Ascendance of a Bookworm (LN) - Volume 2.4 - Chapter 5

Researching Color-Making 

Rows of bottles containing colored ink were laid out in a small glass rainbow, and attached to each bottle was a tiny wooden board describing the combination of oil and materials that had formed the color. Josef was in the process of relocating them to a shallow wooden box. 

We had stopped experimenting for the day since Josef’s and Heidi’s arms were tired from hours of mixing, lunchtime was approaching, and the only two diptychs we had on hand were completely full—not even borrowing Lutz’s diptych after mine had run out of space had been enough to contain all of our data. I looked over both while thinking about the results. 

“It’s not great that the color is near impossible to predict.” 

“But we’ve figured out some general trends, eh? And it’s sooo nice that we have all the results labeled so clearly like this. I’m glad you were around and know how to write, Lady Myne! You’re the best!” Heidi exclaimed, beaming as she looked over at my diptych. She could understand a few words and letters that were relevant to her job, but she was still basically illiterate. In the past, she’d had no way to record the results of her experiments, having to instead rely entirely on her memory. 

“I think you being able to memorize such complicated test results is a lot more impressive, personally.” 

“Sadly, Heidi only seems to have a good memory when it comes to her experiments. It’s far from perfect,” Josef said with slumped shoulders. 

Lutz looked at me and gave a teasing grin. “That goes for Myne too. She only puts in this much effort and dedication when books are involved.” 

Lutz and Josef seemed to have bonded over this, and were patting each other’s backs in a show of consolation. 

It’s nice to find people you can relate to. Each day gets a little more fun. 

“Okay, I’ll have these test results compiled by the day after tomorrow.” 

“Thankee, thankee. I don’t know how to write, so that’s all up to you.” 

Heidi and I shook hands and exchanged a smile before going our separate ways. I wanted to go straight home to start compiling our results, but Gil pulled on my sleeve while acting kind of hesitant. 

“What’s wrong, Gil?” 

“Sister Myne, I want a diptych too...” Gil murmured, his eyes lowered. That reminded me—I had said I’d make one for him once spring came since he had learned to read. 

“Okay, let’s stop by Johann’s smithy to order a stylus for you. Then I can go home and compile the results.” 

The ink workshop wasn’t too far from the smithy since both were in Craftsman’s Alley. Johann might not be happy to see us since we’d be visiting right before lunch break, but we headed for the smithy nonetheless. 

“Good morning. Is Johann here?” 

The foreman glanced away from the customer he was dealing with to look over at us. The second he saw me, he stifled a guffaw and forced out a “Heya there” before gesturing toward an empty seat. 

“I’ll go get Johann for you,” he said. “Heeey, Gutenberg! Your patron’s here!” 

“Pfff!” Lutz and Gil hurriedly covered their mouths to stop themselves from laughing. It seemed that “Gutenberg” had stuck as a nickname for Johann in the smithy. 

“Foreman, I told you to stop calling me that!” 

I thought “Gutenberg” was quite a respectable name, but Johann clearly didn’t like it too much. He came bursting out from the back, meeting the foreman with narrowed eyes and a big frown. 

“Good morning, Johann.” 

“Oh, Lady Myne. Welcome.” 

“Sorry for coming right before lunch. Do you have time to take an order?” 

“...I’m still not done with your last order,” Johann said with an uncomfortable expression. He was still working on the additional letter types I had ordered, but that wasn’t a huge deal since the High Priest already put a stop to movable type printing. Johann could take his time making a ton of them over the next couple of years. 

“Please prioritize this order. I would like you to make a stylus for Gil, just like the ones I ordered previously.” 

“Absolutely!” Johann said, his face beaming. He even pumped a fist into the air. “It’s been so long since I made anything but letter types... So, so long...” he murmured, an emotional tear dripping down his cheek. 

...Honestly, I feel kinda bad now. Sorry, Johann. 

Since I was his only patron, he had apparently been making nothing but letter type after letter type. And on top of that, not just the foreman, but now all of his coworkers made fun of him for his “Gutenberg” title. 

Maybe I should pop in every now and again just to give him different things to do. 

“I’ll try to give you orders for things other than letter types soon.” I needed an iron for the wax stencils, as well as a stylus and a file for the mimeograph. There were a lot of things I would want his help to make, but all of them were tools for printing. 

“I’m very much looking forward to working on something other than letter types.” 

Johann’s smile at getting the stylus order made me feel just a little guilty; no matter how I looked at it, he wasn’t going to escape his fate as a Gutenberg. 

Having ordered Gil’s stylus, we left the smithy just as fourth bell rang to signify noon. 

“You’re going home, right, Myne?” 

“Uh huh.” 

“I’m hungry and wanna get back to the store as soon as possible. Get on, let’s hurry.” Lutz crouched down for me to get on his back. Apparently he’d end up getting less food if he wasn’t back soon. 

