"It's changed." Saina's tone left no room for discussion. "Move the lookout platform to the back. The front gets better sunlight, so the vegetables will grow stronger."
The engineer looked at Su Li.
Su Li shrugged. "She has the final say."
The engineer erased "lookout platform" from the blueprint and wrote "deck vegetable plot."
Then he hesitated and asked, "Will the chicken coop be on the deck too?"
Saina gave it some thought. "At the stern. The ventilation's good there, and the smell can disperse. Build a cat bed beside it, too."
The engineer silently marked everything down.
Su Li walked to the bottom of the dry dock and reached out to touch the surface of the keel.
The Empire's deep-sea forged steel plates had an even texture and an exceptionally high aether conductivity.
He took a thumb-sized piece of dark golden metal from his pocket.
It was a fragment of the royal palace grand formation's core, a material steeped in highly concentrated aether for centuries, its purity absurdly high.
He intended to smelt it into the ship's core propulsion circuit.
Fifth-tier aether seeped from his fingertips into the fragment, and dark red patterns of light surfaced across the metal.
"I'll forge the core components myself," he told Elonore behind him. "You handle the buffer layer and auxiliary circuits."
"Alright." Elonore tightened her grip on the charcoal pencil.
Elena pulled out the southern sea chart from the leather case she carried and spread it across the workbench beside the dry dock.
She picked up a red pen and drew a circle over an archipelago at the southern edge of the map, an area marked "Unknown."
"Our first stop," she said.
Su Li put the fragment back into his pocket and walked over to glance at the red circle.
The outlines