“Is this the place? A-Are you going to be, ok? I can see a little bit of dust in here…”

  Man, she really sounds like a fairy, one that is extremely kind, worried about me a mere ape and his allergies. She’s also worried about the well-being of the ape, something that only those whose hearts are big and warm enough to embrace said beings. I mean, her tone of voice is soft and of course, with said softness comes the worry attached to it, one that feels quite warm and genuine. All of this because a bit of dust might cause the end of the world. Nah, I’m exaggerating. Or am I? Also, why did I call myself an ape?

  “Don’t worry, it’s not like a little bit of dust is going to cause a natural catastrophe or something like that. I think.”

  Man, that really did sound convincing, don’t you think?

  “Ahem! The magic line ends here meaning that we are close to the “target”. Looking around I don’t see anything special, although I’m using magic.”

  “I don’t see anything either… Just a few pieces of wood, a chair’s leg or is it from a table? There are also a few pieces of paper but I don’t think that’s what we are looking for either.”

  Or in other words, we are both seeing the same. This can mean that we both are quite blind, unable to actually see the “prize” that is right under our nose, whatever by using magic or our ol’ and not so trusty pair of eyes. Just like she said, there are a few pieces of wood laid out throughout this zone. The same can be said about a few rather small debris of concrete but, I have no clue where this debris might be from. The roof is intact and the same can be said about the floor. Not only that, she also said that there are a few pieces of paper scattered around and yet, I don’t see a single book where they might belong to… Picking up one of those pieces of paper and what it’s presented to me is nothing more than unreadable letters that do not seem to form any coherent sentence/s at all. Seriously, I have no clue what it’s trying to say and to make it worse, some of those pieces of paper have suffered the consequences of time meaning that, the ink is close to being gone making it hard to read, while in some cases impossible for such. Hmm, what should we do then? The magic line definitely ends here, looking around with magic will tell you that much and yet, here we are like two sitting ducks waiting to be hunted as we have no clue that the hunter is right behind us, ready to unleash his deadly attack.

  “Have you found anything? All of these pieces of paper and yet no book in sight… To make it worse, what’s written on them, they don’t make any sense whatsoever.”

  “I’ve noticed that, but do you think we have to put it together?”

  Now that is a possibility that never crossed my mind but to be perfectly honest, one that I wish it will not come to fruition. Think with me for a bit. There are easily more than hundred pieces of paper scattered around not only that, the majority of them are beyond incomprehensible, while another good part of them is straight out unreadable. Time has done its thing in some of them, making them unreadable to us, a consequence of suffering the undeniable and unstoppable force known as time. How in tarnation are we supposed to “create” a book in these conditions? Seriously, how are we supposed to do anything at all? No, there must be something else, something that we are missing…

  “In these conditions, do you think you could do that?”

  A simple question and of course, the answer will follow the same principle.

  “No, not really…”

  I more than was expecting this and yet, I had a sliver of hope that she had figured something out but it seems that won’t be happening. I’m not disappointed at her or anything like that, don’t get the wrong idea but, I just couldn’t not be a little sad after hearing her soft voice destroying my silver of hope. What should we do then? The more I look around the more pages I find but any solution for the problem is basically becoming more and more impossible to find. Hmm, I just picked up roughly twenty pages and to my massive surprise, the majority of them I can actually read something. Alright, I think I just figured out a plan to deal with this.

  “Look, let’s do it like this. Any piece of paper that you can read a single word, tell me where they are. Since well, you can’t pick them up so I will be doing that instead. The objective here is to gather everything that is eligible into one single place while leaving everything else in another.”

  “Hmm, hmm, I can do that. Are you thinking that not every page is needed to make the book?”

  Ah man, she really is smart, I love it! To be able to reach that conclusion so quickly, especially after giving her little information is actually quite astonishing to be honest. At the very least, I’m not able to do it. Either way, she’s right, that’s exactly what I want to do.

  “That’s correct and I hope that we are going in the right track. How can you make a book if the pages are either unreadable or they don’t make any sense at all? That’s why I want to at the very least divide what we have in front of us, this way, we will be able to better understand our predicament.”

  It’s exactly as I said. By doing this we will be dividing what is readable and whatnot, from there, we can easily see if what we have in our hands is enough to make said book or if we are screwed… With the pages that we can read I believe we can reach an agreement in a sense that we will be able to know what page is the first one and what’s the last and so on. It will be hard and extremely time consuming but we will reach it in the end. However, if I reach the conclusion that we will be basically figuring this out for a long period of time, I will be asking her to actually leave this universe and rest for a little bit. She’s consistently using magic as I said several times before and since she cannot physically touch any of the pages, there’s not much that she can do once I have divided everything. There really isn’t any reason for her to exhaust herself as she will be simply standing still waiting for me to either ask for her opinion or to simply wait until I finish. Yeah, this sounds like a good plan.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Paper noises!

  To my massive surprise, she actually agreed to what I proposed. I was actually expecting her to tell me that she’s fine and for me not to worry about her, forcing me to find a way to convince her. Well, after reaching an agreement, we processed with my perfectly thought-out plan that has no flaw to it whatsoever. It still is better than standing still doing nothing, eagerly and patiently waiting for a light to light up and show us the path with it. The world is not that kind, let alone that easy.

