Bad Charging Station

It didn't take me long to understand that trying to recharge the Useful Marble with my tiny bit of mana was little more than a pipe dream. Something that could power and move while also shielding an entire massive ship was never going to operate with just a tiny bit of mana. In fact, it was already great that part of the damage done to the ship had been restored. At the very least, this meant that the ship wouldn't degrade further, at least for some time.

On the other hand, it meant that I was unlikely to ever fully recharge the Useful Marble, which in turn meant that the ship would probably never be able to freely roam the blood sea like it had in the past, all because I was a bad charging station.

It was strange that I would miss the days of safety I spent alone on the still-powered ship, when those days had arguably been the most miserable ones I had ever experienced… within these illusions, anyway. Nevertheless, it was true that I sorely missed the security I had once taken for granted. The fact that the ship was always on the move had also been nice, although the scenery had barely changed at all in truth….

Unfortunately, wishes and remembrances would not aid me, not with my current circumstances. The Useful Marble would hardly be of help to me now, but it could be used to repair the ship in case of severe damage or to temporarily shore up defenses if a particularly bad storm hit and I had charged it enough.

As such, with a heavy sigh, I turned back to my never-ending task of charging the Useful Marble.

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I stopped even attempting to keep track of time a few days ago - or was it a week? Maybe a month. Anyway, it hardly mattered. The Useful Marble had been alternately charged and used to keep the ship from breaking apart, but even I could tell that things were reaching a breaking point. The ship was suffering more damage than my torturously slow charging speed could keep up with, and many parts of the main deck had been entirely lost by now, along with the sails and masts. 

The only thing that kept me fighting on was a sort of drained anticipation. What would finally end this terrible odyssey I had experienced? Would it be a monstrous shark or perhaps some leviathan of the ocean? Perhaps a storm would wreck the ship and leave me hanging on to mere driftwood until a school of fish ate me alive.

With these morbid thoughts in mind, I sat listlessly on the hammock that had been my resting place for all my days on the ship. The Useful Marble had been completely drained once again, and my pounding headache was enough to dissuade me from further attempts to charge it, at least until my migraine subsided.

Once every once in a while, I would take a quiet moment to reflect upon the fact that I was in an illusion. The previously comforting truth was starting to hold less and less sway now, a dim light in the darkest of nights. Should I be concerned about my fading faith? Perhaps. Did I really care? No.

Maybe the only good thing about this whole journey was that I had become rather proficient in mana and weapon wielding… was that really so good? My mana efficiency had stalled a long time ago, and weapons were just tools to maim and kill. Not that I hadn't done my fair share of the above. 

I was desensitized to murder by now. To be fair, I had watched death before my eyes with no emotion when I first joined the battle on the first day, but that wasn't someone I had killed. When I had first shot down a bird-like monstrosity during my days with the crew, it had felt little different from just throwing a stone, probably because I hadn't seen the death happen.

However, when I was forced to fight off assailants by myself, I had inflicted a fair share of casualties, on not just creatures and humanoid abominations, but even human-like monsters. At first, I felt some sort of guilt, chillingly little from an objective standpoint, but by now I could hardly care.

After all… was that really a bad thing?