Rootless Island

As the skeletons got to work, Lilia carried Lin Yuan out of the cavern in his coffin.

It was already daytime outside. Judging by the sun's position and height, it was around nine or ten in the morning.

The beginner dungeon would last for 24 hours.

Without anything to keep time, Lin Yuan did not know exactly when the dungeon had opened, only that it had been late at night.

By that reckoning, he still had the better part of a day to gather the island's resources.

"So that cavern was inside Skeleton Giant Rock."

Observing his surroundings through Lilia's shared vision, Lin Yuan figured out where he was.

It seemed the dungeon's normal progression was to land on the beach and kill the Skeleton Pirates, then find a way through the jungle into Skeleton Giant Rock, and finally defeat the boss, the Skeleton Pirate Captain.

That progression posed no difficulty whatsoever for Lin Yuan.

Skeleton Giant Rock stood at the center of the island. Having the skeletons Lin Yuan summoned explore outward in every direction from there would let him make the most of all the island's resources.

"I wonder if I can get anything besides wood. It would be great if I could complete both blueprints directly."

Lin Yuan's storage capacity was limited now, so he could not possibly take every resource with him. The best way to maximize his gains was to use them on-site.

"There's as much wood as I could want on the island, but steel might be hard to come by."

"I still have about 80 units of steel in storage. Another 20 and I can upgrade the hull right away."

As for the Production Workshop compartment, it required rubber and a Steam Core, so Lin Yuan had no expectation of finding enough resources for it on the island.

"I'm stranded on the island anyway. I might as well use this time to fish up some more Shell Treasure Chests from the sea nearby and try to gather the remaining 20 units of steel."

Although the skeletons had no wills of their own, they retained basic mobility and judgment. Lin Yuan did not need to stay beside them giving orders at all times.

So he had Lilia take him to the shore where they had landed.

Only now, under the sunlight, did Lin Yuan notice that the sea a kilometer beyond the island looked somewhat distorted and blurred, as though an invisible boundary separated the inside from the outside.

"So this dungeon actually covers the island and the surrounding waters. There's no leaving before the dungeon disappears."

Lin Yuan understood, then submerged himself.

Just as before, the ocean looked empty from above the surface, but once underwater, he could see schools of fish swimming about, teeming with life.

But he soon noticed a difference.

"Huh? The ocean here has no underwater layers!"

He had already descended more than ten meters, yet the schools of fish around him had not changed at all.

He continued down to twenty meters. It was still the same.

Is it because this is a dungeon? Or is the ocean around islands special? Lin Yuan speculated, but could not be certain.

The ocean around an island ought to be shallow. Perhaps that wondrous layered world only appeared in the endless deep ocean?

Suddenly, he remembered what Lilia had said when she first discovered the island-

The island had floated up!

"Come to think of it, how exactly did this island appear? Did it rise straight up from the seabed?"

But according to what Lilia had said before, from shallowest to deepest, the ocean consisted of the Shallow Sea, Main Sea, Deep Sea, and Abyssal Sea.

As for what lay beneath the Abyssal Sea, Lilia could not remember either, but the concept of a "seabed" did not exist in her memories.

But if there was no seabed, what was going on with this island?

"Why not... take this chance to get to the bottom of it!"

The Deep-Dive Shield Bubble Soap Lin Yuan had just acquired could come in handy!

Moreover, the underwater world around the island had no layers, which meant that no matter how deep he descended, he would not encounter the powerful beings of the deeper worlds.

"It has ten uses anyway. This is a rare opportunity. Let's do it!"

Without further hesitation, Lin Yuan took the soap-shaped Deep-Dive Shield Bubble Soap out of storage.

A faint glow rose from the Bubble Soap's surface and enveloped Lin Yuan, making him look like a rather dim light bulb.

"That's it?"

Lin Yuan looked at the Bubble Soap. Its remaining uses had now changed to 9/10.

The item's activation was surprisingly plain, but its advantage was that it took effect immediately, with remarkable speed.

He then descended, smoothly passing the thirty- and forty-meter marks.

At a depth of just under a hundred meters, he discovered the seabed.

Of course, it was not the real seabed. This was actually the part of the island's beach that extended into the sea.

Lin Yuan swam away from the island along this underwater beach, and before long, he found himself at the dungeon's boundary.

The underwater beach extending from the island had also lost its surface layer of loose sand, exposing the rock beneath.

The entire rock layer stopped abruptly at the Instance Boundary.

It looked as though this dungeon had sliced the island and its surroundings out of space and dropped them onto this sea.

"So that's it. That would explain why an island appeared on the Bottomless Sea... Wait!"

Lin Yuan swam a little farther toward the boundary and suddenly discovered that the rock beneath him did not fit flush against the dungeon's boundary!

A dozen or so meters before reaching the Instance Boundary, the rock layer suddenly plunged like a cliff, leaving an abyss-like gap between it and the Instance Boundary!

"Why is there a gap? If this really were a normal island extending up from the seabed, there couldn't be a gap no matter how space was sliced, could there?"

After a moment's thought, Lin Yuan slowly swam into the gap.

He stayed alert throughout, ready to use the Seashell Pump Propeller's jet function to escape at any moment.

But the unexpected incident he had anticipated never came, and Lin Yuan swam down without trouble.

As he continued descending, the gap rapidly widened.

The dungeon's Instance Boundary was a perfectly vertical spatial barrier, so there was only one reason the gap was widening-

The rock wall on the other side curved inward toward the island.

"What's going on?"

Lin Yuan raised his eyebrows in surprise.

Normally, an island was actually the part of an undersea mountain that rose above the water.

That mountain could have gentle or steep slopes, but in either case, its lower portion would never be narrower than its upper portion.

Yet this island completely violated that rule.

Steeling himself, Lin Yuan continued downward.

He could descend to a maximum of five hundred meters. He was going to see just what the underside of this island looked like!

But before he reached a depth of five hundred meters, a familiar spatial barrier blocked his way.

The dungeon's Instance Boundary.

So this boundary did not merely surround the island vertically. It also existed beneath the island.

By that reasoning, there should also be an Instance Boundary above the island. The entire dungeon was an enclosed space, impossible to escape unless the Instance Boundary was broken.

But Lin Yuan paid no attention to that. Instead, he turned to look upward.

Sure enough, the entire island was not a mountain that had risen from the seabed at all.

It had a bottom, and that bottom formed a regular arc.

This was a single enormous rock floating on the sea, a rootless island.

No!

Lin Yuan suddenly noticed that the closer the island's underside was to the center, the less it resembled rock.

It was dark brown there, divided by straight lines into uniform rectangles.

At the same time, he also saw an especially enormous rectangular protrusion running across the island, like a dividing line splitting its underside down the middle.

"Are those... planks and a keel?"

Lin Yuan's eyes abruptly widened.

So that was it. So that was it!

No wonder Lilia had said this island had floated up from underwater.

It was not an island at all, nor was it even an enormous floating mass of mountain rock.

It was a ship!