Central Ocean Waters

When Su Ming woke up, it was already noon the next day.

Last night, he had carried the girl down from the top of the bridge. She had managed to peel off her wet clothes before falling asleep. Su Ming himself had kept the Zhiyuan racing along for another five hours before switching to economic cruising speed and going to sleep.

Afraid something might go wrong, he had slept right in the control room.

Su Ming stretched, but the pain in his back brought him to an abrupt stop halfway through. He felt along his bones and checked himself over. It was probably just a soft tissue contusion, so he found a few painkillers.

As he swallowed the pills, Su Ming checked the industrial computer's system logs. He found several parts of the equipment that needed maintenance, so he shut down the boiler and steam engine.

He scanned the area with the mast radar and found several tiny islets and reefs nearby. Using them and the nautical chart to determine their position, Su Ming discovered that they had traveled nearly 400 kilometers and were now well out in the open sea. There were no fishing boats this far out, and strangely, he couldn't see any merchant ships nearby either.

According to the chart, they should have been on the central maritime trade route between the eastern and western continents, the busiest and most densely trafficked area for seagoing ships.

Su Ming first went to check on Zijin. The girl looked heartbreaking as she slept in exhaustion. She must have woken up once, though, as she had changed into her floral pajamas and tidied her hair a little.

She had also drunk the glass of water and taken the aspirin he had left by her bed. He had chosen the medicine based on the aftereffects of Zijin overusing her magic, and it should have eased her symptoms.

Su Ming tucked the blanket around her, thought for a moment, then called the skeleton servant over to cook.

After Su Ming picked out the ingredients, he had the skeleton servant make soup and fry fish. Apart from nearly adding several times too much salt, it made no major mistakes throughout the process. With someone to teach it, it was gradually becoming capable of handling this kind of repetitive work.

After he finished eating, he packed Zijin's portion in an insulated lunch box and left it on the dining table. He then had the skeleton servant take the pieces of fish that had been fried to a crisp to the captain of the Four-Eyed Jenny, before heading to the engine room to deal with the problems he had found earlier.

One large bearing was worn, and a screw in a transmission assembly had broken.

Over the past few days, Su Ming had discovered another use for Summoning of All Things. He could make localized modifications to a loaded model, such as piecing broken parts back together or even incorporating bone or alchemical materials to strengthen them.

This allowed Su Ming to repair damaged parts, reinforce components prone to wear, and keep the power unit running.

Once the maintenance was complete, he restarted the power unit. The steam engine chugged as it picked up speed, belching black smoke into the sky. White foam appeared behind the stern once more, spreading into a V-shaped wake.

With the sea breeze blowing through the window, Su Ming sat down at the table, opened his laptop, and began to write.

Probably awakened by the vibrations when he started the power unit, Zijin sent Su Ming a message to say hello and thank him for the lunch he had prepared.

"Don't force yourself to get up," Su Ming told her. "You weren't fully recovered from your illness to begin with. Get more rest."

"The medicine you prepared for me worked pretty well," Zijin replied. "My head doesn't hurt as much."

"Even so, don't do anything, especially reading," Su Ming said.

Then he discovered that Miss Scholar had come to the control room.

Zijin got herself a bench and lay down on it in the control room, holding her blanket. "I'll recover a little faster if I'm closer to you," she added in explanation. "It's because of the White Bone Mark."

Su Ming had created a WPS document on his computer and was already several pages into it, his fingers clattering over the keys.

Miss Scholar watched Su Ming with great interest and asked, "What are you doing?" She couldn't read the Chinese characters on the screen.

"Reviewing last night's battle."

Zijin thought he was still dwelling on having walked into Katharine's trap, so she tried to comfort him. "You can't judge decisions made during a battle with the benefit of hindsight."

Su Ming shook his head. "It's a technical review."

He explained that he was studying the course of the battle, analyzing Katharine's fighting style and commands, listing each warship's ability to carry out combat operations, and recording it all.

"I used to do the same thing when reviewing my matches," Su Ming explained. "Games have replays, but this is my first time doing it for a real battle. Still, if I analyze and record everything properly, it'll at least give me something to refer to the next time we fight."

It was Zijin's first encounter with anything like this. "Does Katharine do this too?"

"I think she probably does," Su Ming replied. "I don't know how she reviews her battles, but she'll definitely go through that step."

Su Ming was nearly done, and the two of them also discussed some issues from the naval battle.

Before long, Zijin grew tired and fell asleep against the chair.

Thanks to the additional fuel from the Four-Eyed Jenny's hull, the Zhiyuan currently had plenty to spare. Su Ming maintained economic cruising speed and headed east.

By the third day, Su Ming had returned to his normal routine, and Zijin was in much better shape. She began repairing the White Bone Fortress's core, which had been damaged in the naval battle.

"Don't worry too much about structural problems, as long as it doesn't fall apart," Su Ming told her. "I'll be changing the ship's design soon."

Lunch was fish again. Both of them were a little sick of it, but they had no other choice. Fortunately, as Zijin recovered, they had considerable freedom in their choice of fish.

After lunch, Su Ming opened his computer and began writing another document in Chinese. Although he had learned the writing of this other world, his laptop didn't have a corresponding input method.

Although Zijin couldn't read Chinese, she noticed how fast Su Ming typed. The computer also made documents easy to edit, had numerous functions for making charts and the like, and performed calculations quickly.

She was a little envious, but using it would require solving the language problem first.

Zijin closed the paper notebook in her hands and asked Su Ming, "What are you doing this time?"

"Organizing the subsystems that currently need to be installed or improved, along with possible modification plans," Su Ming replied.

First up was the radar again.

An important reason they had walked into the UFO's trap this time was that they had been overly confident in the X-band short-wave radar and hadn't considered that the enemy ship might use a stealth configuration. So they needed to address that weakness. One approach was to add a set of long-wave radar, preferably military-grade meter-wave radar, which would greatly improve their ability to detect stealth targets.

Next was the propulsion system, including the next-generation hull. The Zhiyuan could now accommodate at least two more steam engines, which meant its speed could undergo a qualitative leap. Combined with a more advanced hull design, it would inevitably be able to roam the seas of this other world unchallenged.

"We can't casually use the sail configuration, and we especially need to avoid letting people see its details up close," Zijin told Su Ming. "If the wing-sail technology leaks, it'll cause us a lot of trouble."

For the Zhiyuan, deploying wing sails was like a pair of wings becoming two pairs, an improvement on something already good. But in their enemies' hands, it would mean going from zero to one-a qualitative leap like a land animal becoming a bird!