Chapter 82: Uses for Char Cloth

Since he was at the riverbank anyway, Ren tried out the finished simple spear on the magic fish. He lured them in with the mana of his water magic, then took aim with the simple spear.

Zak.

Skewering a magic fish cleanly was rather fun. After using it over and over, though, the horn at the tip started to wobble a little.

“Ugh… the glue’s gone all soft and rubbery…”

The parts that used glue weren’t resistant to water, Ren realised.

“…If I keep it out of the river and watch out on rainy days, it should be all right, I guess…”

He let out a long breath and glanced over at the magic fish he had taken. He pulled out the branches for a campfire that he had stowed in the “Small Box.” He set stones in a circle and placed char cloth at the center.

“…Why is it that magic fish somehow taste better grilled over a fire… I wonder why…”

He could keep branches in a scorched state inside the “Small Box,” so by rights he ought to be able to grill magic fish in there too—and yet magic fish grilled over the flames of a campfire somehow felt like they tasted better.

As he reached for a Moss-Red Cockatol tail feather to strike sparks, Ren froze.

His hand was pitch black.

“Ah…”

The fingertips that had touched the char cloth were black. If he grabbed the Moss-Red Cockatol’s red tail feather like this, he would dirty the feather.

“…I got a good handful of it…”

To get the soot off his fingertips, he rubbed them against the surface of the board he had set down. A short horizontal line was drawn on the board.

He looked at that line for a little while, then pinched up the char cloth again in his fingertips and pressed it to the board. When he dragged it across, it wrote.

“Could I use char cloth to take notes…”

Putting up with his hands going black, he folded the char cloth small to make a corner.

He couldn’t write fine characters the way he could with a quill pen. The letters came out large, and on the small board he could barely fit a single word. On top of that, black powder came flaking off what he had written and blew away in the wind.

Next he rolled the char cloth up from one edge into a thin cylinder. He tried writing with the rolled char cloth as though it were the nib of a quill pen, but the rolled cloth bent limply, and wherever he put pressure it crumbled away.

“It goes all floppy, and my hands are pitch black…”

Looking at his blackened palm, he tilted his head.

“Could I make it thin and firm, like a quill pen…”

He tried winding char cloth around the shaft of a three-eyed eagle quill pen. When he bound it in place with thread, wrapping the shaft and all, the nib ended up with a thin roll of char cloth jutting out of it. Testing it on the board, he found he could write a finer line than before. The char cloth at the nib still crumbled away quickly, though.

Wanting to do something about the crumbling, he stuck the char-cloth-wrapped quill pen into the small box that held the glue he had left in its melted state.

He soaked it in the glue for a while, then let it dry.

He had thought that if the surface hardened with glue, the char cloth wound around the quill pen would be less likely to crumble—but when he went to test it after the glue had dried, the nib had been coated in glue as well. He scraped the nib down a little with a knife and tried again, and it was the smoothest writing he had managed yet. When he sharpened the charcoal nib to a point, he could write a fine line too. And compared with using char cloth that hadn’t been soaked in glue, the line came out firm and solid, with hardly any black powder coming off.

When he touched a fingertip to the lines he had written, they barely smudged unless he pressed hard.

“This might work… I can take notes without using ink…”

Out in the field there had been times when he couldn’t jot down something he had noticed, because he was somewhere it was awkward to get the ink out.

Holding the char-cloth-wrapped quill pen and a board, he stood up and tried writing on the board on his feet. If he braced the edge of the board against his stomach so it wouldn’t move, he could write without the letters going crooked.

“I might be able to take notes in the middle of the forest and everything. This is great!”

Unlike ink, what he wrote would go pitch black and become unreadable if it were rubbed hard—but for carrying around in the “Small Box,” that was no problem. If he needed to, he could just write it out again in ink once he got home.

Ren, delighted, wound char cloth around his other quill pens as well.