Zheng Yang left his boat at the harbor. While walking home to go wash up and eat breakfast, he thought about how to go about collecting the required materials. If it wasn't for the limitations posed by his spirit power reserve, he would dismantle his house and make his boat his living place right away.
What he lacked most at the moment were wood and steel. The broken boats at the harbor no longer had any useful wooden materials left on them. He quickly finished his breakfast and filled a big bottle full of freshwater before packing up his gear and heading out.
The island covered an area with a radius of about seven to eight kilometers and a circumference of about 25 kilometers.
Zheng Yang hopped onto his boat and put down his gear. He rowed his boat out a dozen meters or so before setting sail. The winds were gentle, making it a perfect day for manning a sailboat like this.
Because of the mystical feeling of being one with his boat, he was able to acutely sense just how well the sail reacted to the wind, and how fast the boat was able to move. As he sailed his boat around the island, heading for the back, it didn't take long for him to figure out how to change the angle of the triangular sail to gain more speed.
At the moment, the boat definitely wasn't moving at a speed anywhere close to five knots, but sailing was nonetheless far easier and less tiresome than rowing the boat himself. Two hours had passed by the time he got to the back of the island.
The tip of the shipwreck was sticking out of the water about 100 meters away from the shore.
The shipwreck actually had some relation to Zheng Yang's family. That ship had been the only private cruise ship that would come to the tiny island. It was a pity that the underwater reefs had punctured the bottom, causing the ship to go down stern first, which resulted in the bow of the ship sticking out like it was at the moment.
Despite the fact that no one had died in that incident all those years ago, it was said that the owner of that cruise ship had gone bankrupt—so much so that he didn't even bother salvaging what was left of the ship. From then on out, no other cruise ships came by the island, resulting in the fishing village on the island becoming increasingly dilapidated.
Zheng Yang's parents were among the passengers that had boarded the ship, and after the incident, they decided to settle down in the fishing village on the island, later giving birth to him.
The shipwreck was about 18 meters total in length, and the fishermen on the island had long since taken away all the valuables it contained. However, no one had bothered to take the steel tip of the ship, which was the part sticking out of the water, due to how difficult it would be to cut it off and haul it away.
Since then, the youngsters of the fishing village had treated the shipwreck as a playground. In fact, right now, several teenagers were playing near it.
A few years ago, Zheng Yang had liked playing around there with his friends, diving in and out of the wreck, catching fish and looking for barnacles. At times, they even managed to find a few geoduck clams. So, all that being said, he was very familiar with the wreckage.
Furthermore, because every single passenger had survived the incident, there shouldn't be any eldritch entities lurking around.
…
The main body of the spirit vessel had to be made out of wood. This was clearly stated in the old travelogue. He had no idea why it had to be made out of wood, but the travelogue was firm on this, so he had no choice but to follow what it said. However, that didn't mean that he didn't need much steel. In addition to wood, natural gum, canvas, and ropes, he also lacked steel to further modify the keel and to make anchors, chains, capstans, transmission linkages, pulleys, a rudder, stabilizers, nails, wrappings, brackets, and the likes.
When Zheng Yang got near the wreckage, the other teenagers noticed him and all called out to him excitedly. Two of them actually tried to get on the spirit vessel when it got close to them.
Zheng Yang stopped them right away. "Don't get up here. It's too crowded."
"Are you here to join us? It's been a while since we've seen you around these parts!"
"Boy, you actually managed to build your own boat! I didn't believe them when they told me yesterday!"
As he raised the sail and tied the rope to the tip of the wreckage, he told them, "My boat's too small, and I wanna make it bigger, so I'm here to see if there's anything left that I can use."
One of the teenagers standing next to the wreckage said, "Huh, can you actually modify that thing? I think it'd be less trouble to just build a new one instead."
The teenager who said this was standing on the reef that had punctured the cruise ship's hull. Because the tide was low at the moment, the water was shallow enough that it was hardly knee-deep, and just barely covered the reef.
The kid looked enviously at the spirit vessel as he continued, "I told my grandpa yesterday that I wanna build a boat just like yours, but he told me that it's a bad idea to use planks to build a sailboat. He says it's a waste of material, and that you should have used those thin, lanky trees at the back of the mountain. The trees should be used whole and laid out in rows. But then again, after cutting the trees, you would need to dry them out after soaking them in complicated preservation baths, which takes a very long time."
