Ascendance of a Bookworm

Chapter 34: A Regretful Mistake

Today, we brought with us our pot and some ash. As the dark outer bark of the other wood we’re experimenting with dries in the sun, we’ll boil the light inner bark from the tronbay together with the ash for about a bell’s worth of time. Lutz is much lighter on his feet today, perhaps because just the pot and the amount of ash we’ll be needing today aren’t all that heavy for him.

After we walk to the riverbank, I set down the basket I was carrying on my back, then hang strips of bark from its edges to dry. While I do so, Lutz starts preparing the pot. He fills it with water, sets it on top of our stone stove, then starts heading off to find firewood.

“Listen up, Maine. Do not, under any circumstance, leave this pot.”

“I get it already!”

The pot and the ashes are both very important and very difficult to acquire, so they’re worth quite a lot of money. On top of that, we’ll be in big trouble if the bark we’ve processed so far gets stolen as well. So, even someone as useless as me can come in handy once in a while, watching the stuff.

I’ve been putting more effort into gathering lately, wandering around more and more, so Lutz has been incessantly hammering in his point.

“You say that you get it, but every time you see something interesting, you immediately stagger off to look at it!”

“I’ll stay right here until you get back, so just go already!”

When I first started coming to the forest, I used to set down my basket as soon as I arrived, because it was so heavy. Whenever I tried leaving it behind as I went deeper into the forest, though, Lutz and Tory would get amazingly angry at me. Unlike in Japan, it seems like in this world you’d never, ever wander off and leave any of your things unattended. For this reason, all the kids who go to the forest always have their baskets and boxes worn on their backs, and they don’t ever gather more than they can carry.

Lutz very quickly comes back with wood, which he uses to build a fire, then immediately takes off to get more for later. I periodically adjust the position of the basket as the daylight shifts, moving it out of the shadows in order to maximize the amount of drying time the outer bark gets, all while still keeping an eye on the pot.

“Is it boiling yet?”

“Yeah, just about, I think.”

To the bubbling pot, I add the strips of inner bark and the ash, then realize that I need something to stir the pot with. However, we don’t have anything like that prepared.

Nooo… yet another thing I didn’t think we’d need.

I slump down dejectedly, suddenly aware of just how lacking my imagination is, then start looking around for something we might be able to use.

“Lutz, could you please make me a couple of long straight sticks, about the same length, that I could use to stir the pot? I think wood would peel apart and get mixed in, so it would be great if you could use bamboo. There’s probably some nearby, right?”

“Sticks made out of bamboo? Got it.”

Lutz skillfully cuts a length of bamboo and whittles it into two long cooking chopsticks for me. Using those, I start stirring the pot. As I marvel at how much better he’s gotten at carving bamboo, maybe from when he made all those bamboo strips, Lutz murmurs something to himself.

“…You’re really great at stirring things with those, huh.”

“Um?! Y-y-yes! They’re super handy, aren’t they?”

I force a smile onto my face, covering my sudden panic, as a cold sweat runs down my spine. This world doesn’t have Asian cooking, so of course it doesn’t have any chopsticks, so of course it wouldn’t have any people in it who are able to use chopsticks. There probably doesn’t exist a single normal little girl on this planet who would look at a pot that needs to be stirred, ask someone to make some chopsticks for her, wield them both in one hand correctly, then stir away like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

Whoa, Lutz has a kind of doubtful expression on his face. It must be just my imagination. Just my imagination. Just my imagination, right?

I continue stirring the pot, internally second-guessing every single movement. It would be very suspicious of me to suddenly change my grip and grab them like normal sticks right after he pointed it out. I have to keep using them like this for now, but my heart is pounding in my ears.

Aaaaaahhh, I’m such an idiot! This totally isn’t just me thinking I’m looking suspicious!

I try to keep my face as normal as I can as I continue stirring the boiling bark. After a while, I hear the faint chiming of the town bell, signaling that it’s probably about time to move on.

We put the stewed bark in the river, simultaneously washing out the ash and exposing it to the sunlight. The more it’s exposed to the sun, the lighter it should be bleached. I don’t know exactly how the plants of this world behave, though, so I’m having to make assumptions based on what I remember from Earth.

“Now we leave it like this for another day,” I say.

“Right. Got it,” says Lutz.

