While Brightfire gathers the warriors and starts talking to them I use mana to lift the beast. From the tentacles I thought that the beast was a giant octopus or something. However, when I pull the main body out of the water I instead find myself looking at a giant clam.

It even has the shell like a clam and the tentacles come out of the shell. While it is not what I was expecting, I still lift it up onto the deck of the ship. I will let the chefs deal with it, they can figure out whether or not it is edible.

I turn around, go back into my cabin, and go back to sleep for the rest of the night. Once I wake up, after breakfast, I go back to drilling the crew and warriors. They did well when we were attacked last night, but there is still room for improvement.

What I would really like to do is find something smaller that they could fight for exp. Ocean beasts may give a lot of exp, but fighting them is much harder. Orcs or goblins would be perfect, but we won't find those in the ocean.

The warriors will just have to do what they can, I can't help too much right now. Mainly because while I can gate from the ship, I am not sure about being able to return to the ship. Trying to gate onto a moving object will not be simple to say the least.

This is especially true considering I need to know where I am going to open a gate. Meaning I would have to know exactly where the ship is at the time I try to open the gate. However, I think if I can figure out how to leave a magic mark to target, that might work.

It will need to be something permanent so that way it won't fade while I am away for a while. Maybe a platform for the gate to form on, that way no accidents can happen. Opening a gate on a moving ship could be dangerous to the occupants of the ship.

Someone being cut in half by a gate is not something I want to see happen. While I am running the crew through drills I keep thinking about how to make a permanent mark. It should be something similar to an enchantment, or at least that is what I am thinking.

When Silverstream comes to take over the wheel I go back to my cabin to sit and think some more. However, I am not able to come up with a better idea, so I start planning what item to use. It should be something like a platform, something the gate can open on top of.

While I can make it out of wood, I don't want to make it part of the ship. The ship already has a ton of enchantments on it, that would make things difficult. It hasn't happened to me yet, but mixing too many enchantments can have strange effects.

Before I decide anything I go check with the elven crafters to see what materials they have. It turns out that they brought quite a lot of stuff with them, even stuff they don't need. Since I am planning to build something big I go with what they have the most of, bronze.

I have no idea why they would even bother bringing so much bronze with them. However, now I am glad they did since it is a good material for what I have in mind. So, I take the bronze and return to my cabin where I use mana to heat it up.

Once it is liquefied I mix in the last of the gem dust I have and then start shaping it. After shaping the bronze into a large disc, about six inches thick and ten feet across, I cool it. As it cools it solidifies and once it is completely solid I start infusing it with mana.

It takes a lot of mana to fill it, way more than I was expecting it to be able to hold. Even with the gem dust, I was only expecting it to be able to hold about half of what it can. This means I can add more enchantments than I was originally planning on.

In fact, I can probably make the platform so that it helps me open the gate. This would reduce the amount of mana I need to open a gate, at least when returning. I should also do something to make sure that I am the only one who can open a gate to it.

After all, I don't want some mage opening a gate and flooding my ship with human warriors. Especially since on this trip we will be pissing off every single kingdom we pass. At least, if they have elven slaves we will be pissing them off, which will be most of them.

Others will probably be pissed off just by our presence, since we are not humans. Unless we come across a kingdom that is run by non-humans there isn't much chance of peaceful contact. I will just have to wait and see how things go as we travel around the continent.

For now, I focus on enchanting the platform, which takes some experimentation. The enchantment to let me find it easily isn't too hard, but making it connect to the gate is. I basically have to enchant the gate spell into it so it can create half of the gate connection.

Once I finally figure out how to do that, adding a few enchantments for security is easy. Now all that is left is to test it and see if my ideas actually work the way I hope. So, I open a gate to the first volcanic island I found and go through.

Then I let the gate close and wander around the island for a while, waiting for the ship to move. If I gate back right away then I know where the ship is and it won't be a proper test. Once I am sure that the ship has moved a decent distance I try to open a gate to it.

However, it doesn't work, I first have to search for the ship with my mana. The beacon in the platform makes it easy to find and as soon as I do the gate opens. Walking through puts me right back in my cabin exactly as planned and it only costs half the normal mana.

Locating the beacon took about a minute, but only because I knew where it should be. In the future if I have to search a larger area for it, it will take longer. However, that is still much better than not being able to gate to the ship at all.

With the ability to gate back to the ship I will not be forced to stay on the ship all the time. This is an important step since staying on the ship for the entire journey would be boring. It also means that I can help the elven warriors gain some levels since I can take them off the ship.

In fact, I can even take them orc hunting, the undead should still be busy with the humans. However, before I do that I need to come up with a way for the ship to contact me. That way if they run into trouble they can call me to return and help out.