Cthulhu Gonfalon Chapter 60:

Sui Xiong had an idea long ago to engage in papermaking in this world.

The spread of culture in this world is very slow, and one of the important reasons is the lack of cheap cultural carriers-paper. Here, the books are assembled into a book with animal skin paper made of various animal skins, and the cost is simply abnormally high. A blank book, about thirty pages, means that the cost price in a wholesale store is six gold coins, and the retail price is generally eight to ten gold coins.

Why are there not many mages in this world? Some people attribute it to the intelligence of ordinary people, emphasizing that people with high intelligence can become mages. In fact, the problem is not this, but money.

A mage needs to learn at least "common language" such as common language, ancient elven language, dragon language, dwarven rune language, celestial language, abyss language, **** language, arcane language and so on. And a mage who is truly proficient in languages ​​often knows more types of languages—for example, Satan, the mage leader of the Masked Void Church, a mage who has just stepped into the upper ranks in the past two years, he knows a total of three Thirteen languages, and are still learning more languages—for example, this year he taught himself a language of a strange species called the Mind Eater. This species basically does not exist on the main plane, but there are countless floating in the void. There is still quite a distribution in large and small worlds, and they are good at using mental shocks to make their prey feel heartbroken. This is where the name "heart-biting" comes from.

According to him, the plan is to master more than one hundred languages.

Mage has to learn not only language, but also culture. Astronomy, geography, customs, humanities, biological history...Forget it, all the words listed are suspected of deceptive words. In short, the reason why the master spends so much is that the cost of "study" accounts for the bulk of it.

The main body of learning expenses is the purchase of books.

Books will not fall from the sky, you have to buy them yourself. Or buy a blank booklet and copy it yourself. A senior mage often has several bookshelves, or even an entire library. what are these? It's all money!

Why are there relatively many mages in the Secret Tower Federation? Because they have a systematic training mechanism, young people who are interested in the magic road can spend less money to borrow books here, which greatly saves money.

Not only that, but in the process of learning spells, "copying scrolls" and "copying spell books" are inevitable, and failures are commonplace. If you fail once, at least one page of animal skins will be lost, and at most one book will be lost. It failed a hundred and eighty times-this number is really not that many. In order to learn the intermediate spell "Ice Storm", poor Palin had nearly two hundred scrolls copied and scrapped, plus books and ink. And healing potions... In the past few years, he has basically spent all his salary in the stationery store.

Even if you don't consider the expenses of the mage, just to learn language and arithmetic-which is almost the minimum requirement for getting rid of the title of illiteracy, you need at least thirty or fifty books. If you learn more about law or art, a zero should be added directly after that number. Learn more about history... Well, don't count that much.

In a world where poor people generally cannot save a gold coin a year in a family, the cost of learning is really too large for them to support.

So if there is papermaking and a lot of cheap paper and books, maybe the culture of this world can spread more widely, right?

It is said that "knowledge changes destiny". If cultural knowledge can be popularized among the poor, maybe their destiny can be improved?

Sui Xiong doesn't know if his guess is correct, but he thinks he can try it.

So he built a small experimental workshop for himself by a river near the sea in Ash Forest, trying to study papermaking.

"I want to think about what papermaking is like..." Sui Xiong sat beside a pile of trees that had just been felled, and thought, "I learned in history class, saying that Cai Lun smashed broken fishing nets and waste wood. After being boiled into pulp, then spread out on a cloth and dried, it becomes paper-it seems quite simple..."

He waved his tentacles, and a big tree next to him flew up. It was crushed by invisible power, making a creaking sound, and quickly collapsed and shattered, and in a short while it turned into a ball of sawdust.

Then Sui Xiong took the river water, mixed it with the sawdust, and then heated it to a boil.

The river water and trees polluted by negative energy gave up a thick black mist during the boiling process. These black mists are not the chemical gases in the paper mills on the earth, but the negative energy that is dissipated. Ordinary people will die if they touch it - it is even more terrifying in terms of danger.

After boiling for a long time, the mass of what I don't know has turned into a turbid slurry, and there is no more negative energy on it. Sui Xiong tried to take some, spread the magic technique on the linen cloth he had bought beforehand, and then dried the magic technique.

After a while, those things were completely dry. Sui Xiong took it off the linen cloth and got a thick black-green paper. It was hard and thick, and it didn't look like it could be used for writing.

"There seems to be something wrong with this..." He said to himself, "If Cai Lun made this kind of thing back then, the emperor wouldn't be able to kill him even if he was kind, so how could he be still young?"

He thought for a while, then took some from the lump, which was probably pulp, and spread it on the sackcloth. But this time he paid special attention to spreading it out more finely, and found that there were so many small pieces, there was no way to spread it out very thinly.

