Ascendance of a Bookworm

"Kuh! I thought the paper problem was solved, I can't believe the ink is next! How can you!

Not only do I not sell the ballpoint pens, sharp pens, pencils, fountain pens I'm used to using, I don't even sell ink and ink around.

If only I was free to use the ink, I could have written with the tree pointy, but that ink is expensive and unavailable.

Even though I know the price of a single stone brush, I can't even calculate the price of ink without knowing how much the special salary will be for the budgeting period.

How much does it cost to just work for three years?

When I think about the process of buying, picking, getting, stealing, making... and getting it, I end up going to make it.

You can't just steal it from the dorm room, and hey...

It's not just the book, apparently the ink has to be handmade as well. Nevertheless, how can ink be? I know it's pigments and dry oils, but where do you get the pigments and dry oils you get here?

"You want me to go get 'Octopus' or 'Squid'? Where's the ocean?

When I grabbed the wooden jane I was about to make and screamed unexpectedly, Lutz turned around as a vick.

"Suddenly what!?

"Lutz, what do you think the ink here is made of!? How do you think I can make it!?

I know it's just unrealistic to travel in search of the ocean and catch octopuses and squid. But it's something around me, and I don't know if I can make ink or ink.

"What kind of ink is that?

"Uh, black liquid, for writing letters on these boards..."

It's hard to explain to someone you don't normally see. As I lined up as I could think of, Lutz twisted his neck, I said.

"Black stuff? If it feels dirty, can you handle it with ash or coal?

"That's good! Let's try it!

If it's coal or ash, it burns firewood, and it's all in the house. It's still made today. You must get it soon.

And when I went home, I asked my mother quickly.

"Mother, can I use this ash?

"No, you can't."

Rejected by instant answer.

"Huh? Why?

"Ashes make soap, melt snow, use it for dyes, sell it to farmers, you have any use for it, right? Don't take it on your own."

Speaking of which, they helped me sprinkle ash first in the spring, and I sprinkled ash in the mood of flowers or grandpa without knowing why, but was it to melt the snow? I knew it by now.

I also used a lot of it when I made the soap, so ash does matter, doesn't it?

It seems difficult to get ashes that you can sell if you have more, but do you also have a use for coal, another candidate?

"Bye, Mother. Coal would be nice?

When I presented my second proposal, my mother allowed me to laugh nicely for some reason after slightly frowning.

"I don't know what you want to do, but coal would be fine"

"Good."

"You mean Mine's going to clean the inside, right? And cleaning the chimney will bring more together, right?

"Huh!?... Ahhh, yeah.... Yes, I wonder"

My smiling mother pushed me off to clean the chimney. This wasn't supposed to happen, but I can't help it if it's to get coal.

When I took the cleaning tools to pay for the coals with a temper, my mother, who had changed her blood phase, stopped me.

"Wait a minute, Mine! Gonna clean with that clothes!?

"... Huh? No?"

It's already thinly dirty and I don't know what the problem is with cleaning it with worn out clothes.

Before me leaning my neck, my mother brought me a sewing box and a rag cage.

"I'll make it in a minute, just wait."

My mother is in a good mood and quickly creates clothes that connect rags together.

I change into rag clothes, and I put it up with a rag, whether they say NG to keep my hair from getting dirty at all, and this replaces the rag with a triangle.

Wow, you have to think it's Cinderella's cosplay, you can't do it.

I scratched out the ashes first from the scratch. Then stick your head inside, clean the coal that was stuck, and collect it. It could be the first time I've been helped by a small body.

Couldn't resist my mother's smile, and then I also cleaned the chimney, collecting coal. The black stuff falls apart, the inside gets cleaner, and the coal I wanted builds up.

When I started doing it, it was surprisingly fun and I seemed too obsessed. The next day, I had a fever and fell.

I was covered in coal, and I fell down, but I managed to recover the coal. She also recovered.

I want to be able to write this coal somehow today.

"Mine, what are you gonna do with this?

"Is it water first?

The best I could come up with was a way to try to dissolve it in water.

I feel inky. Somehow.

I put a little water from the river in a wooden vessel and scratched it around with the coal chopped from the tree. The coal is just floating in the water, and it doesn't dissolve.

"Is this what this is all about?

"Why don't you just write it down?

I nodded at Rutz's words and instead of a pen I stuck a sharpened stick ahead and wrote a "1" that represented the number of pages on the tree briefly.

However, it pulls more on the stick than it can write on the board, and the writing you can write is thin and hard to read.

"No ~. Failure"

"What do we do next?

"Hmm, I think it's Theory who makes ink that I try to melt with oil..."

I can't ask my mother to want this.

Because vegetable oils are used by both eaters and simple phosphors, and we are always in short supply.

And since animal oil is used for candles and soaps, I didn't think this would be easy to get either. Maybe it will be dismissed as easily as ash.