The kid pointed at the woods near the shore to elaborate his point. Sure enough, there were a lot of lanky trees over there.
Zheng Yang's eyes immediately lit up, as he realized that his thinking had been too inside the box. He shouldn't have wasted his time looking for planks, because he could have used the trees for modification purposes instead. Those trees were as thick as pillars but were also tall and lanky at the same time. It would also have been rather easy for him to chop them down, and using entire trees like those would have made his vessel stronger, and would have eliminated the need to saw planks.
But he wondered if the spirit vessel would have been all that better if he'd undergone the long process of using trees that had been soaked and dried.
The other two kids looked at each other and laughed before Zheng Yang replied. They, too, were trying to make boats for themselves just like Zheng Yang.
"Yang, the wood in this boat is all rotten, and there's nothing you can use here at all. How about we just get up there and cut the trees down, and then you can teach us how to build a boat, eh?"
"I have nothing to teach you people!" Zheng Yang thought. He was speechless. He'd only been able to cobble together something that resembled a boat. It was the magic formations and rituals he'd used during the conversion of the boat into a spirit vessel that had refined it into a true boat. He knew nothing about building boats himself.
"We'll get to cutting down the trees first. Feller's grandpa knows a lot about shipbuilding already, so we can just get him to teach you guys instead." Zheng Yang then asked the kid who was standing on the reef, "What do you think, Feller?"
"Alright."
After confirming that they all shared a common goal, the boys no longer bothered playing around and instead swam back to shore right away and got to work.
Zheng Yang untied the ropes and rowed his way to the shore without bothering to lower the sail first.
"My grandpa said that cutting down about 20 of those trees would be enough to make a simple single-masted sailboat. If we were to start chopping now, we'd be able to get enough wood to make our own boat. Right, did you guys bring your own gear?"
The kid named Feller fished out an axe from his backpack and waved it around excitedly.
Zheng Yang brandished his handsaw while the other two kids took out their two-man saw.
"Well, well, the bunch of ruffians here are very prepared indeed," Zheng Yang thought.
Before getting to work, Zheng Yang altered his plans to specifically include the use of those trees. As he thought it over, an image appeared in his mind of what the boat would look like, and the materials on his materials list changed from the wooden materials to the trees. Furthermore, the amount of spirit power needed actually went down instead of going up. He also tried to replace the wooden materials entirely with steel, but was immediately told that his plan was "unavailable."
All of this showed that it was entirely possible to use whole trees for crafting spirit vessels, and that doing so would be even better than what he'd originally planned. However, the required amount of natural gum and steel skyrocketed by several times over.
The four teenagers got down to work. They began chopping and sawing the trees at the edge of the forest and were actually able to work with exceptional efficiency, felling a single tree in a matter of minutes.
The trees were lanky and uniform in shape, with the taller ones being more than ten meters tall. The trees were of low density and had few branches, making it very easy to trim them.
They caught and cooked fish for lunch before getting back to work. By four in the afternoon, each had been able to bag at least 20 trimmed logs for himself before moving the logs to the seaside. Among them, Zheng Yang had cut down the most, bagging over 40 trees for himself. Part of the wood would be used to lay out a deck, while the rest would be used for other purposes.
They would need to get the grown-ups involved later and have them come tomorrow to tie the logs in rows and drag them back to the fishing village for further processing. Zheng Yang refused Feller's offer to drag his logs back together with theirs, saying that it was fine to leave his logs where they were. He would deal with them later himself.
Feller and the other two walked back to the fishing village with a great sense of accomplishment, and Zheng Yang also felt very pleased when he saw his pile of logs.
"I'll need to collect gum, then. The more the better."
The island was rich in natural resources like gum because it had never been exploited before. It would be easy, then, to collect natural gum, and he should be able to collect about 15 kilograms' worth if he worked half the day tomorrow. As for steel, there was already a lot lying around in that wreckage.
The sun had just set by the time Zheng Yang got back to the village on his boat, arriving far later than Feller and the other two. He hesitated for a bit before deciding to ask Hans for help getting more canvas and ropes. He already owed the older man so much to begin with, so he thought that he might as well ask for more help.