The revelation left Leo in more confusion than shock.
'If only she knew his soul had been replaced by someone who hasn't even awakened.'
He smiled.
Lyra caught him smiling and asked what was so funny. Leo shook his head and said nothing, walking away to continue building the ship. He would not want to mess with her anymore. A Sagittarius was only two ranks away from being a Pisces.
Back at the ship, he started selecting the materials he needed to complete the fifth inner deck. They had completed four already, leaving roughly two hundred more according to Leo's calculations.
They had come a long way, and in this case, a quarter was better than none. Besides that, building one inner deck was like building a city. Leo fully understood what Aquarius meant by saying it was wider than the Ocean of Existence. That was still a hyperbole, since the ship could still fit in this ocean realm, and there was no doubt that the Ocean of Existence was larger since it connected nine great realms.
An inner deck usually took two days to build with the help of the glove and Lyra. When they worked much faster, they could make four inner decks in that same time. The last two weeks were mostly preoccupied with building the inner rims that formed the ship before plastering it with enchanted wood.
Now that they were done with the inner rim and had four decks, if they worked much faster, they should be able to finish the ship in another two weeks.
'Building the world's largest ship in a month. Record breaking.'
Lyra was already beside him, nailing wood together to complete the surface platform of the fifth deck. As of now, the ship still looked like a skeleton from the top. Only the bottom through the fourth deck was covered with enchanted wood.
Using the metallic gloves, Leo easily nailed and removed wood without the help of actual nails or a hammer. As for Lyra, she controlled the water using her heating abilities. She heated the wood through the water to make the parts she wanted to attach to the inner rim as sticky as adhesive gum, even stronger than any gum Leo knew.
When they started building this ship, it all looked impossible to Leo, but as time went by, he became accustomed to it. He understood it was almost like building a normal ship, but this one was designed with intricacy to be much more powerful, buoyant, and arguably more perfect than any other vessel.
It was a mixture of magic and engineering. In other words, magical engineering. Even within those two weeks, he studied the wood and materials to compare them and later figured out it was magic. Intricate magic.
Magic was used to create the materials, which the seller had said were brought from other realms. So in a sense, the ship was made of magic. Yet still, Leo could not understand how magic itself was created in the first place.
Just like the beings that existed before the Conceptual War, magic had existed even before the birth of Aura. It had actually existed outside the Aura system until it was fully incorporated by the royal clans. Those who could weave those two together were deemed the pinnacle of humanity.
But these people were scarce. Trying to understand the logic of magic was one thing, and trying to use it was another. Trying to mix it with Aura was simply a path to madness. Leo had no idea if these special people were plentiful in this era, but back in his timeline, he only knew a few who were called Divine Mages. They were able to understand the Auric Codex, harness Aura, create magical runes, and implement them into a vast array of different abilities and spells.
These people also came from Outsiders, those who used Aura before Elara brought it as a system into Primoria. One of them happened to be his own father, Jean Atlantis.
He would have thought of studying magic, but no. There were other ways of getting stronger. Magic was too rigid, complex, and bizarre for him. Maybe in the distant future, he would get a grasp on how to use magic, but for now, he had to focus on passing the Seek.
'That reminds me. I haven't summoned the system in a long time.'
He looked at the ship and noticed they were still far from done with the fifth inner deck. He dismissed the thought of summoning his system and continued working.
The sun, or whatever celestial body governed the light in this sunken realm, was beginning to dim, but Leo did not slow down. If anything, the memory of his father and the weight of the Seek had lit a fire under him.
By midday, they had hammered through the remaining sections of the fifth deck. By the time the mid afternoon currents shifted, the sixth deck was already being sealed.
Leo's movements became mechanical and precise. He stopped walking to fetch beams to save time. Instead, he used the gloves to create small gravitational tugs, calling the iron wood to his hands. He would catch a twenty foot beam out of the dark water, soften the edges instantly, and slam it into the skeletal rim.
Lyra was right there with him. Though there was no sweat in the crushing depths, her body heat was rising so high that the water around her face began to shimmer and distort, creating a hazy blur of exhaustion.
"Seventh!" Leo grunted, his voice sounding thick and muffled through the heavy water.
"Ready!" Lyra shouted back.
They moved like a single machine. The seventh deck was the storage level, a massive open expanse that required long, reinforced spans of wood. Leo placed them with the speed of a man possessed. He used the gloves to vibrate the wood at such a high frequency that it fused with the inner rim with great accuracy before Lyra even touched it with her heat.
The eighth deck fell shortly after.
The ninth was the housing quarter, a complex maze of smaller partitions. Usually, this would have taken days, but Leo's mind was projecting the blueprints directly onto the empty space. He saw where every wall needed to be before he even moved.
As the deep, bruised purple of the night water settled over the Anvil Mountain, they reached the tenth deck.
Leo's muscles burned with a dull, throbbing ache that felt like it belonged to a different person. His hands were raw beneath the metallic gloves, but he did not stop. He grabbed the final support beam for the tenth level, a massive piece of enchanted heartwood, and heaved it into place.
Lyra let out a sharp cry of effort, her hands flaring with a white hot intensity. The wood hissed and the water around them exploded into a massive cloud of bubbles as the seal was completed.
Silence fell over the construction site, broken only by the heavy, ragged breathing of the two builders.
Leo stepped back, his boots clanking against the newly finished platform. Beneath him, ten solid decks of magical engineering now stretched down into the darkness. From a distance, the ship no longer looked entirely like a skeleton.
It still resembled one, but it was nothing compared to before.
Ten decks in a single day.
"We did it," Lyra panted, collapsing onto a pile of leftover shavings. Her glow had faded to a dull ember. "Ten decks. Leo, no one in the history of the nine realms has ever moved that fast."
"You can't tell. You haven't left the water since you were born," Leo laughed.
"True."
Leo looked at his hands. He looked up at the floating castle, then out toward the city where he believed one day the sea monsters would pour in and force people to harness Aura beyond their control.
"Sixteen hours," Leo muttered, checking the clock in his mind. "We still have fourteen days to go."
He turned to Lyra, who was looking at him with a mixture of awe and genuine fatigue.
"Tomorrow," Leo said, his voice cold and determined, "we do twenty."