  Paper noises!

  But, for now everything is going well and smoothly. And yeah, I was right about something... Miss Pink Orb is simply standing still, somewhat in silence at that, as what I’m doing is only a “one man” job. My Heroic persona is bothering me quite a bit though, whispering to me to tell her to leave now so that she can rest for a little bit longer than what we planned. Maybe call it instincts instead, as they seem to be the ones telling me that she’s indeed getting tired. Getting in “touch” with the Spirit Magic Stone that she still is holding tightly, it will tell me that her magic usage is somewhat for the high side but that’s it really. I’m starting to think that she has done something that prevents me from knowing just how much magic she has. The only magic that I can “sense” is the one that is coming out of her body. Magic that is being used to control the orb, talk to me and so on. This is weird though, how can I not feel her magic energy inside of her even though I can feel her holding the Spirit Stone? Since she has physical contact with it, I should be able to sense it and yet…

  Paper noises!

  Sigh, maybe I’m exaggerating, overthinking about her situation. I'm getting worried for nothing… Either way, there sure are quite a bit of legible pieces of paper however, the ones that are not, are literally 4-1 or in other words, the vast majority of them are useless. All of these pieces of paper are the ones that I’m separating into three piles. The first pile is where only the unreadable pieces of paper are, the second pile is the pieces where I can actually read them but, for the love of me and everything that is sacred (my cute goddess included), I simply cannot understand what it’s written on them. The third pile is basically the rest as with these ones, I can actually understand what they are saying but of course, missing the context. Funny curiosity about these two piles is that, it’s a perfect 50/50 and combined they make those odds as otherwise, it would be 9-1. Anyway, enough of my random and not funny curiosities, after 10 minutes of separating I’m finally done doing so.

  “There, I’m done. Now, without any further due, let’s see what we have here…”

  As expected, this is beyond chaotic as nothing makes “sense” but at the same time makes. You have a page that starts with talking about human emotions then, the next page I pick up seems to be about a random story. The very next page that I pick up goes into an example of what I believe might be about the negative emotions that a human can have. Then the next one is yet again about a random story and so on. Yep, I cannot make out what’s first, second, third or even last. To make it even worse, I do have exactly a hundred pages in “hand”, eagerly waiting to be ordered and correctly placed.

  “Yeah, I have no clue what I’m looking at… How are we supposed to figure out the order in this chaos?”

  “Uhm, at the bottom of the pages, right at the corner, there is something written there. I also noticed that each page has a different symbol? Or is it a letter?”

  And yet again, I’ve missed something this simple… I was so focused on the content inside of the pages that I failed to see this.

  “I believe this is a letter as in this page for example you have an X, while that one over there has an X followed by an I-Ah, I got it.”

  I really should level up my “Perception” as otherwise I would have been standing here reading each and every single page until I’ve figured out the correct order. Basically, brute force it just like an ape would. Anyway, before I yap about god knows what, this “X” letter is nothing more than the number 10, while the letter “I” means 1. This is how an ancient empire wrote its numbers. Rather than actually being a number, it’s a letter that represents said number. This empire no longer exists of course and the language that belonged to said empire has suffered the consequences of evolution throughout the centuries as the current country/nation that lives in that area now uses the normal and universal language code. Or should I say universal numbers code? It matters not, this empire was nothing more than the strongest nation at that time, with close to 50% of the world under its borders. You heard that right, 50% and to make it even more unbelievable was that, slowly but surely, they were conquering more and more throughout the years. I can only imagine how the current world would be if they succeeded. Now, a good question to put out is, how and why did they fail? It’s actually simple, a Demon Lord rose up and destroyed them completely. And, I mean that. The vivid hatred The Demon Lord had towards that nation is nothing more than a simple and accurate representation of what caused said empire to fall. From what I remembered; The Demon Lord destroyed the empire in the spam of a single year only to disappear completely shortly afterwards. There are a few unproven theories that say that he was defeated. Ones say that a Hero made short of him, others say that he was betrayed while a very few say that the ruler of said empire ended him instead in the very end. All of them are just that, theories so there is no point in trying to figure out what’s true in this precise moment but, one thing I can say is that, it seems the Demon Lord was born to solely destroy the empire as they were the only that suffered casualties and destruction. All the other empires escaped said fate.

  “These letters are numbers and they are very rarely used, if at all actually. They belong to an ancient language from an empire that had half of the world under his “domain”.”

  “Oh, I think I know what you are talking about though, I never learned them…”

  “Don’t worry about that, I will explain what they mean as I put them together and in order.”

  With this in mind, with a solid plan ready to be executed, we finally seem to actually be moving forward, towards the end of this rather annoying problem. First of all, I look around for the first page or in other ones, the page with the letter “I” on it. But I’m quickly faced with another problem as I currently have two pages with the letter “I” on it. This can mean two things, one of them is that there are two “stories” written in this book and after quickly reading what these pages have, that does seem to be the case. It’s going to take a little longer but one of the stories seems to end in the “XV” page or in other words, it only has fifteen pages. On the other hand, the other one has “LXXXV”, eighty-five pages in modern terms. Time to put them in order then.

  ……..

  ……

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