To make sure our paper will be as white as we can get it, we’ll leave the bark in the river for another full day. After Lutz finishes washing up the pot, we take turns going out to do our gathering work.

I manage to reduce the total percentage of poisonous mushrooms by a just a little bit. I’ll need to keep at it like this.

The next day, our main paper-related task is just retrieving the bleached white bark from the river. Essentially, we’re just going about our gathering business as usual, then when we’re just about ready to head back we’ll stop by the river and collect the bark. To do that, instead of bringing the pot with us today we’ve borrowed a bucket from home, but that’s all we need for today.

“Work’s going to be mostly at the warehouse starting tomorrow, after all,” I say.

“Ah, okay. So, we have to make sure we get all of our gathering done today, then.”

I wind up with a sizable amount of things, including edible mushrooms that Lutz helped me select, several nearly-ripe melia fruit that Lutz helped me pick, and some cran that I hope to boil down into jam. While we work, I sample a few things for myself. These fruit are far, far more sour than anything I used to eat in Japan, but since this world lacks sweet things so dearly, you could think of these as delicious.

The next day, instead of going to the forest, we sit outside the well in front of our warehouse to work. Today, I hope to get through picking all the junk out of the fibers and combing them out, enough to make several sheets of paper.

Picking the junk out of the fibers involves finding and removing any damaged or knotted sections of the wood, which will increase the quality and consistency of the finished paper. Since this is work that can be done sitting down, I’m in charge of that. While I pick through it, Lutz is peeling edil fruit, crushing it, and mixing the pulp with water to make a sticky binding agent.

“Hey, Maine. This the kinda goop you were looking for?”

“…Hmmm, I think so? Since it’s sticky, I think that’s good, but honestly I don’t know exactly what we need. Try thinking about what it’s going to be like when we’re mixing the fibers in with it.”

After I’m done removing all of the junk from the fibers, we start pounding them out. Using a squared timber made of a hard, oak-like wood, we need smash away at the pile of bark until it’s as soft as cotton. In order to make the stick comfortable to hold, we whittle the corners off of one side of it, then wrap some cloth that we borrowed from home around that side. Then, Lutz starts pounding away at it. This is Lutz’s job. If I were to try it, given how little strength I have, all I’d do is get in the way.

This time, since we’re just working on a prototype, we don’t really need very many fibers so this doesn’t take a tremendous amount of time, but when we’re looking to start increasing the quantity, it looks like this might be really tough.

We put the beaten, softened fibers in the tub, add the binder, then add water a little bit at a time so that we can regulate the stickiness of the mixture. Ordinarily, the next step would involve using a kind of large comb called a mase to churn this all together. For now, though, since we’re working with such small quantities, I have Lutz make two more sets of cooking chopsticks, then I hold them together like I was about to use them to whip up a custard, and mix the fibers up that way.

…If I remember right, when I made recycled paper out of an old milk carton that one time, the mixture felt kind of like this…

Since I am nothing even remotely like a craftsman, I don’t have any real sense for regulating the mixture, so I try my best to recreate how I remember the paper slurry I worked with back then felt. Finally, I take that slurry and spread it onto the bamboo mat in the paper frame.

“Aaah, finally, the part I actually know how to do!”

When we made homemade paper in my home economics class, the process was simple: we took recycled milk cartons, boiled them, peeled off the shiny polyethylene coating, put them into an electric mixer, added laundry starch, spread it out over a screen, and let it dry. We’re at the stage now in making washi that my home economics experience actually applies to: spreading pulp out to dry.

My time has finally come! Roar out, my practical experience!

“You really know how to do this?” asks Lutz, looking at me with a very doubtful expression on his face as I quickly set up the paper frame.

Well, certainly, there have been a lot of parts in this process that have been really vague, and there have been a lot of tools that I didn’t know we needed until we actually needed them, but all of those problems were because I lacked any actual practical experience.

Although I’m a little bitter about how little confidence Lutz has in me, I still stand up straight, suck in my baby gut, and look him dead on.

“Leave it to me!” I say, cheerfully. “I’ve done this part before.”

“…When?” he says, frowning. “Where?”

The sudden sharpness in his voice makes my heart freeze.

“Guh?! …A, a, aaaaa, a maiden has her secrets!! Don’t pry!!”