Knowing that I would be dead weight and just slow him down otherwise, I climbed onto his back without protest. He stood up and dashed off in a half-run to the plaza where our well was. 

“You stay inside and start compiling the test results after lunch. I’ve gotta go check up on the Myne Workshop and give Master Benno a report on all this. Don’t go outside, okay?” Lutz set me down in the plaza and put his diptych into my hands before immediately running off toward the Gilberta Company. It looked like he really was worried about his lunch. 

After seeing him off, I turned to look at Damuel and Gil, who were both blinking in surprise. “Sir Damuel, Gil, thank you for accompanying me. You may both return to the temple, since I won’t be going outside any more today.” 

“Alright. You’ll want to come to the temple tomorrow, I take it?” 

“Yes. I would really like to go to the ink workshop, but Rosina would be very unhappy if I missed too much harspiel practice.” 

I put Lutz’s diptych into my tote basket and climbed the stairs home all alone. “I’m home,” I whispered while quietly opening the door, though there was no escaping the creaking of the rusty hinges. 

“Welcome home, Myne. You’re back early,” Mom said after I slid inside. She was probably preparing lunch, given that she was standing in front of the hearth. 

“Mom, how’s Kamil? Is he sleeping? Did I wake him up?” I asked, glancing over at the bedroom. 

“Don’t worry, he’s fine,” Mom replied with a small smile and nod. 

I snuck into the bedroom to have a look at Kamil’s face, then put my stuff down and washed my hands before eating lunch with Mom. We were only halfway through when Kamil started to cry in his tiny voice. Mom hurriedly finished her food and sped over to him. 

“Sorry, Myne, but could you clean up for me?” 

I cleared away our dishes before starting to copy the results of today’s experiments from the diptychs onto my notepad made of failed paper. The seemingly nonsensical results began to take a more sensible form once I had them all lined up together. Linseed oil tended to make blue colors, mische green colors, pedgen red colors, and eise yellow colors. Turm would make seemingly random colors, but they all had pastel tones. 

“Hmm. There are some exceptions to these rules, but I think I’ve gotten a grasp on how they work.” 

We could make a surprisingly wide range of colors with these combinations. All it took was listing what made which oils change to which color. 

“You look like you’re thinking hard, Myne. What are you working on?” Mom asked when she returned from the bedroom with Kamil, who was wrapped in what resembled a long baby sling. His eyes were wide open, maybe because he just filled himself up on milk. 

“I’m planning a picture book for Kamil. It’s going to need pretty, colored ink, which I’m trying to make now.” 

“You’re making it from scratch? That sounds like it’ll take a while.” 

“It will, I think. How’s Kamil today?” I asked while stroking his head. He stared at my face without blinking. I couldn’t compare to Delia’s overwhelming big sister power, but Kamil not crying over my presence was good enough for me. 

“Kamil, Kamil. It’s me, Myne, your big sister.” 

I spent some time playing with Kamil, until eventually his eyes began to droop again. I watched Mom take him back to bed, then looked back at the list I had made. 

“Oh?” While looking through the oil names, I realized that the oh-so-familiar parue oil wasn’t included. “It might be worth experimenting with that, too. I wonder what would happen? Maybe I should bring some to the workshop. And also, we need to test to see whether the ink we’ve made changes color when put on paper, not to mention whether it lasts over time. Experimenting with layering colors will be important too.” I wrote down everything I wanted to investigate that I could think of. These were things I would have to ask Heidi about next time I saw her. 

The next day, I went to the temple for my daily harspiel practice, then helped the High Priest. In the afternoon, I spent time with Delia, who was always bored and listless while Dirk was in the orphanage. I had Lutz get some paper and brushes from the workshop; tomorrow we would be bringing them to the ink workshop to test ink on. 

And so the next day arrived. Gil, Damuel, Lutz, and I headed to the ink workshop with the paper, brushes, and the rest of our parue oil from the winter. Heidi was pacing in front of the workshop. It wasn’t hard to imagine that she had been dying waiting for us. The second she saw us, her face lit up and she gave a big wave. 

“Morning, Lady Myne. It’s so good to see you!” 

“Morning, Heidi. Here’s the chart of compiled data.” I showed her the research I had compiled as soon as we were in the workshop. She peered at it with excitement, but then slumped over sadly. 

“I can tell what some of the stuff is, but I can’t read most of this.” 

“Also, I had a thought while compiling this...” I began listing out all of the things I wanted to try, which earned me a big, eager nod from Heidi. 

“I didn’t include any parue oil since you can only harvest them in the winter. This may make for some interesting results. Let’s try it out right away!” 

Heidi and Josef began mixing various materials into the parue oil I had brought. She tried out red materials and he tried out blue ones; they mixed them, ground them, and stirred them a ton, but there were no weird changes. Both simply turned into the color of the material put into them. 

