[NR] Two Inks - Chapter 626 (Patreon)

Jason frowns as he looks over his 33 pieces of vellum, the 34th had predictably been ruined. All of the vellum is still on the wooden frames, but there is really only one step left. He needs to cut out the actual pages.

Now, that isn’t exactly hard. You just examine the hide and split it up so that the various inherent marks don’t mess up the page. Except, Jason was looking at it from a higher level. He knew the information the book would need to contain and the basic layout. Given perfect sheets of paper as he would have access to in a city or irl, he could give an exact page count.

In fact, if he had more hides, he could do the same thing by just being picky. Instead, he needs to incorporate a few imperfections. Others might ignore them and just write the book as is. Jason instead was fitting it all together like a puzzle. He should be able to get 3 to 4 pages from each hide. A few might only have two pages, but others look like he might fit a fifth page so it evens out.

Now, he could have cheated. It wouldn’t be hard. A few quick snaps of the scene and detailed renditions of the vellum would be available in his private room. At that point, it would be just a matter of taking his already written pages and transposing them over the vellum. Doing that, he would get even more pages worth out of the material.

He wasn’t going to, though. Instead, Jason was laying it all out in his mind, both front and back. This wasn’t as efficient, but the mental workout was a great tool. In particular, he had managed to grow his understanding of [Substance] by 0.002%. Not a lot, but any growth was amazing.

Jason wasn’t sure why it had grown, mind you. However, he wasn’t going to let a little mystery hold him back. Besides, it could be something as simple as him having analyzed the vellum as a material so deeply. Enlightenment can come from both the profound and the simple. So gaining some from observing the substance of a hide shouldn’t be surprising.

Still was, of course. It wouldn’t be enlightenment if you were expecting it. Well, Jason waffles with himself, there are methods, but not for this sort. For now though, this was training his mind, which was the same whether it was here or irl. While a higher Strength stat would be helpful, sometimes the unquantifiable things are what helps the most.

It takes Jason an entire week to finalize his vision. This is mostly because he took the saying about, “Measure twice, cut once” to the extreme. After all, unless he went out and gathered more trade goods, he wasn’t going to get anymore hides. Nevermind the fact that he had picked the best of this species and level range that Helina was willing to trade. Not that he wouldn’t be able to get more, but it would require more gold value on his end to make it work.

Now satisfied with the layout, Jason begins to cut the vellum. Though it seems that his butchery skill no longer qualifies to help as his energy blade doesn’t cut as smoothly. At this point, the System truly sees the vellum as being complete.

To be fair, it was questionable that the System even counted the untreated hides as a part of butchery in the first place. In all likelihood, another butchery skill wouldn’t count it. He had talked to the others about it and Courtney’s theory was that the formless nature extended the usefulness.

Either way, he was now on his own. Good thing cutting the vellum into the correct sizes wasn’t hard. Though he left an edge to them all, just in case. It would be much easier to remove a bit of material later on then try to make up for not having enough.

This only took part of a day. That left the rest of that day to figure out the exact mixture he would use for the ink. Because ink was a simple enough concept. A dye or pigment suspended in a liquid base.

Jason had kept the number of different colors he would use down to a minimum, black and red. He had been tempted to add in blue and yellow for the full suite of primary colors, but there wasn’t a good local blue. Oh, and the best yellow looked sickly. Besides, black and red has a certain amount of class to it. That or the appearance of a graded school paper, but most locals wouldn’t get that one.

The black ink was easy enough as the source was a tree. He had at first considered ink black, but research showed that wasn’t the best for vellum as it could peel or rub off. Instead, Jason went with iron gall ink.

Irl it is made from a mix of iron sulfate and tannins, traditionally from oak galls. Galls being the bulbs that can form on trees caused by the injection of certain chemicals from a gall wasp larva. NeoRealm locals sidestepped the mixing by just using galls off of an iron oak.

Now, the ink would have either a brown or purple tint. Which meant it wasn’t as black as ink black, but either one would match the red ink to some extent. And speaking of the red ink, that would use another plant product.

There were a lot of choices, but he decided to go for using a berry. His pick wasn’t called a raspberry, but if you imagine one of those except there are fewer drupelets that are bigger to make up for it. That, plus some sort of acidic liquid like vinegar, was enough.

Jason used basically all of the scraps he could recover from the 34th hide to test various mixtures. In the end, he had to add a couple special ingredients to help overcome the water resistance. Though the herbs needed to make the red ink work gave it a green under-hue. Set it off from the black ink, which ended up having a purple tint to it. So that was convenient.