Aaaaaaaaaaagh! I’m an idiot! I’m such an idiot! What am I saying?! He’s staring now! He’s staring at me! Aaaaaagh! Did I just wreck everything for myself?!

I try desperately to hide the screams of terror in my heart behind a pleasant smile as I transfer some of the pulp into the paper frame. My fingers tremble slightly as I work, but not so much that it can be seen. I scoop some pulp into the frame, then shake it around, letting it spread out over the surface of the mat.

“Why’re you moving it like that?”

“Oh, this? By shaking it around, you can make sure it spreads out evenly so the paper will be the same thickness for the whole sheet. After this, depending on the kind of paper and how thick we want it, we might repeat this step a few more times.”

“Hmmm, you’ve done this before, so you know a lot about it, huh?”

Lutz’s frigid stare drills into me, scrutinizing every tiny detail of my facial expression. No matter what I say, I don’t think I’ll be able to weasel my way through an answer to that remark. Instead, all I can do is keep quietly working, then abruptly change the subject.

“Uh, um, Lutz. I was thinking that we should change up how many times we’re doing this step for each sheet so that we can test out different thicknesses for the paper, what do you think?”

“…Yeah, sure.”

Perhaps he thought something was up with my spontaneous topic switch, because his eyes grow even colder as he continuously glances between the work that I’m doing and the expression on my face. As he stares, I keep spreading pulp out over the frame.

Aaaaaargh, I think I just wrecked myself on my own wreckage again…

When enough pulp is evenly spread, I remove the bamboo mat from the paper frame, then transfer the sheet of filtered paper over to the paper bed.

“When you’re transferring paper over to the bed, you don’t want there to be any space between the new sheet and any sheets that you’ve already made, so you need to be careful like this about where you put everything down, starting from the first one.”

“Let me try.”

Lutz sets the mat back into the frame, then starts spreading pulp out himself. Since we’re only making small, postcard-sized sheets, it doesn’t take much movement to spread the pulp evenly across the surface of the mat. We take turns making sheets, working mostly in silence. Although I’d tried to prepare enough white bark to make only a few sheets of paper, by the time we’re finished, we have a full ten, showing just how off my calculations really were.

Well, making too much isn’t actually a bad thing.

“We haven’t made very many sheets today, but no matter if we’re making a a lot or a little, we’ll take this one day’s worth of paper and leave it here on the paper bed for a whole day so the water can naturally run off it.”

“Then what, after that?”

“Then we slowly start adding weight on top so that we squeeze the rest of the water out of it. We’ll put the stone weight on top of it and leave it alone for a day. If we do that, all of the leftover stickiness from the binding agent should go away.”

“Hmm…! You know your stuff. Have you maybe done this before?”

Whoa, Lutz’s eyes are penetratingly harsh. I’ve been completely exposed, haven’t I. I’ve managed to wreck everything for myself now, haven’t I. I am a complete and utter idiot.

However, since all he’s doing right now is staring at me with narrowed eyes, thinking deeply about something or other, there’s no way that I’m going to say anything else to finish myself off. I’ve done enough damage already, so since I don’t want to do any more I keep working, indifferently, as if I didn’t want to be wasting any time on idle chatter.

If I tried to lie my way through this, I’d probably immediately mess up, and suddenly being perfectly honest with him is far too risky. I’m positive that he’ll say something once we manage to finish making paper, but I don’t know how much of this he’s figured out or what he’s actually going to say.

I’ve already thought about how I’d deal with the situation, so there’s not really any problem there. I hate painful things, and I hate scary things. If anything like that looks like it’s going to happen, I’ll unleash the fever that I keep bottled up inside my body, let myself be swallowed by it, and disappear.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like the fever is getting more powerful than it used to be, so I’m sure it won’t take very long for it to devour me once I let it out.

Unfortunately, there’s one big new regret that has come into my life since the last time I thought about this. All that’s left on finishing this paper is letting it dry out. If we haven’t made any mistakes, I’ll finally have been able to make paper so, before I disappear, I want to make a book.

I wonder if I can stall long enough to make a book?

I want to buy myself some time. For now, until I can finish a book, I need to come up with some way to drag things out.

As I contemplate what I could do, I continue jerkily going through the motions of my work.

