Chương 25: Chapter 24

The silence inside the shack felt almost luxurious after Hua City. Ling Tian stood just inside the crooked doorway for several seconds and listened to nothing more complicated than the wind slipping through gaps in the walls. No merchants shouting over one another. No cart wheels grinding across stone. No chickens making repeated attempts at organized escape. The contrast was immediate enough that some of the tension left his shoulders without permission. He closed the door and crossed toward the splintered table.

The newly purchased supplies waited exactly where he had placed them. One roll of treated paper, two sealed jars of dark ink, a rigid metal-nib pen, and a small packet of replacement nibs sat against the rough wood. To any proper scholar, the collection would have looked painfully basic. To Ling Tian, it possessed the same emotional appeal as a clean workstation, a functioning spreadsheet, and a meeting canceled before anyone had prepared slides. Order. Tools. Documentation.

Civilization had finally reached the shack. He dragged the rickety stool away from the wall and sat down. The table immediately shifted beneath his forearms, one uneven leg scraping against the packed dirt floor. Ling Tian stared at it.

"Do not start." The table remained structurally questionable but otherwise cooperative. He reached for the paper, then noticed the thick gray layer coating the back half of the workspace. Ling Tian had apparently lived in the shack long enough that dirt had begun blending into the architecture. That was tolerable when the surface held a chipped bowl. It was less tolerable when he intended to place expensive paper and wet ink on it. He swept one hand across the rear corner. Dust rolled away.

Something beneath it shifted. Ling Tian stopped. His fingers had caught against a small wooden box wedged behind two cracked clay bowls. He pulled it free and studied the lid. One hinge had nearly rusted through, dust filled the shallow carvings along the edges, and the brittle latch resisted before finally opening with a dry click. Inside lay several old animal-hair brushes, a cracked ink stone, a dried fragment of ink, and a handful of yellowed writing sheets. Ling Tian went still. A memory surfaced.

Not Aditya's. The original boy's. His mother sat beside a weak cooking fire, one hand wrapped gently around his much smaller fingers as she corrected the angle of a brush. Slow characters appeared across cheap paper. The boy complained that writing was harder than climbing trees, and somewhere beside them his father laughed. The memory shifted. His mother became thinner. Then absent. His father continued the lessons when time allowed, correcting crooked characters after returning from long days on Crimson Peak.

His hands had always smelled faintly of soil, crushed leaves, and medicinal sap. Ling Tian looked down at the box. The memories were incomplete, but the conclusion was not. The original Ling Tian had not been illiterate. His parents had made sure of that. For a household poor enough that one failed gathering trip could threaten the next week's meals, the effort must have cost them. Paper cost money. Ink cost money. Time spent teaching a child instead of working cost even more.

Ling Tian ran one thumb along the cracked wooden edge.

"That explains a few things." The supplies had probably remained untouched after his father died. The original boy had little reason to use them. Survival demanded firewood, herbs, food, and avoiding the mountain's many opportunities for premature death. There were no accounts to maintain when the household barely possessed enough assets to justify counting. Ling Tian glanced from the old box toward his freshly purchased stationery.

A smaller, meaner part of his mind immediately began calculating unnecessary expenditure. He had already owned brushes. Technically. He had already possessed paper. Technically. He had just descended an entire mountain and paid good copper for items that apparently existed six feet from his bed. His internal accountant objected. Briefly. Ling Tian picked up one of the old brushes and bent the hair gently. Several stiff strands snapped. He set it down.

The paper was brittle enough that one corner flaked away beneath his thumb, while the cracked ink stone would require grinding the dried ink with water before every writing session. Usable, perhaps, if the alternative were nothing. Thankfully the alternative was no longer nothing. Technically existing inventory did not automatically qualify as functioning inventory. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

That distinction had saved entire companies from extremely embarrassing balance sheets. Ling Tian placed the old box beside the table instead of throwing it away. The contents still mattered. They confirmed that he could write the local language properly, and more importantly, they belonged to people the original Ling Tian had loved. That alone was enough reason not to treat them like trash. He returned his attention to the blank paper. The real problem remained. What language?

The obvious answer was the local script. The original boy's memories supplied enough literacy that Ling Tian could write it without difficulty. Which made it completely unsuitable. Anyone in Hua City with basic education could read it. The ledger would contain the most dangerous information Ling Tian possessed.

Not vague observations or a few cultivation notes, but everything: how he isolated microscopic quantities of Earth Qi, where he opened the meridian gate, how he routed the energy through his body, which sections created resistance, what happened after the first deposit, what changed after the second, and how the original boy had died. If someone found those notes and understood them, they would possess the closest thing Ling Tian had to intellectual property.

More importantly, they might understand what made his cultivation method different. That was unacceptable. Ling Tian leaned back slightly and considered English first. It was the obvious foreign-language option. Aditya had used it professionally often enough that technical writing would not be difficult, and no native of this world should recognize the Latin alphabet. Should. Ling Tian disliked that word. He had already transmigrated once.

That single event had permanently damaged the statistical credibility of phrases such as impossible coincidence. If one person from Earth could appear here, Ling Tian had absolutely no evidence proving there could not be another. And if another transmigrator existed, English was probably the worst language he could choose for security. His webnovel-poisoned imagination supplied the scene immediately. Ancient shack. Mysterious hidden ledger. Another transmigrator opens it. Wait. This is English.