"I use oil. You don't get it, do you?

"Yeah, you can't. I wonder if there's anything else..."

Exploring the tips, I think of the writing devices I used in Japan one after the other.

"Oh, the" paint "in" Japanese painting "is definite, I used" glue "... but I can't use fire, so I can't"

Using glue will be an option in the future, but not ready at this point.

If I could use glue, I would likely be able to make paint-like objects from natural ingredients, so there are going to be quite a few more things I can do. I just have to wait for myself to grow up.

"Hey, Mine, you okay? Come home."

I can see Lutz waving his hand patty in front of me on the edge of consciousness, but now I can't just go back.

"Um, it doesn't have to be liquid, does it?" Crayon "or" chalk "or" pencil "...... yes, clay! Try mixing it with clay!

"Huh?"

"Sure, I think 'core of pencil' was a mixture of 'graphite' and clay. Is that a 'conte'? Well, no. Coal, not 'graphite', but we might figure it out!

Mix clay and coal, round and thin, and dry. If this hardens, I might be able to write it.

"Lutz, you dug that area for the clay when you made the 'clay plate', didn't you?

"Even if I didn't bother digging, it must have been around that stone that I couldn't use and left alone"

As Lutz said, the clay was turning into a small mountain.

From there, take a little clay and mix the coal together. The image is the core of a coopy or pencil. If you don't touch it and turn black, it won't be a usable color.

I round the coal pencil thinly, turning my hands and on the stone I used instead of the table black. And I divided it into about pencil lengths.

If this makes me dry and stiff, I will succeed.

Washing your hands and feet with river water doesn't make it much cleaner. I have to use soap when I get home.

But with this persistent dirt, I feel I can write it on the board, too.

"I wonder how long I should dry it, huh?

"Come on?"

"Shall we bake it?

"You shouldn't do anything extra. We're gonna blow up again."

"Ugh."

I left it for a few days and let it dry and it solidified step by step.

Wrap a blur around the coal pencil and make a place to hold it so your hands don't get dirty. Then I scraped the tip with a knife and pointed it and wrote the letters.

I could write!

It's a little blurry and collapsible, but I can write it for once.

It's more of an ancient recording medium than a book, but it's a success.

"Yay! I could write, Lutz!

"Oh, you did it"

When the writing instruments could be created, I began to groan and increase the number of woodwinds.

Since the ingredients can be secured while picking up firewood, it can be increased quite easily. Above all, it is more attractive to be able to increase it a little bit by itself.

I have difficulty putting it away when I get more because of the tension, but that was the same thing with the clay plate. Patience until you grow up and become independent.

I was more or less satisfied with the tree Jane was able to do, but one day the neglected tree Jane disappeared.

When I get back from the woods, it's not where I left it.

"Nah!? No? Oh!?

"What's wrong, Mine?

My mother turned to the storeroom looking for a wooden Jane who might have moved me somewhere.

"Mother, don't you know 'Wood Jane' that I left here?

"Moccan? Come on? Like what?"

To my mother leaning her neck. I will elaborate as much as possible on the wood Jane I have made.

"Uh, they're different sizes because they're thin or thick, but they're all trees that scrape surfaces and have letters on them..."

"Oh, the firewood Mine picked up, right? Then you used it, didn't you?

"Huh? Huh? Did you use it? Why?

My head turned bright white in an instant.

"It's the firewood Mine has picked up so hard in the woods that he can finally help. I thought you had to use it properly."

"But the firewood's for piling up over here, right? Why bother using it for a minute? It was a collection of folklore I made that my mother told me about in her bedtime story!

"Oh, if you want me to talk to you before you go to bed, I'll give it to you again."

Mine will always be sweet, what a joyous laugh, and he stroked my head.

"That's not what I meant..."

There is not one left. I look at the space where Wood Jane was, and all my energy goes out.

Wood Jane doesn't matter how hard she works to make it. It burns again. Thinking about it, I couldn't motivate everything anymore.

The moment the force fell out of my body, I burst out like the calories I had been suppressed in my body had grown steadily. It feels like an instant reduction in time to heat out of excitement and fatigue, making your hands and feet paralyzed and your body unable to move.

"What is this...?

Unable to grasp what was going on in me, I fell suddenly and was to be suddenly high fever.

You seem to be swallowed up step by step by the heat that goes around you, and your consciousness swings loosely. It feels like the fever is eating me away a little bit.

For the first time in this state, I understood that the real mine might have been swallowed up by this fever.

Sometimes I see my family peeking worryingly as I am swallowed up little by little without the strength to just resist.

I saw Lutz's face in there for some reason.

... Why Lutz? …

As I put my efforts into bringing Lutz into perspective, my swallowed consciousness fluttered.

More effort around the temples, trying to look closely, instead of floating blurry, Lutz came into his sight properly at his will.

