Chapter 40

About ten books.

All of them need to be read, or rather, memorized.

Magician Elliot, feeling that he had repaid a favor, bid farewell and left. Great stood in front of the table, looking at the thick stack of textbooks before him, and let out a light sigh.

He stretched out his hand to measure: about ten books, each larger than a 16K book from his previous life, piled up from the sturdy oak table to his neck. Leaning forward and lowering his head, his chin rested perfectly on the top of the books.

This thickness...

It’s, a small matter.

Which medical student’s textbooks, exercise books, and picture books, when piled up, don’t reach a person’s height?

Following Magician Elliot’s instructions, Great flipped through the stack of books. The first one, he didn’t recognize the characters; the second one, he still didn’t recognize the characters; the third one, still no recognition...

Damn!

Are they all written in magical script?

So, I have to learn a new language to study magic?

And it’s a dead language...

Great, holding out a glimmer of hope, flipped from the first book to the last, and found that except for "The Study of Magical Script," all other foundational textbooks and principles of magic were written in a script he didn’t recognize. With no choice, he put the books back on the shelf and opened the last one, determined to tackle the magical script.

4500 words in the Level 4 vocabulary list.

Finished in a month back then.

5500 words in the Level 6 vocabulary list.

He forgot how long it took to finish, but under the heavy pressure of professional courses, he managed to pass the Level 6 exam quite easily.

Magical script...

How many words are in this dictionary?

Great never counted and didn’t want to.

The only thing he was sure of was that "The Study of Magical Script" was the thickest book among the nearly a hundred on the shelf. Other books were at most as thick as a fist, but this one was as thick as two fists.

The writing was also small. If the characters in other books were in initial size or even larger, the characters in this book were only in second size.

The content volume is almost as much as a dictionary...

Great silently lamented. He gritted his teeth and opened the first page, only to feel as if he had been hit on the forehead with a blunt stick.

The arrangement of this book was very casual, written wherever the author thought of it, or arranged according to the author’s perceived importance. On the first page, the four major elements were listed in order: fire, water, wind, earth.

Flipping to the next page: magic, dragons, spirit, primordial, Mars, Venus, Sun, Saturn.

Third page: macrocosm, microcosm, birth, death, sage, devil...

Great: ...

I need a dictionary!

I need all the words to be arranged alphabetically!

At least give me an alphabet, aaaaah!

The 26-letter English alphabet, the 50-sound Japanese kana chart, the 30-letter German alphabet, and the International Phonetic Alphabet, please come back... I will never complain about how basic they are...

But no one responded to him.

No dictionary, no phonetic symbols, no one casting "Comprehend Languages" to instantly understand magical script, and no AI scanning all the information to engrave the unfamiliar language into the database.

After Great finished crying his heart out, he could only dig out a pen from his backpack, spread out a piece of paper, and start working hard on his own—

First, he had to tally all the letters that appeared...

It took about half an hour to flip through thirty to fifty pages of the book, and a large area of the paper was filled. After confirming that no new letters appeared, Great took a deep breath and began to sort them.

Fortunately, the magical script somewhat resembled Latin. Great purely judged by appearance, placing the one that looked like 'a' first, the one that looked like 'b' second, and so on, following the German and Roman alphabets.

What, this letter looks really unique, not like any other?

All of them go to the back!

After this round of work, he realized that the script he needed to learn wasn’t too complex, with about sixty letters—considering that some only appeared at the beginning of words, it could be inferred that there were uppercase and lowercase letters, meaning the total number of letters was about thirty.

Great flipped through the manuscript in his hand, writing a new letter every so often. Then, looking at the open "The Study of Magical Script," he took a deep breath, rubbed his wrist...

The entire book needs to be reorganized!

It’s not easy, compiling a dictionary is really not easy... No wonder the "Dictionary Publishing House" revises the dictionary every ten years; just revising this book can support half the staff. The workload is just that large...

And now all this work is his alone T_T

Forget it, in the web novels he used to read, some predecessors had to decipher magical languages like cracking codes. Compared to that, he had a ready-made book to copy from, which was still quite fortunate...

Great copied the words and their corresponding common language definitions from "The Study of Magical Script" page by page, under the corresponding initial letters. Surprisingly, copying was quite helpful for memorization; after copying one page, Great found that he had already memorized that page.

Great worked hard for half a day, his eyes blurred and his wrist ached, suspecting that he was about to get tendonitis. Just as he was thinking of casting a healing spell on his wrist, he encountered his first difficulty:

He ran out of paper.

He had brought about five to six sheets of paper, and both sides were filled with writing, leaving no more space...

Tear a blank page from one of the books?

Great felt he couldn’t do that.

Borrow paper from someone?

He didn’t dare. Magician Germain had forbidden copying, and going to borrow paper now would be like walking into a trap!

Ask for help, plead with Magician Germain?

Great felt he wasn’t ready to die and didn’t want to be turned into charcoal by a fireball...

He quickly thought for a moment, put the paper, pen, and ink into his backpack, and left. The reference books could be seen again tomorrow; if he didn’t return to the city, the shops would close, and he wouldn’t have anywhere to buy paper...

He ran back to the city, rushed into his house, closed the door, and moved to the square table. He moved the chair with a broken leg, lifted the brick under the chair leg, and dug a few shovels. A small money bag lay neatly in the soil. Great took it out, poured it out, and a small pile of coins fell into his hand.

Two silver coins, seven copper coins.

At the other end of the long street, Uncle Simon’s bakery, a black bread loaf cost one copper coin. If he saved, it would last him a day.

One silver coin could be exchanged for ten copper coins, and this small bag of money was the original body’s monthly expenses.

—His salary in the city guard was five silver coins a month. If he patrolled the city, he could get a free meal at the barracks. In total, he could save two silver coins a month to cover other daily expenses.

But to buy paper... this amount of money might not be enough. The productivity level in this world was not much better than the Middle Ages, and from what he remembered, paper and pens were extremely expensive in this era...

Great hesitated for a moment, crawled under the bed, pushed open the book box, and dug out another small box.