Chapter 6: The Diary
Day 1, Night
At some point, I must have fallen asleep. I know this because the world was utterly silent by the time I jerked back to wakefulness. I blinked a couple of times before slowly sitting up.
The world was still blanketed by darkness, though my eyes had long since adjusted to it. Was it over? Was it safe to go out now? I didn’t know, and I wasn’t eager to find out. I looked around. I could tell immediately that the cottage wasn’t in the best of conditions. There were holes on the floor where some of the boards had snapped during the quake. The wooden beam next to the cupboard looked dangerously bent. One side of the wall shelf had come loose, and the jars were strewn all across the floor. Miraculously, none of them had shattered during the terrible quake. It was a good thing. Considering how jumpy I was feeling right now, waking up to a cockroach on my face would definitely have pushed me over the edge.
Miss Plant was still at the table, her posture barely changed since the last time I saw her. It looked like she was asleep, but of course there was no way to tell. Was sleeping even a thing for an eldritch horror? Regardless, I felt no desire to disturb her. In fact, I didn’t feel like doing anything until light returns to the world.
If it ever.
I lay back down on the mattress and tried to get some shut-eye, but unfortunately my mind was fully awake. Today’s events just would not stop replaying themselves in my head no matter how many times I counted sheep. Just this morning, I had believed that this world was a strange but idyllic place where the only threat to my life was my own lack of skills. Less than half a day later, I had been struck by a supernatural disaster that felt like the divine judgment of god himself. To say I felt humbled would be an understatement. Whatever miniscule confidence I managed to muster after reacquiring my possessions had been annihilated down to the atoms, and it was in no hurry of recovering any time soon.
Guess I know why this place is so “peaceful” now. I would never have guessed that the answer was “giant murder cloud that annihilates nearly everything in its path” though.
Generally, there were two ways to deal with a natural disaster. One, you find a shelter and stay there until the disaster has passed. Two, you just don’t live where a natural disaster would strike. Hiding in a shelter until it is safe was a perfectly fine method on Earth, but on this planet there were a couple of glaring problems with it. If you didn’t detect the cloud fast enough to get to the nearest shelter, you were dead. If you weren’t anywhere close to a shelter when the cloud shows up, you were twice as dead. In other words, no shelter, no life.
Moreover, whatever power or loophole that prevented a shelter from being crushed clearly wasn’t omnipotent either. The cottage had visibly strained under pressure when the cloud was passing through us. Even with repairs, I could not imagine it holding out for many more times before it finally collapsed.
We can’t stay here, I realized then. We need to move to an area where the cloud cannot reach, or it’s only a matter of time before we die.
Of course, there was the possibility that the cloud avalanche was a super rare phenomenon, something that only happened once in a blue moon or something. No way this place could be anything but a wasteland if the lawn mower kept showing up every few days, right? I didn’t hold out much hope though, not least because I had read way too many web stories to believe that I could get away with being the protagonist of Stardew Valley instead of Green Hell. First day trap-dagger, second day giant murder cloud? Yeah, the signs were about obvious as it gets. I needed to come up with a plan, needed to communicate better with Miss Plant, needed to know if light would ever return to the world, I needed to…
The more I tried not to think about everything, the more I thought about them. A while later, when the knot in my chest had grown to the point where it was suffocating, I finally let out a sigh and sat up again. If sleep was going to continue eluding me, then I might as well do something productive until it returned. I looked at my makeshift pillow, the bag.
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I already knew that the bag was nothing special, but just in case, I went through every pocket for the third time of the day and performed some weight experiments with it. The result was exactly what I expected: nothing. So, I set it aside. The dagger, I wasn't going to touch the dagger until things had brightened up both literally and figuratively. Handling a normal knife in the dark would be dangerous enough. This one? I might as well walk out of the front door now and save myself some trouble. That left only the notebook. Without further ado, I pulled the leather-bound book out of the bag and examined it closely. My first—excuse me, I mean second impression was that it was rather bulky. It was about the size of say, a Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch, hard cover? As a book it would’ve been the ideal size for bookworms anywhere, but a notebook? Eh, it felt a tad excessive. I gave it a sniff. Smells like fantasy leather and paper, nothing out of the ordinary here.
I opened the notebook and squinted at the paper. Each page except the first and the last was a ruled paper. After flipping through a couple of pages, I let them fall through my fingers in hopes that one of them might stand out to me. Unfortunately, despite the near non-existent lighting, I was pretty sure that the pages were all empty. Undeterred, I examined the sides of the book next. Maybe there were some sort of hidden lines that joined together to form a secret code? There was still nothing though. I even tried tapping the cover to see if there was something like a hidden compartment or a switch, but of course that didn’t work. The notebook, for all intents and purposes, looked like an ordinary notebook..
Not gonna lie, a bit of disappointment and desperation crept into my heart then. Surely this can’t actually be an ordinary notebook, right? I thought angrily to myself. Or is that the point? It’s the one ordinary item among all the other extraordinary items, which is why it’s “special”? If that’s true, I swear… Still, I didn’t give up. Short of holding the papers close to a flame or painting its surface with charcoal to test for invisible text, both of which methods I currently lacked the tools to test, I believed I had gone through all the mundane checking methods I could think of. This meant it was time to experiment using more… fantastical methods. So, I held the book with both hands, sucked in a deep breath and said,
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“Status.”
… Nothing happened.
“Character screen?”
Still nothing.
“Interface… menu… option… start… on… unlock… abracadabra… open sesame… jimahoimoon (still open sesame, but in Cantonese)...”
