Chapter 190 (1/2)
Bringing paper-making technology to this world was an idea Sui Xiong had long ago.
The spreading of culture was very slow. One of the crucial reasons was that there was a lack of cultural carrier: paper. Here, the books were compiled into booklets with papers made with various beast skins, hence the incredibly high cost. A blank booklet for about 30 pages would at least cost six gold coins in the wholesale store, while the retail price normally cost eight to ten gold coins.
Why aren’t there many mages in this world? Some of the people laid the blame on the commoners’ brain power, emphasised that only people who were highly intelligent could become a mage. Actually the problem wasn’t that, but the money.
A mage would at least need to learn the common language, ancient elven language, dragon language, dwarven runes, heavenly language, Abyss language, hell language, mystery language and the other “common languages.” A true mage that was proficient in languages, normally knew even more different languages. For example Void Mask Church’s mage group leader, Satan, was a mage that had just gotten into the higher order in the recent two years. He knew 33 languages in total, and was learning more languages then. For instance, that year, taught himself the language of a mutated species, Heart Eater Soul Monster. The species was basically non-existent in the main dimension but it was distributed across countless worlds that were floating in Void. They were good at using attacks on their prey that caused heartache, hence the name “heart eater.”
According to his way of saying things, his plan was to master above a hundred languages.
A mage not only had to learn languages but also know the more headache-inducing study, culture. Astrology, geography, customs and practices, biology, history… forget it. Listing them out one by one seems as though I am trying to fulfil the word count. All in all, the reason why mages had high expenditures was mainly because of “learning.”
And principal part of the learning expenditure was the purchase of books.
Books wouldn’t fall from the sky but required to be bought using one’s own money. Or maybe one could buy an empty booklet and copy by hand. An experienced mage normally had a few racks of books, or even a library. What were these? These were all money!
Why did Mifata Fedaration have more mages? Because they had a systematic nurturing standard, and youngsters that intended to go down the path of magic could spend less money to borrow books which helped to cut down the expenses by a lot.
Not only that, but in the process of learning magic, “copying scrolls” and “copying magic books” were inevitable. Defeat was a common sight too. With a failure, one would lose at least a beast paper, or one might lose the entire book straightaway. Encountering 80 to 100 counts of failure wasn’t a huge number. The poor Palin wanted to learn an intermediate magic “ice storm,” and wasted almost 200 scrolls, plus booklets, ink, and therapeutic medicine… These few years, he basically spent all his salary in the stationary shop.
Even if they didn’t take the expense of a mage into consideration, merely language learning and calculation, which was pretty much a basic requirement to shake off the nickname of illiterate, would need at least 30 to 50 books. If he were to learn law or performing arts, there should be an extra zero behind the existing figure. Plus history… Sigh, it would be best not to calculate so much.
In this world where a poor commoner’s family might not even make a gold coin, the education expenses were enormous and hard to afford.
If there were paper making technology, with a large amount of cheap papers and books, the culture in this world might be able to spread more widely.
Like the saying went, “knowledge will change one’s fate.” If cultural knowledge were to be common among the poor, maybe their fates would be improved.
Sui Xiong didn’t know if his speculations were accurate but he felt he could give it a try.
So he built himself a laboratory by the river near the sea in the Ashes Woods, and tried to research and develop paper making technology.
“Let me recall how does paper making works…” Sui Xiong said at the pile of wood that had just been chopped. He hung his head low as he thought, “I learned it in history class. It said that Cai Lum produced broken fishnet and chopped wood into paper paste, then spread it flat on a cloth to dry, and it became paper. It seems quite easy…”
He waved his tentacles and the big tree next to him flew up and was crushed by an invisible force. After some squeaking noises, it quickly shattered into a ball of shredded wood.
Then, Sui Xiong got some river water to mix with the shredded wood. He then boiled it with magic.
Because the river water and wood that were polluted by negativity, they gave off thick clouds of black smoke during the boiling process. The black smoke wasn’t the chemical gas commonly seen in the paper making factories on Earth, but the negativity that was dispersed. Any commoner would die if they were to get in contact with it. Looking at the danger aspect, this was more terrifying.
After boiling for a long time, that ball of unknown mixture had turned into thick murky fluid and the negativity in it had fully dispersed. Sui Xiong tried to take some and used magic to spread it on the linen that he prepared earlier. Then, he oven-dried it using magic.
After a while, it was fully dried. Sui Xiong took it down from the linen and gotten a piece of thick paper in a blackish green colour. It was hard and coarse, and didn’t look like it could be used for writing.
“This doesn’t look quite right,” he mumbled to himself. “If Cai Lun made this back then, the emperor was kind enough to not beat him to death. How could he even leave a good name in history?”
He pondered and took out some again from the mixture that would likely be paper waste, and spread it on the linen. But, he purposely spread it thinner. then he realised that there were many small pieces, and he couldn’t spread it nicely.
“It’s not fine enough!” He suddenly understood, so he used magic to shred the ball of paper waste again. This time, he strengthened the pounding power. Even steel could turn into powder, not to speak of wood.
Hence, the paper waste was spread thinly and evenly. After it oven-dried, he had gotten a flat piece of paper.
Greyish blue in colour, a little crumpled; it looked like soft paper that could be used to wipe one’s ass.
“This is toilet paper… I want to make writing paper!”
He pondered again, wondering it went wrong.
Firstly, he had to remove the color because he needed white paper.
How to remove the colour? Filtration?
He tried to filter it, and there was murky water that was greyish green. But the color on the paper paste obviously didn’t change.
Well, filtration didn’t work; how about washing?
He made some purifying water with magic, used a ball of paper paste for experimentation and washed it a couple of times. The color of the paper waste was slightly lighter. If he were to lower his standards, he might be able to use it for writing. But, the prerequisite of it was that, it needed to written on with a writing brush.
This world was popular for the feather brush, which was to used with beast feathers and dipped into ink to write. The type of brush obviously couldn’t be used to write on soft but coarse surfaces; at least not on this kind of paper that Sui Xiong had invented.