The Sunset lay moored in the shipyard, soon to be launched for a distant voyage.
Riding Loki the Landwalker, Liszt gazed out at the Skyship—sixty-five meters long, nineteen meters wide, with three enormous, thick masts rising from its deck.
With the collapse of the Children of the Sun's civilization, this colossal vessel, whose means of soaring through the skies was impossible to fathom, had become utterly lost to history. Once Liszt salvaged it and decided to convert it into a seagoing sailing ship, it had already bid farewell to its past and set forth toward a new future.
"My lord, judging from what I know, the Sunset in its current state is no worse than the court's fast sailing ships."
The speaker was Buck Driftwood, an apprentice shipwright.
He had come from a shipyard on Leather Island, an enterprise of Marquis Ramirez White Glutinous Rice of Leather Island. For certain reasons, he had been forced to leave the shipyard. The Tulip Family had then invited him, through their merchant caravan connections, to settle on Black Horse Island and oversee the shipyard.
There were only three families in the Sapphire Grand Duchy capable of building two-masted sailing ships: the White Glutinous Rice Family, the Pineapple Green Family, and the Sapphire Family. In the past, Marquis Bull's family had also possessed the shipbuilding techniques for two-masted sailing ships, but the Bull Family had long since vanished like smoke.
Among them, the Sapphire Family also possessed the methods for building three-masted sailing ships, techniques that were essentially among the finest in the world. They kept them under strict secrecy, with no possibility of leakage.
Ordinary nobles had no chance of poaching shipbuilders from the Sapphire Family. Even if they truly abducted a shipwright, they would soon face the Grand Duke's wrath.
Thus, Liszt