The three of them stared longingly at the feathers floating on the water.

The feathers were their bobbers.

But all three were lousy fishermen. Ning Chen sighed. "It's not that this prince lacks skill. It's the gear. As they say, a craftsman who wants to do good work must first sharpen his tools. If this prince had a proper sea rod, there'd be a shark on the deck for you.

Too bad this world of yours is so backward. This prince is a clever housewife with no rice in the pot. Looks like no fish soup tonight." (TL Note: From the proverb "Even the cleverest housewife can't cook a meal without rice," meaning nobody can make something out of nothing.)

Pan Yucheng hadn't followed what Ning Chen was saying, but he understood the last part. Without thinking, he said, "Fish soup's the one thing this ship has plenty of, isn't it?"

Ning Chen was stumped.

Right. They were on a ship. If there was one thing it had plenty of, it was fish soup... And the three of them had been sitting out here like idiots, working at it all this time.

Ning Chen coughed awkwardly. "Still, it doesn't taste as good as soup from fish you caught yourself."

For the rest of the voyage, Ning Chen didn't spend all his time at sea. He often had the ship put in so he could go ashore.

He wasn't just traveling to the Wu Kingdom this time. He had official business too: inspecting the coastal defenses.

That idiot Zhang Tianlun had made a complete mess of the eastern frontier, and the coastline was all but undefended.

A month earlier, Ning Chen had ordered Mu Anbang to lead fifty thousand troops north, wiping out bandits and roving brigands as he went and setting up coastal defenses.

The eastern frontier had few prefectures and counties. Mostly it was small villages like Tianci Village.

That made coastal defense crucial. Bandits held a good number of the islands offshore. Without troops sealing off the coastline, the Zhaohe Kingdom and the bandits alike could devastate these…