concern was the reef.

I call it a reef, because that is what it looked like to me. A singular mass of spiky rock and coral that wound its way along the seabed, making a veritable maze for fish and other animals to call their homes. I could see some of those fish now, frantically dashing to and fro as they went about their piscine routine. .None of the animals were large enough to pose a threat to me though, and I focused on the physical problems caused by the reef. While the rocks in the area were considerate enough to be relatively localized, the reef was not. There were hundreds of yards of reef all around me, most of it connected and pushing right up against the surface, dipping in and out with every wave that passed by. They were formidable walls that I did not want to test my hull against, but finding my way out of this maze would be tricky as well.

Saltwater Sense meant I could at least avoid any collisions, but its relatively short range of detection meant that I couldn’t rely on it for plotting my course out of here. Sonar could theoretically tell me more and at a longer range, but I was still learning how to use that Skill properly, and at the moment the only thing I could decipher from the echoes it returned was that I was surrounded by hard things.

Navigation was my longest-range skill, but for once it showed itself to be a bit of an idiot. It could easily plot a course to take me from here to any other location in this strange world, but compensating for physical obstacles was beyond it. I had a heading that would take me back to Dirint, if not for the fact that I would ground myself on the reef in just a few yards. It was a headache and a half, and I glared at my mental windows while trying to get them to give me a map of some sort. Neither one responded to my mental nudges, and I resigned myself to slowly picking my way forwards, trying to head towards Dirint while staying afloat.

Progress was slow, and hard to gauge, but I was at least able to tell that I was moving, which was a positive I hadn’t expected to be grateful for. My cheer over that fact was tempered by another discovery, one with more concerning revelations. Underneath my hull and a good bit off to the side, I could feel as a section of water was pushed aside, replaced by what I had thought was a stationary part of the reef. Now that I was looking for it though, I could see a half dozen instances of movement around me, spots where passages were narrowing or widening, or where the waves didn’t move the reef as they ought to.

Suddenly the animal interactions I had spotted earlier took on a more ominous tone. Those fish weren’t dashing around because they normally would move that quickly. They were being trapped and hunted by the living reef.

Worried about being targeted myself, I switched directions and rowed myself back towards a spot I had passed by earlier with what looked like multiple avenues of travel connecting it to elsewhere. As I waited there, I continued to try and figure out what the reef was doing to the trapped fish. My further observations did help me relax to some degree.

The reef wasn’t actively hunting the panicked fish. It didn’t need to. It wasn’t some regular sized predator that had to worry about losing its prey. It was a being that covered this entire section of shoreline. The maze by itself was confusing enough to keep most of the animals that entered it trapped, like a fish trap built on an architectural level. It might lose a few animals that were lucky enough to wiggle back out the entrances it had, but it meant that the living reef’s energy expenditures were minimal. It could piggyback on the flow of moving water to cover most of its energy costs, and the rest, the power needed to run the mind that controlled all this likely didn’t need much.

Not all the animals I saw were stuck in here either. Most of them were actually long-time inhabitants, perfectly content to settle down and raise minnows in convenient cubbies and crannies, eating food that the reef produced while serving as lures to bring in food for the reef, in an unusual form of a symbiotic relationship.

I even got lucky enough to be able to watch as a small school of fish found themselves trapped to the point that the reef could feed on them. It had managed to shift a section to trap them in a small pool on the other side of a wall from me, and began to go about its task of actually killing the creatures.

Its first move was to send out a series of filaments, tendrils so thin that I could barely perceive them. A dozen or so launched outwards from different sections of the reef, subdividing the water into a tripwire maze. Those thin lines were used to guide the rest of the movement of the reef, such as when an unsuspecting fish bumped into one. With surprising speed, a solid spike of coral began to grow around the tendril that had made contact, spearing forwards both figuratively and literally as the fish soon found itself pierced through one side. The wound wasn’t in a particularly vital location, and if it had been a normal strike their might have been able to swim away and eventually recover, but the coral hadn’t finished growing. It’s first thrust had ripped open a path for it to go through the meat of the fish's body, and once it entered water again it began to spread out, growing thicker with every passing second. Not only was the fish instantly trapped, but the growing spear inside of it was breaking it apart. By the time it died it didn’t even resemble a fish anymore, instead looking like a strange ornament on the end of a branch of stone.

The other fish panicked at that, but their last-minute burst of adrenaline simply meant that they ran into the remaining filaments faster than they would have otherwise. One by one they were speared and broken apart, their bodies turned into little coffins that would eventually expand to become a new section of wall, or would be pulled back and distributed elsewhere.