The next day, we don’t talk very much either. We walk to the forest, put the next round of dark outer bark into the river to soak, then do our gathering work. When we return to the town, we drop by the warehouse to put the stone weight on top of the paper bed, but since there isn’t a whole lot else to actually do, there really isn’t anything to keep me from constantly looking over to see how Lutz is doing. I’m very much aware that he, too, keeps glancing over to look at me.

“Hey, uh…” he says.

“Hm? What’s up?”

A tremor runs uncontrollably through my body as Lutz speaks up. I’d planned to be calm and composed, like nothing was wrong at all, but I can’t make myself act like I thought I could. While I wait nervously for his next words, Lutz scratches furiously at his head, ruffling his blond hair. He opens his mouth as if to say something, then closes it again.

“…Never mind.”

“O… okay.”

These are seeds that I have sown myself, so I’m well aware that there’s nothing more that I can do now, but as long as things continue like this, there’s no way I’ll ind any comfort.

The next day, we go to the forest to work on stripping off the outer bark from our next set of materials, making sure not to forget to bring a board to work on this time. This time, the work is far, far more difficult than it was with the tronbay. The fibers are left in tatters as I pass my knife through them. This isn’t only due to my own incompetence, though, even Lutz seems to be having a hard time. Tronbay fibers worked so well, but the difficulty of working with this material makes me wonder if we even can make paper out of it.

“…This material’s different, so it’s way harder, huh.”

“Yeah, it really is.”

I can’t help but let out a sigh as I compare the tattered fibers to our current relationship.

“We can let the inner bark dry like it is, so let’s stop for now.”

“Mm. Hey, uh…”

“What’s up?”

“…Nah, maybe later. I’ll tell you when we’ve made some paper.”

Lutz closes his mouth and doesn’t say anything more, and I give him a small nod. Inside, I’ve already prepared myself for the worst. Lutz has noticed that I am not, in fact, Maine, and he’s going to blame me for it. After all, ever since that enormous mistake, he’s never called me “Maine” even once.

When we finish making paper, I wonder just what kind of yelling I’m going to get? Or maybe is it going to be abuse? Thanks to my overactive imagination, the Lutz in my mind starts screaming worse and worse insults and abuse at me. In my imagination, my heart feels hollow, and I hang my head.

How could you say all that, Lutz! You’re so mean! Even though you’re a figment of my imagination, you’re making me cry! I’m crying!

The next day, we work at the warehouse. First, we hang the inner bark we worked on along the edge of my basket so that it can dry in the sun, and set it outside. Next, we lift the stone weight from the paper bed, then carefully peel off each sheet of paper and stick them to another board.

“We really should use a paintbrush or something to get all the air out from underneath these sheets, but I guess I forgot to order that too. Ah well, ah well. These are postcard-sized, so if we’re careful about it, it’ll probably work out.”

“…Wow, you forget way too much stuff.”

Lutz shoots me a brief glare, but thanks to all of the hideous abuse my imaginary Lutz has been constantly showering me with, something at this level doesn’t even faze me. I shrug my shoulders a bit, brushing off the insult.

“Well, make sure you don’t forget anything either, next time we do this. …That aside, though, once we let these dry in the sun, they’ll be all done. The longer we let them stay in the sun, they brighter white they’ll get, too.”

Lutz carries the board outside and leans it against a wall so that the sun can hit it. After that, he washes off the paper bed in with water from the well, then sets it next to the board with the paper on it so that it can dry as well.

The bright gleam of the white paper lined up to dry under the perfectly clear, blue sky creates a beautiful contrast. I let out a sigh of satisfaction, wondering if this is the paper that I’ll be able to make into a book.

“Haaah, it’s paper! It’s really turned into paper. …It’s really paper.”

“Hey, so…”

“Let’s let it dry until evening. When it’s dry, we’ll need to peel it off carefully so that it doesn’t rip, then it’ll be totally finished.”

With the paper so close to being complete, I want to put off having to face Lutz just a little while longer. Perhaps he senses this in my expression, because irritation suddenly flashes across his face.

“Hey, it’s basically done, right?”

“…Well, yeah, but…”

“I told you, right? When we’ve made some paper, I’ve got something I need to say to you.”

The time of my reckoning is at hand. A sharp light glitters in Lutz’s green eyes, as if an anger deep inside him is clawing its way towards the surface.

I bite my lip, hard, telling myself that I’ll stay standing no matter what he might say to me. Steeling myself, I turn to face Lutz dead on.