Ling Tian refused to become the mysterious predecessor in somebody else's story. English was rejected. Javanese came next. From a secrecy standpoint, it was excellent. The chance of another Earth-born anomaly also being able to read Javanese would be drastically lower, and the language felt personal enough that writing in it would come naturally. Speaking it would. Technical documentation was another matter. Ling Tian could converse comfortably in Javanese.

He could joke, argue, complain about traffic, talk to family, and navigate ordinary life without difficulty. But the ledger required precise language for anatomy, force distribution, heat, uncertainty, observed correlation, and experimental procedure. Most of that vocabulary had entered his life through Indonesian or English. He could work around the gaps. Probably. That was not good enough.

A cultivation record capable of deciding whether he lived or died should not contain the equivalent of the heavy magic thing moved through the arm somewhat badly because the writer lacked the vocabulary to be more precise. Ling Tian rubbed his chin. Then the correct answer became obvious. Bahasa Indonesia. The more he considered it, the better the choice became.

It was the language of his formal education, administrative paperwork, corporate reports, technical explanations, government forms, accounting standards, and more medical terminology than Ling Tian had ever wanted to encounter. It also used the Latin alphabet. To a local reader accustomed to the written script of this world, an Indonesian page would look alien long before the meaning became relevant. That did not make it unbreakable.

Nothing was unbreakable if someone possessed enough examples, enough time, and enough motivation. Ling Tian did not need to defeat an immortal cryptographer studying the ledger for fifty years. He needed a thief, gatherer, wandering cultivator, or curious visitor to find the document, glance at it, and conclude that the child living in this shack had suffered some deeply private form of madness. Bahasa Indonesia could accomplish that. Ling Tian nodded. Decision made. Then another problem occurred to him. Names.

If he wrote recognizable local terms such as Earth Qi, Wind Qi, Dantian, Crimson Peak, or specific herb names beside the unknown foreign text, those repeated references might provide contextual clues. Most people would still understand nothing, but leaving unnecessary anchors inside an encrypted document seemed lazy. He could solve that cheaply. Earth Qi became E1 in the technical sections. Wind became W1. Fire became F1. Water became A1. Verdant Qi became V1.

The substitutions were not sophisticated cryptography. They did not need to be. The goal was layered inconvenience. An unfamiliar alphabet, an unfamiliar language, and deliberately neutral labels would make casual interpretation difficult enough for the threats Ling Tian could realistically anticipate. Satisfied, he picked up the metal pen. The brass body rested comfortably between his fingers. Then he discovered another problem. He had barely written anything substantial by hand in years.

Most of Aditya's adult life had happened behind keyboards. Reports were typed. Spreadsheets were typed. Emails were typed. Even shopping lists usually lived inside a phone. Ling Tian stared at the pen. Then at the blank paper.

"This may be ugly." On the positive side, terrible handwriting constituted an additional layer of encryption. He uncorked the first ink jar. The sharp smell of soot and binding oil rose into the cold air. Ling Tian dipped the metal nib carefully, immediately went too deep, corrected the angle, and wiped the excess against the rim. He did not risk the new paper. Instead, he pulled one of the least brittle sheets from his parents' old box and made a test stroke. Too thick. Second stroke. Too dry halfway through.

He adjusted the angle and tried again. Better. Ling Tian wrote several short words in Bahasa Indonesia. The letters looked terrible, though not quite as catastrophic as he feared. His handwriting had always been bad, but the rigid nib behaved far more predictably than a brush. After several minutes, some forgotten muscle memory began returning. Not elegant. Not beautiful. Readable. That was enough.

He pulled the treated paper across the table and flattened the first section with the old ink stone on one side and a smooth river rock on the other. Then he considered the title. His first instinct was something clinically dull. Cultivation Observation Record. Accurate. Also potentially identifiable if anyone ever translated it. Ling Tian smiled faintly. He wrote two Indonesian words instead. BUKU BESAR The Big Ledger. Appropriate. He started to write the date and stopped.

Ling Tian did not actually know the exact official date. That was slightly embarrassing. The original boy had rarely needed to track the calendar precisely, and Aditya had spent his first week in this world occupied by slightly more urgent matters than finding out which day of which month it was. Inventing precision would defeat the entire purpose. Ling Tian adjusted the entry. * Day 1: First controlled E1 deposit.

* Everything else could be tracked relative to that event until he learned the local calendar properly. Better. He began writing. The first major section concerned the original Ling Tian's death. Failure parameters came before successful procedure. Success created confidence. Failure established limits. Ling Tian documented the inherited memories as accurately as he could.

The original boy had opened himself too widely and attempted to absorb multiple elemental energies at once, allowing incompatible quantities of Wind, Fire, Water, and other ambient Qi to enter meridian channels unprepared for the load. He resisted the temptation to make the explanation cleaner than the evidence. He did not know exact quantities. He did not know exact internal pressures. He did not know which meridian failed first.

The memory contained pain, heat, pressure, uncontrolled movement, and catastrophic internal damage. So that was what the ledger recorded. Ling Tian separated the entry into what he knew and what he merely suspected. Multiple elemental intake was known. Uncontrolled volume was known. Severe internal pain immediately before collapse was known. Meridian overload and structural rupture seemed likely, while the exact sequence of failure remained unknown. That distinction pleased him.

The original cultivation manual probably would have described the same event as imbalance, deviation, insufficient harmony, or failure to comprehend some philosophical principle. Ling Tian preferred a record willing to admit ignorance. At the bottom of the section, he wrote a simple warning in larger letters. DO NOT REPEAT MULTI-ELEMENT INTAKE. He underlined it twice.