kscans

Chapter 48 - Starting Rough Paper

On a day near the end of November according to Yuri’s homemade calendar, one he based on the date of his reincarnation, he returned from the outdoors grumbling about the biting cold. From his Storage, he produced the one thing he had been anticipating most of all. The raw materials for paper. Ever since his reincarnation, he had spent his days securing food and other necessities. Now, with winter fast approaching and his food gathering having reached a lull, he had finally been able to harvest Kenfa and Neri, the plants needed for papermaking. To be honest, he could have harvested them sooner, but securing warm clothes for the winter had taken priority, pushing the task back to this time. Though, as it happened, he hadn't managed to make his winter trousers in time, so he had to do the harvesting work while wearing leather pants instead.

"Still… I can finally get my hands on paper now… assuming this goes well…"

As he muttered to himself, Yuri glanced at the pile of stone tablets stacked in the corner of the room.

The truth was, Yuri Sarai, formerly Isarai Yuuri, had been an obsessive record keeper in his past life. He made it a daily habit to jot down everything he saw, heard, or thought of in a memo pad he carried at all times, then transcribe it into a journal at the end of the day. Any information he felt should be noted separately was written down in a different notebook. This had been a habit since childhood, one he seemed to recall his parents had urged him to start to correct his forgetfulness. His memory had improved a little after that, but the habit of taking notes remained with him to this day. Of course, in his later years, at the ripe old age of thirty-seven, he had evolved from paper notebooks to recording everything on a computer.

This penchant for record keeping, which had once earned him a comparison to Hideki Tojo from a former teacher, remained with him after his reincarnation. Yuri had a mountain of things he wanted to record, but he had run up against the wall of having no paper. Not that he was the type to give up on his records because of that. He had devised an alternative method, creating stone tablets with Earth Magic and carving his notes onto them. That pile of tablets had already grown into a mountain, not only encroaching on his living space but also reaching a point where their sheer weight threatened to break through the floor.

From Yuri's perspective, developing paper as a recording medium was an urgent task.

"Now then, this Kenaf, or Kenfa as it’s called here, how do I turn it into paper again? …I was so excited about it being a paper ingredient before that I never looked up the details…"

Consulting his Rural Life Guide and Appraisal skills, he learned that the bast fibers of the inner bark could be used as a raw material for paper. While the Kenfa’s bast fibers weren't as good as kozo, the raw material for Japanese washi paper, they were over five millimeters long. This meant that, like washi, they could be screened into paper without adding a bonding agent like starch. He also learned that the bast fibers could be used as a material for cloth, not just paper. However, with Mao and other materials already meeting his needs for fabric, Yuri had no intention of diverting his precious papermaking ingredients to clothing. As for the woody core, it seemed it could be heated with steam and compression molded into particle board without any adhesive. That sounded useful in its own right, so Yuri decided to store the cores separately and turn them into boards when he had the chance.

Fired up, Yuri read through the papermaking process, only to freeze mid-sentence.

"…A mold for papermaking with a wire mesh or something similar stretched across the bottom… a wire mesh?!"

He had no such thing.

"A, a substitute… a screen? …But that’s made of bamboo! There’s no bamboo here…"

There was none. At least, he had never seen any.

"Ah… oh, right, even if I don’t have a wire mesh, I could use some kind of cloth instead… ah…"

He had used it all for clothing. He didn’t even have any raw Mao fibers left.

"I could make a sieve with Earth Magic… no… that won't work. …I don't know if I can do such fine work, and even if I could, it might be too heavy and hinder the papermaking process…"

This was what you would call being completely stuck.

Faced with such a string of bad luck, the normal course of action would be to wait, to gather thin branches from a suitable plant and fashion them into a screen. But Yuri, burning with a monomaniacal obsession for paper, didn't resort to such a leisurely approach. He chose a path of overcoming everything with sheer brute force.