“Hmmm~ Is this okay?”

“Ah, that’s… passable, I guess? I think you should pay a bit more attention to how the leaves look like here.”

Fiora presented a piece of wood to me where she had carved or at least tried to carve the same patterns I usually make in my wooden strips.

After we got into the ferry and began our way to the sites where we would be repairing the bridges, I decided to take a better look at the quest details Sorgre had handed me.

In the meantime, I hashed it out with the quartermaster’s assistant that came in the ferry with us to cede one of the planks so that she could practice carving with my knife.

It was a bit tough to convince them, but in the end they conceded since that would shut me up for the rest of the trip.

Though only about half an hour had passed by, the girl was still holding on to the carving knife and poring over the example strips of wood I gave her.

She ran her fingers through the wood, placed the tip of the knife on the grooves and traced the forms I had carved and then turned back to her wooden plank and started practicing.

Though I was pretty sure the wood with which the boards were made wasn’t exactly easy to carve precisely due to them being of a dense wood, she was doing a remarkably decent job.

If not talent, maybe she might just have the motivation to do this part of the work for me.

Aside from the sound of wood carving, the travel went otherwise silent until we arrived at the first site of repairs.

The route that was decided was heading first to the west side location, then swinging by the second location before arriving at Simar.

The first island was largely uninhabited. I think I’ve caught sight of a house, or the remains of it, amidst the woods, but otherwise was dominated by forest and lumbering sites.

It was right by an actually inhabited island by the name of Sasara, in which there was a town by the name of Elba on the southeast side. The town was mostly a logger’s community and a hub for trade of local lumber for food.

Unlike Simar, there wasn’t much food to be grown in Sasara, so while there were small farming villages in the countryside, those were mostly subsistence farming communities and couldn’t actually support the whole island.

They instead relied on cultivating and logging wood from the eleven islets that floated around Sasara and were connected by large and sturdy suspension bridges, which the locals called ‘the sisters’.

While the bridge to the largest islet, ‘the big sister’, was still standing even after the earthquake and only needed some minor repairs, the same couldn’t be said about the others.

“Alright, let’s start working.” The quartermaster assistant got up from where he was sitting and started talking with the other people in the ferry.

After talking for a while, they brought the ferry to the side of a cliff on the place we were going to re-set up the bridge and set down a bridge between the ferry and the cliff for people to cross into the island carrying the materials.

I decided to leave Fiora on the ship doing her practice and go out to help them prepare the bridge.

We spent about two hours offloading the planks and ropes for the bridge before setting up the supports on the cliff, fastening the planks and securing one of the sides. Then we threw the other end of the bridge on the ship and boarded again.

The ship then made the crossing to the other island and we repeated the process of setting up the support poles and securing a place to tie the bridge to.

When we finished setting up the first bridge, the sun was already starting to set, so we got on the ferry and the conductor took us off to Elba to rest for the night and resume working tomorrow.

I was a bit worried about the lodging, but thankfully the assistant told me they wouldn’t charge us for it since we were fixing the bridges already.

“Fiora, it’s time to head to bed.” We were put together in a two beds room, so I could keep an eye on her, though she was still preoccupied only with the carving practice to the point she was sitting in the bed still examining the plank even late at night.

“Mnnn…? It’s fine, I’ll sleep later~”

“No…” I took the plank away from her. “You’ll have to sleep now. Otherwise I’m pretty sure you’ll lose track of time staring at this.”

“Uuu… Fine…” She begrudgingly laid down on her bed.

I put the plank away, leaning on the wall, before heading to bed myself. Hopefully she won’t be stubborn enough to get up in the middle of the night.