I reaffirmed my resolve to not let myself get trapped like that. My defenses were pitiful, and there was nothing I could do to stop those coral polyps from tearing me apart if they felt so inclined. Of course it wasn’t going to be as straightforward as simply telling myself not to do something. If I wanted to escape, I would need to explore the various spaces between the reef walls. Some of them might lead to an exit, but others would be dead end traps that might seal up on me and seal my fate in turn.

This would be so much easier if I had armor available to me, some sort of copper plating for my hull, if not iron or steel. I didn’t think I could carry the weight of those metal though, and copper was a traditional metal used to plate boats, both to reinforce their structure and also to stop barnacles from attaching, due to formation of copper oxide.

That train of thought was mostly wishful thinking, but it did remind me of a resource I had access to that I had been ignoring. The barnacles that had made their home on my hull had been joined by a few more over time, but given my lack of ability to do anything to them I had let their presence fade to the backdrop of my mind. I could tell they were there with Saltwater Sense, but they didn’t exactly cause me any pain, and it was generally just easier to pretend like they did not exist.

Now however, I’m feeling inspired. The barnacles might be useless parasites which only served to break up my profile and slow me down, Water Resistance notwithstanding, but they didn't have to remain that way. I was surrounded by a prime example of how magic could animate the immovable, and I had just gotten my hands on a skill that let me stick magic into things. It probably wouldn’t be as easy as I was imagining it at the moment, but that was what Attributes and system Skills were for, to bridge the gap between myself and impossibility.

My hasty level up in the fog to level six had improved my Spirit Attribute to 24 giving me a large amount of extra energy I could use for this experiment. It wasn’t limitless though, and I knew from infusing my hull just how quickly I could drain my reserves if I tried.

Grateful that I could at least practice without having to worry about accidentally breaking the enchantments on me, I pushed my mana outwards, flowing it through my hull and then outwards again, bringing it into contact with my little passengers.

They resisted, in a way that my hull hadn’t. I didn’t know if it was because they were living and my hull wasn’t, or if it was because my hull was already part of me, but either way I simply pushed harder. It wasn’t really a contest in the end. No matter that these creatures were native to this world, they were younger than I was, and didn’t have my intellect or other advantages to turn this into a fight. One by one they broke and fell, my mana flooding through them and changing them all slightly. They were still themselves, still mollusks, but my act of forcing my magic into them had stuck a tiny piece of myself into them. In turn, they were now a tiny piece of me, and I could use that.

The System wasn’t nice enough to offer me a new skill, as apparently what I was doing still fell in the range of regular use for Mana Infusion, but I still managed to project my will enough to get the barnacles moving. Moving at a snail’s pace, some of them detached their homes from my hull while others began to build up larger, putting all their energy and resources into extruding the cementlike paste that both anchored them to the hull and protected them from predators. They still did so, but with a bigger picture in mind. The barnacles moved into the spots I had order them, latching once again to my hull. For a brief moment I considered the idea of simply making them all leave once this was over, but discarded it. If it didn’t work, then I wouldn’t be able to order them around. If it did work, then hopefully I wouldn’t need to get rid of them for being parasites.

As the barnacles built up their shells, they followed a new pattern. Previously their self-made homes had been lumpy objects, each one built to protect them independently, with no care or concern for aesthetics beyond functionality. My magic induced a concept of cooperation, and their new barriers were built to work with each other, each barnacle acting as a single scale in a larger work of armor. A regenerating layer of defense that would keep me safe from whatever the world might throw at me.

That was the idea, anyways. In practice I didn’t have nearly enough barnacles to cover my hull with a full coat of armor, getting them into the positions I wanted was an exercise in futility, and working around their biological limitations to come up with a design that they could produce and that meet my needs took several attempts to get into a state approaching right.

Despite all that, it worked. My keel now had a complete coverage of barnacles, with larger than usual plates that were fused together with their neighbors’ shells. It was still bumpy, and I doubted it would hold up to the coral trying to eat its way through for long, but it didn’t have to. Exploring the reef maze meant playing by the rules that the reef imposed. Instead, I angled myself at the wall in the direction that Navigation wanted me to go. Slowly I pushed my way up against it, before using my oars and an opportune wave to scrape my way over the top. The scratching made for some concerning noises, but I didn’t appear to have taken any actual damage. A few minutes' wait confirmed that I wasn’t taking on any water while letting the barnacles repair and reposition themselves after that first test, and then I made my way towards the next reef wall.

Nothing like some practical testing to get things working correctly, after all.