"Mine?"

"... Lutz?

"Aunt! Mine is awake!

My mother jumps into Lutz's voice.

"Mine, all of a sudden I fell down and worried because I wasn't conscious at all."

"Yeah. Sometimes, I could see your face. I'm sorry to bother you.... Mother. My throat tingles. Besides, it's so sticky, I want to wipe my body. Water, will you bring it?

"Yeah, I'll bring it right away"

When I saw my mother turn her heel back, I shook Lutz's hand tightly. I can't even lift my head yet while I'm sleeping.

"... Lutz, I couldn't do it again. My mother burned me, Jane."

"Ahhh... Well, it just looks like a tree cut with a weird pattern"

"I made it and put it away on purpose..."

No more.

My book is destined to never be finished.

Ha, and when I sighed, the heat in my body gained momentum. I shake my head and shake off that my consciousness is about to sink.

"Don't be so depressed. Then you can make it an unburned material, right?

It's made of wood, so it gets fired. Then you can make it an unburnt material.

I found a single light in Rutz's words.

Not if you have a fever. I have to figure out if there's any good material.

When I put all my strength into my body, I felt like the heat in my body was getting smaller so I could gather towards the center.

"... why do you think I wouldn't be burned if I made it?

Think about it, I can't think of any unburnt material at all. Is it because my head blurs because of the heat, or because I don't know much about the material I can pick around here?

"Uh, look, bamboo, something like that"

"Huh!... Lutz, genius"

Bamboo will blow up when burned, so it won't burn that easily.

Hope has gushed. Then, for some reason, the fever gets a little smaller, making it easier to breathe.

"Oh, what are you talking about?

My mother grabbed a bucket with water and came in.

Lutz and I look at each other and laugh small.

"It's a secret to my mother"

"I'll get it for you. So definitely get better."

"Thank you, Lutz. That's sweet."

"This is for Mr. Otto to to introduce us! I'm paying up front, so Mine definitely needs to get better! All right?"

That's what Lutz said and he popped out, so I wipe my body with the water my mother brought me.

This fever is crazy.

A fever that suddenly feels like it hits me from within my body and slowly eats my consciousness is not a disease I know of. I do not know of a fever that suddenly spreads or becomes smaller if it is concentrated.

What the hell is this fever that still mourns in my body?

When I first came here, I didn't think so strange because it was normal for me to have a fever.

But lately, the oddity became clear because I was getting to work out my body a little bit and be able to move. What the hell is wrong with this body?

But I'm not wealthy enough to see a doctor in this world, and there can't be a book like the Family Illness Encyclopedia, so I wouldn't be able to look it up right away.

... If you want to concentrate and reduce your consciousness, it's going to get smaller gradually, so I wonder how things are going for a while?

In the evening after two days trying to figure out how to deal with the heat, Lutz really cut the bamboo to just the right size to make it bamboo easy for me to bring. The skin on the surface is also shredded and ready to write.

"Never touch it until the fever drops. Look, if I break this promise, I'm not going to help you."

"Yeah. Thanks, Lutz"

I held only one bottle in my hand, otherwise I asked my mother to put it in the storeroom.

If you can't get out of bed yet, but the fever drops completely, write a letter on this and get it done.

I need to get better first.

Lutz grabs the bamboo he brought me, and then his eyelids come down. When my consciousness is about to break off trying to sleep like this, Dad, bread! and a shitty sound sounded.

"Ha ha!?

"Hey, what!? What happened!?

From the kitchen, Papan! Daddy bread! and intermittent sounds of something blowing up.

My mother jumped into my bedroom, pulling my face.

"Mine! What did Lutz bring!?

"... bamboo, but?

"Well! Confusing! You didn't collect firewood for me instead of mine!?

I understood the cause of the bursting sound in my mother's words. They burned bamboo as firewood. I feel a lot more powerful than the bamboo I know, but is it a world difference?

"Maybe, because the surface was shredded, you mistaken it for firewood?... Is that it? Are trees and bamboo things you don't even know when you look at them?

"Bamboo and vanilla trees are very similar in fiber, aren't they?

"I, the tree, I don't know because I've never seen it..."

I don't know if I can get my name up. At least I never saw bamboo or a tree similar to it when I went to the woods.

"What are you talking about? It's a tree that Thuri used to make cages with his winter hand job. Mine made a cage, too."

"Oh, I remember. Sure would be confusing to peel it off."

I know because I saw Thuri getting ready for a hand job. It looked like a normal tree when it was skinned, but when peeled, it looked like bamboo.

"Anyway, it's dangerous, so don't bring bamboo into the house. You get it, right?

"...... ha"

Bamboo's banned, too.

Yeah, I've felt like this since the bamboo blew up.

You worked so hard for me, I'm sorry, Lutz.