Chapter 85: Classifying the Reference Materials

From the burlap sack Colette had carried in, they picked out the coloured feathers and separated them.

Red, green, yellow, blue—they laid them out in small piles by feather colour.

“…We don’t know what kinds of material there are besides magical beasts and medicinal herbs, so for now let’s just make it ‘Other.’ Same as the beginners’ corner.”

Red: information on magical beasts

Green: information on medicinal herbs

Yellow: other

Having settled the colours for the classification, he looked around at the shelves in the reference room. Boards were packed in tight and haphazardly across any number of shelves.

Since Victor and the others had given their agreement, the first thing they did was move the material onto a ground cloth spread out on the floor in the corner of the room.

There wasn’t enough space to take all the material out of the shelves at once, so they decided to carry over one shelf’s worth to start with.

Ren divided the boards stacked on the ground cloth into piles, thinking as he went about how to classify them.

“Magical beasts… wolf types… forest… Do I split them by kind or by area…”

Ren thought about horn rabbits and Moss Rabbits. Both were rabbit types, but the areas they appeared in were different.

“If I spotted some other rabbit-type magical beast in the forest, would it be easier to look through a category for rabbit types, if there was one, than to search through a category called ‘forest’…”

Main category: magical beasts

Middle category (magical beasts): beast types, bird types, insect types, aquatic types, plant types, spirit types, reptile types

Small category (for beast types): dog and wolf types, boar types, rabbit types, cat types, rat types, weasel types

Detailed category (area): riverbank, grasslands, mountains, shallow forest, deep forest

“For a horn rabbit it’d be something like: main category magical beasts, middle category beast types, small category rabbit types, detailed category grasslands. You can’t tell what’s what unless the classification is fine enough…”

When he tried writing out the classification he had come up with, it looked as though beast types at least would need dividing all the way down to the detailed category.

He increased the number of ground cloths and set the material out on the main-category cloths, in piles by classification.

“For the middle category, let’s change the colour of the cloth. Beast types get brown cloth stuck to the side of the board… ah, but the cloth might fade. Then let’s stick the cloth on and divide by the number of horizontal lines as well. One horizontal line for beast types, say. And for the small category, the number of diagonal lines running from upper right to lower left. And the detailed category by the number of diagonal lines from upper left to lower right…”

While he was working out the classification, he had the others go on ahead with the job of embedding the main-category feathers, taking care not to shift the positions of the piles of boards.

He wrote out the classification scheme he had decided on as a single list.

“For medicinal herbs, going by grass or fruit or shape should do. And what they’re used for.”

Main category: medicinal herbs

Middle category: grass types, flower types, tree types, fruit types, mushroom types

Small category (use): wound recovery, detoxification, disease treatment, poison

Detailed category (area): riverbank, grasslands, mountains, shallow forest, deep forest

“Right. For Heal Leaf, embed a green feather, middle category one horizontal line, small category one diagonal line from the upper right, detailed category one diagonal line from the upper left. And it’s a grass type, so I’ll stick green cloth on too. After that I’ll make sure to carve numbers in.”

Once he had gathered the classifications into a list, the next thing he did was write things like “Beast: brown cloth, one horizontal line” on small boards and set them down near the sorted piles. Victor saw them and said to Ren:

“Ah, Loren and Fred can’t read much, so if it says ‘one horizontal line,’ I think they’d get it better if you drew one line across.”

“Ah, right…”

Hearing what Victor said, Ren stuck a scrap of brown cloth to the board with the classification method written on it and drew a single horizontal line. He went on drawing the actual lines on the boards for the other classification methods too, but once the lines ran to six or seven they were hard to make out at a glance. He settled on representing five diagonal lines with one horizontal line.

However much he classified, more material kept being carried over from the shelves, one lot after another.

Looking at the material piled up in mountains was almost enough to make his head swim—but somehow, Ren was enjoying himself.