“Both batches of parue oil turned into the colors we expected. That’s incredible,” I said, looking at the finished ink with wide eyes. I had seen so many weird changes of color that simple, logical results were enough to impress me. 

Heidi let out an impressed whistle at the finished ink. “The colors are real vibrant too. If only we could get parues outside of winter, huh?” 

Heidi was right. Parue oil couldn’t be used liberally since parues could only be gathered on sunny winter days. The oil was great, but sadly not suited for high volume production. 

While Heidi and I were sadly consoling each other, Josef was already preparing for the next experiment. “Let’s try getting the ink we’ve made on paper, yeah?” 

Heidi helped Josef bring out all of the ink we had made the other day. I leaned over to Lutz as I watched them prepare. 

“Hey, Lutz. Do you think we could make paper out of parue trees?” I asked, full of hope after seeing how well the parue oil worked for this. Trombes were feyplants and they made good paper, so maybe parue trees would make for good material too. 

“Nah, that’ll never work. Those trees just melt and vanish when fire touches them. They’d disappear if you tried boiling their wood, and there’s no way we could peel their bark.” 

“...Are parue trees really that weird?” Having never gone to the forest during the winter, I had yet to see a parue tree. I’d heard about how they’re strange, beautiful, and only appear on sunny winter mornings, but other than that I really didn’t know anything about them. 

“Lady Myne, everything’s ready.” 

At Heidi’s call, I beckoned Gil over so that he could test the ink on the paper using his brush. I had brought several sheets of poorly made volrin and trombe that we wouldn’t miss. We weren’t going to be making picture books out of trombe paper, but it was still worth seeing how it handled the ink. 

“...Oof.” 

Unsurprisingly, the ink even changed color depending on the type of paper it was put on. The colors stayed pretty much the same on the trombe paper, but ended up more dull on the volrin paper, though it wasn’t really noticeable unless you compared the two side by side. 

It’s fine, I tried telling myself. But as time passed and the ink dried, the colors just kept getting more and more dull. 

“I think we’ll need to make other kinds of paper and experiment with them too.” I could have wept as I compared the colors on the trombe and volrin paper. Lutz, on the other hand, just gave a light shrug. 

“Volrin is the only kind of paper we’re gonna be using for a while, so why not just make colors that look good on that?” 

He was right. The Myne Workshop was only making trombe paper and volrin paper at the moment. If we wanted to make the picture books any time soon, we’d need to focus on making colors that were suited to volrin paper. 

“This red color was really pretty before, but now that it’s on paper and has dried, it’s more like a dark-blackish red. It would be good for drawing blood.” 

“We don’t need a color that’s only gonna be good for that!” Lutz yelled. 

I pursed my lips. Maybe we would need an ink that’s only good for blood. It wasn’t uncommon for religious myths to get bloody. 

“...This stuff’s real tricky,” Heidi murmured as she glared at the changed ink, her arms crossed. “I think I understand why art workshops keep their paint recipes secret.” It really wasn’t easy to make colored ink independently. 

According to Benno, paint production wasn’t bound by any magic contracts, so any workshop could make it as they pleased, but the production methods themselves were kept secret by the workshops and none were on sale in the lower city. The workshops making paint for art-loving nobles delivered their goods directly—I knew this from Rosina, who had been the attendant of one such art-loving shrine maiden. You couldn’t get certain colors anywhere except from the workshop that made them, so apparently Christine had favored a number of workshops at once. 

“Lady Myne, let’s figure out why it’s changing colors.” 

“Like I said, the results are the important thing here.” I could appreciate her dedication to discovery, but my goal was to make picture books for Kamil; I didn’t have the time to waste on superfluous research. I wanted usable colored ink as soon as possible. 

“Let’s try layering the colors next. Gil, would you?” 

“As you wish, Sister Myne.” Gil drew a blue line across the colors we had already put on the paper, and the overlapping parts darkened significantly. It wasn’t pitch-black, more of a really dark version of the mixed colors. Not a single one of the combinations could be described as bright or vivid. If we had a “Danger: Do Not Mix” sign on hand, this would be exactly the right time for it. 

“...What’re we gonna do?” Gil asked, holding up the sheet of discolored paper. The result was so unexpected that we were all at a loss for words. All we could do was stare in silence at the dark colors. 

Josef eventually broke the silence. “Guess we should just stick to separate colors for these,” he said with a shake of his head. 

“But I’m pretty sure you gotta mix colors to paint things properly. Seems like there are still a lot of secrets behind the paint that art workshops use.” Heidi was right. If our ink turned black when mixed with other colors, we wouldn’t be able to draw anything like the paintings in the temple’s noble section. The paint used in this world definitely had a secret to it that I didn’t know about. 

