"May Great Bodhisattva Huitzilopochtli bless us! From the felling of the divine timber in the kingdom and the start of its drying and treatment, this great ship, the Snow Wolf King, has already been under construction for more than five years. Of that, it has been three years since I personally designed its conversion into a great Zheyang Ship and personally took charge of building it. And after this group of Wagoku master craftsmen arrived, we spent more than half a year solving many crucial difficulties. Now, today, this sixteen-hundred-liao giant ship has finally taken on a rough shape, and we can be confident it will be completed within a year or two!"
Kim Seon-su, deputy head of the Shipyard and a shipwright, was lean and wiry. He stood on the deck of the Snow Wolf King, surrounded by several Priest Apprentices and Kingdom Craftsmen. Dressed in the sacrificial robes of the Institute of Divine Inspiration and wearing an Obsidian priest's necklace, he had completely taken on "the shape of the Lake Kingdom." Before him, five towering masts for the Zheyang Ship had just been raised on the broad deck. The complex rigging had not yet been laid, and the Chinese-style stiff sails had not yet been hung. As for the main deck and hatches, the forecastle and sterncastle, and the iron fittings of the rudder system, they only had their general frames and were not fully installed.
And beneath Shipwright Kim's feet, through the deck that had not yet been completely sealed, one could still roughly count sixteen Chinese-style watertight bulkheads. In the center enclosed by the Watertight Bulkheads was the backbone of the entire great ship: the main keel, made from a treated twenty-zhang giant timber, which could also be called the outer keel. Extending from that main