"It's not enough to smash!" He understood at once, and shattered the mass of pulp again with a magic technique. This time he greatly strengthened the crushing strength, not to mention wood, even steel has become iron powder.

So, this time the pulp was really spread very thinly and evenly, and after drying, a smooth paper was indeed obtained.

Gray-green, crumpled, soft paper that seems to be used to wipe buttocks.

"This is toilet paper...I want to make paper that can be written on!"

He pondered again, thinking about what else he could not do well.

The color must be removed first, because he needs white paper.

How to remove the color? filter?

He tried to filter it, and filtered out a lot of gray-green dirty water, but the color of the pulp did not improve significantly.

It seems that filtering is not enough. How about washing?

He created some purified water by magic techniques, and washed and filtered a small group of pulp used for experiments several times. This time the color of the pulp is slightly lighter. If the requirements are lowered, he may also be able to use it for writing-premise Yes, use a brush.

The most popular in this world is a quill pen, which is to write with a bird's feather dipped in ink. Obviously it is impossible to write on soft and rough paper with this pen, at least the paper invented by Sui Xiong is definitely not good.

"So...I want to invent ink and brush?"

He pondered for a while, and decided to improve papermaking first.

However, as the saying goes, "When books are used, they hate less." By this time, his stored knowledge has been used up, and I don't know how to further purify those pulps and make them whiter.

After thinking for a long time, he decided to develop a spell, a spell to purify pulp.

The essence of this spell is to absorb the pigment in the pulp, but it is not particularly high-end. It took Sui Xiong only a few hours to design it, and after a few hours of experimentation and improvement, he finally came up with the first spell in the world that he can really spread out to keep his name. .

Sui Xiong's pulp purification technique is an entry-level spell. The composition of the spell is spells and runes, and the casting material is a small piece of charcoal. Using this spell, the pigment in the pulp can be extracted and turned into a viscous colored colloid, while the original variegated pulp becomes white.

After completing this spell, Sui Xiong finally got the white pulp he wanted. Using these pulps as raw materials, white paper is obtained.

However, it's still soft, crumpled paper, and it doesn't seem to be able to write on it with a quill pen.

What's more troublesome is that this kind of paper is obviously not good for packaging and storage. You can see from the appearance that it is definitely not a durable thing.

Sui Xiong thought carefully, and tried to flatten the paper.

Smoothed a bit, but not enough.

Thinking about it again, he tried to spread a little more pulp on the linen cloth, then flatten it and dry it.

This time, he finally got a smooth white paper.

Of course, there still seems to be a big gap compared to the white paper on the earth, but someone in Sui is really exhausted and can't think of any ways to improve it.

He tried it with a quill pen and ink, and not surprisingly found that this paper would spread the ink on it, making it impossible to write fine small characters.

"Well, next is a brush."

The writing brush is very simple in theory. It is to tie up animal hair with a suitable length, stuff it into a thin bamboo tube, and then tie it firmly.

"It's not difficult at all!"

In just a few moments, Sui Xiong produced perhaps the first brush in the world.

However, its effect of absorbing ink is very poor. After absorbing the ink, the writing is not continuous at all, and the effect is almost astonishing.

This is obviously a failure.

Sui Xiong thought for a long time, then wondered--is it because there is grease on the fur?

To remove grease, you need to use soaping. This doesn’t hurt him. Soap has been invented in the world for a long time-even if the quality is not as good as that on the earth, the price is slightly more expensive~ IndoMTL.com~ The beast after washing Mao really got better. Although it was still a bit uncomfortable to use, at least he could write smoothly.

This is just fine, let the users overcome the remaining problems by themselves!

Sui Xiong set his sights on the ink again.

The price of ink in this world is very expensive. A small bottle is about fifty grams and requires almost twenty gold coins. For quill pens, which consume less ink, they are a big consumer of ink. If they are used in this way, it is estimated that the poor still can't afford them.

So Sui Xiong began to study ink production again.

He failed shamefully this time, but he found an alternative.

Mix a little glue with water, mix the soot, and you can write. Although the effect of writing is not so good, it can be used anyway.

The biggest problem with this method is that the ink must be temporarily adjusted every time it is used, which is not convenient at all. But "inconvenient" is better than "no", isn't it?

Sui Xiong deliberately created the "ink block" that his ancestors used for many years. He tried to glue the soot into a block, but found that the ink block can only be cut and crushed.

Well, this is fine...

A few days later, at a high-level meeting of the Masked Void Church, Sui Xiong triumphantly demonstrated his invention.

"Look!" He said to everyone, "This is something that will change the whole world!"