“Let’s stop for today. No matter how many colors we make, it won’t matter if they change over time and turn black when mixed.” 

Maybe there’s some way we can sneak the secret to making paint out of an art workshop, I thought, slumping my shoulders in despair over the ink-making being stalled. The fact that we hadn’t made any usable colored ink meant we had failed. 

I returned home with my head hung low, and reported the day’s results to Tuuli as I helped her make dinner. 

“...Which means the colored ink doesn’t work. I don’t know what to do about it.” 

“Mhm, you definitely don’t want mixed colors to turn black.” 

“Right. It’s a big problem. It just wouldn’t be usable for printing, no matter how hard I tried.” I stirred the pot of soup while pursing my lips in a pout. 

Mom, who was watching us cook while breastfeeding Kamil, put a hand on her cheek in confusion. “You’re not using a fixing agent when putting the ink on paper?” 

“...What’s a fixing agent?” I had read about fixing agents for photos and art back in my Urano days, but had no idea what kind of fixing agents were used here. 

Seeing my confusion, Mom returned her gaze to Kamil and continued. “A fixing agent is a liquid used to stabilize colors. We use them when dyeing to stop the color from fading over time.” 

“Mom, could I ask for specifics? How exactly do you make a fixing agent?” I looked at Mom with gleaming eyes, but she just furrowed her brow in concern. 

“Is this something I should be telling you?” 

“I’ll check to see whether it’s bound by any magic contracts later.” 

“...Well, I suppose it won’t be a problem then. I trust you to make sure it’s safe for you to make,” Mom said with a somewhat uneasy tone before continuing. 

You could apparently make the base of a fixing agent by putting the sap of a tree called a gnade into the stem of a flower called heirein, then boiling it until it went all gooey. When actually using it, you would want to dissolve it with about twenty times as much boiling water. 

“Be careful. I’m sure there’ll be differences between using it on cloth and paper.” 

“Thanks, Mom. I’ll give it a shot.” 

Now that I knew about fixing agents, I immediately asked Lutz to get the necessary materials for me. He seemed to have not known about fixing agents either, judging by how his eyes widened in surprise. 

“I didn’t know there was something like that. We might’ve never figured it out if Mrs. Effa didn’t work in a dye workshop.” 

“Uh huh. I want to get the materials together and try making it right away, especially since Mom went out of her way to teach me how to make it.” I started humming in excitement at our new discovery, but both Lutz and Gil stopped me. 

“You should just teach us how to make it.” 

“Yeah, we’ll make it. You shouldn’t do it yourself, Sister Myne.” 

If we were going to make it in the Myne Workshop, then I wasn’t allowed to do any work. I pursed my lips at being the only one left out, but no one backed me up. 

I had Benno look up the magic contracts through the Merchant’s Guild and search for materials, setting the stage for us to start making a fixing agent. When the time finally came, both Lutz and Gil were bouncing with excitement over the new challenge. I handed them both boards with detailed instructions on them, and that was that. My job was done. 

I didn’t like being left out, so after harspiel practice with Rosina, I told her about the colored ink in order to vent my lonely frustration. 

“And now Lutz and Gil are making the fixing agent without me as we speak. Do you not think that is just cruel?” 

But Rosina was less sympathetic for my plight and more just surprised that I didn’t know about fixing agents. “Oh, you did not know about fixing agents, Sister Myne?” she asked, her eyes wide. “They are essential for drawing. Without them, no colored art could be done at all, really.” 

In a shocking twist, the temple also had someone who knew about fixing agents. Apparently they were essential for art. But since Rosina had only ever used finished fixing agents, she didn’t know how to make them. 

“...Do you by chance not know how to use fixing agents either, Sister Myne?” 

“I do not. May I ask you to teach me?” Mom only knew how to use it for colored dye. I would need to know how to use it for art when making the colored picture books. 

Rosina gave a refined giggle at the immediateness of my request. “You must put the fixing agent on the paper ahead of time and allow it to dry. That way, there will be no discoloration even when layering different colors of paint. Sister Myne, you seem to know a shocking amount about everything, but I see there are some simple things that escape your grasp.” 

“I have simply never taken the time to draw with paint or ink before.” 

“Indeed,” Rosina murmured before clapping her hands together and smiling. “In that case, would it not be wise to have Wilma teach you how to draw once you have finished the fixing agent and colored ink? Art is an important cornerstone for any woman of culture to learn.” 

“I shall think about it.” I gave an ambiguous reply, but already had a clear response on the inside. No thanks, I don’t want to lose any more free time than I have already. 

That said, some part of my heart told me that it might be smart for me to learn it now, since in two years’ time I would be a noble’s adopted daughter whether I liked it or not. 

Using the fixing agent production process I had learned from Mom and applying it as taught by Rosina resulted in us being able to layer multiple colors without them becoming black or discolored. The colored ink was complete.