It should be obvious to those who was even the slightest bit familiar with the genre, but I was hoping to activate a status screen. Normally, invoking the right words would cause it to appear on the notebook, and I even tried repeating them in other languages. No one ever said that the key word must be in English, right? Unfortunately, the experiment was a total failure. Not only did the notebook remain exactly the same, I didn’t even get an obtrusive blue screen that, in my opinion, should’ve killed most story characters a million times over when they popped up in mid-battle. In the end, I was seething with so much frustration that I had to take a moment to calm down and reorganize my thoughts a little.
Maybe I was going about this the wrong way. Come to think of it, why did I think that a status screen would exist, much less present itself in a notebook? Nothing I saw so far so much as hinted that LitRPG was a thing in this world. I was just projecting my desires onto the experiment and testing an idea that, realistically speaking, had about as much chance of succeeding as me waking up from this nightmare. I should return to the basics. What is a notebook? An object that people used to write things and record stuff. I had dismissed this at the beginning because the notebook hadn’t come with a pen, but maybe…
I flipped open the notebook and turned to the first page. Staring at the first horizontal line, I thought, write something. Anything.
The words started appearing on their own, and I broke into my widest grin yet since I became stranded in this world.
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I found out a couple of things after experimenting for what felt like hours. First, the obvious: I could record any thought on the paper in any language simply by verbalizing them mentally. For example, if I thought, “My name is Kaylan Chin.” inside my head, then the entire sentence including the punctuation mark would appear on the paper. By default, the sentence would always appear in the first available space unless I willed it otherwise such as leaving a line to start a new paragraph, or overlapping a new sentence with an existing sentence. There was no reason I would ever want to do that, of course, but it was good to know. Moreover, I could edit the text however I liked. I could bold them, highlight them, change them to cursive, change their font color and more as long as I could visualize the changes.
I could even select a multiple lines or paragraphs and dump them to a different page just by willing it to happen, though I had to be careful not to verbalize the action or it would appear as text instead. You would be surprised how easy it was to mix up the two. Still, executing the operations was far easier than I expected even in near total darkness. With a bit of practice, I imagined that using the notebook would become as easy as breathing.
Text wasn’t the only thing I could record either. When I tried imagining two of my favorite childhood characters, Doraemon and Nobita inside my head, the notebook immediately started drawing the images in its paper—I said draw because I could see the images fading into the page rapidly—with picture-perfect details. It was incredible. It was like a camera, except it took snapshots of my mind instead of the physical world. And I could use it like a camera, it just took a bit of effort to do so. When I stared at the darkened wall beside my mattress and tried to memorize it with the intent of capturing it within the notebook, one of the pages immediately started to turn ink black. To say that this was immensely useful would be an understatement. In the future, if I ever needed to record something but could not rely on my pea brain to recall the details perfectly, then the notebook would fill in that role perfectly.
As with all things, the notebook wasn’t without its flaws. For one, it was quite heavy. It wasn’t noticeable if you were just holding it for a couple of minutes, but half an hour? An hour? I actually exercised my arms quite frequently because I understood just how important they were in my line of work, but they still grew sore after just a short while. This could be a problem if I was outside and I had to carry the book for an extended period of time, which leads to my second point. During my experiment, after I became sore and decided to adopt a more comfortable position, I lay sideways on the mattress with the notebook open next to me. However, I was surprised to find that nothing was happening when I tried to resume the experiment. I soon realized that the notebook was unusable unless I was touching it directly. It wouldn’t work if I covered my hands in say, my shirt before grabbing the book either. I tried gaming the system by placing a hair in the book and see if it counted as direct physical contact, but unfortunately it didn’t count. It was a great shame.
What this meant was that I couldn’t just put the notebook in my bag and record text and images remotely. I must either carry it with my hand—not even under the arm because there would be no skin-to-skin contact, and also because it’s just plain disgusting—or strap it to my body or something. I shouldn’t need to point out the problems with both solutions. There had to be a better way to do this, but I was also starting to feel tired. Oh well. It was a problem for future Kaylan to solve.
Last but not least, the notebook only had so much space. It was pretty big, and it had at least a couple hundred pages in it, but I had no doubt that I would use it all eventually. The good news was that I could organize and delete some content should the need arises. The bad news was that it was only a temporary fix to the “storage space” problem. Still, this was a magical fantasy world. Maybe I could find something to improve its capacity in the future.
Oh, there was one last thing I almost forgot to mention. It felt a bit silly, to be honest, but when I realized that the notebook required skin-to-skin contact to activate, my mind immediately went to the ▇▇▇▇▇▇. Now, it might just be a coincidence, but what if ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇
Er, what was I thinking about again? Never mind. I’m more or less done with experimenting for now, so there’s only one thing left to do.
I’m going to write a diary.
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I must have fallen asleep again at some point. When I woke up again, light was streaming through the gaps and bathing the entire cottage in light. There was no morning confusion this time. I immediately jumped to my feet—nearly losing my grip on the diary as I did so—grabbed my stuff, and ran up to Miss Plant as quickly as I could. The eldritch horror was back at the front door, though she hadn’t opened it yet. It was almost as if she had been waiting for me to get up. I muttered a quick sorry, she tilted her head as if in acknowledgement, and I reached out toward the handle. I paused.
“Do you want to do the honors?” I asked while gesturing between her and the door.
Tilt.
“That doesn’t answer my question. Can you nod your head if your answer is yes, and shake your head if it’s no?” I nodded and shook my head to connect the words to the gesture.
Tilt.
“Still doesn’t answer my question, but uh, you’re… a lot more responsive than you were yesterday. Did something happen?”
Tilt.
“Well, whatever. I guess I’ll do it then. Okay.” I sucked in a deep breath. “Here goes nothing.”
While holding the diary to my chest like a talisman, I slowly pushed open the door…
… and came face to face with a world of gray and ash.