Monogatari Series - Volume 29 - Chapter 1.10

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I had a good failure and a bad failure, but which one would you like to hear first?

I see. So you prefer that, too.

Then, according to your wishes, I’ll start with the bad failure.

By hitting a rock against a boulder, I’d made a grass sickle—or, in this case, a kelp sickle. Up until then, things had been going well. From the first day, I’d thought I’d become an ability user of “fire” and “water”, but perhaps I had actually become an ability user of “stone” instead.

Sengoku, master of a thousand stones.89

Then, I lengthened the safety rope more and more like an extension cord, and I secured it to my torso more than necessary and headed towards the open sea—I’d talked about special training, but just like how people say, “practice makes perfect”, I really did get better at swimming over the past two weeks (at least, in the shallows).

I didn’t skip out on training out of laziness, okay?

However, “swimming” and “diving” were completely different skills, and as I’d touched upon previously, the bodies of humans were fundamentally made for floating. It was difficult to sink to the ocean floor, even in spite of the instincts of land creatures.

It might have been different if I had swimming goggles, but I couldn’t hope to obtain such luxury goods here—I’d tried to make a snorkel, but after some trial and error about whether or not I’d be able to make a straw out of weeds, I hit a dead end.

Because they were called straws, I’d had the faint hope that I’d be able to use weeds as a substitute,90 but if I were to hold something like that in my mouth while diving underwater, I would basically be personifying the expression, “A drowning man will clutch at straws.”

Becoming a diver didn’t come easy.

When the structure of human bodies made them float, the precise reason was not the density of muscle, but that the lungs contained air like life vests. If one were to exhale all the air in their lungs, the body will naturally settle to the bottom of the ocean, which people will refer to as a natural death.

Or rather, a suicide.

If possible, I wanted to go underwater with the oxygen tank of my body at full capacity… Even more so, considering the amount of time it would take to harvest the kelp.

After much deliberation, I decided to use my innate special skill as a “stone” cheat ability user—in other words, I dove into the ocean while holding a decent-sized stone in my arms.

You couldn’t really call this anything but suicide.

However, when I looked it up afterwards (as usual, it was only if there was an afterwards in store for me), it seemed that scuba divers would add weight to their wetsuits to reach further depths.

So I’ll insist that I was doing the same.

Of course, I was able to apply enough intelligence to repeat the trial and error of finding the appropriate stone weight in shallow waters, so that I didn’t go in blindly for the real thing—however, I’d decided from the beginning that, because I was taking the psychological-horror-like high risk of walking into the sea with a weight stone in my arms and a handmade sickle in my mouth, there should naturally be a commensurate high return for my efforts.

It had to be that way.

As I walked on and on, I couldn’t see any kelp—rather, I had been looking forward to finding the boundary where the footing underneath me turned from “beach” to “seafloor”, but such a line ultimately did not appear.

Rather.

What I could see with my blurred vision was, most likely, a coral reef—I didn’t have any decisive evidence, and I had absolutely no idea what a coral reef was fundamentally meant to be, so I was only speaking from my own unsubstantiated impressions, but the colorful soil, which was neither rock nor sand, nor soil nor loam, was probably a coral reef.

Welcome to Okinawa.

A piece of nature of our Mother Ocean, deserving of protection, was right there in front of me—indeed, this scene could be called one of Earth’s treasures. It made me think that this would be the best if I had goggles with me—and I almost committed the cardinal sin of dropping my weight stone onto the coral reef.

But, before I could admire that great piece of nature, there was an important announcement—according to my superficial knowledge, coral reefs were inedible. I’d heard of cooking with goat meat before, but I’d never heard of cooking with coral—what I wanted to see right now was not a colorful coral reef, but a mundane colony of kelp.

At this point, even sea grapes were fine.

In the first place, I’d set out without any knowledge of what kind of soil kelp grew in, or how it grew—on top of being reckless, I was also clueless about kelp.91 Good grief, it just wouldn’t do to go back empty-handled after coming all the way here.

At the very least, I wanted to catch some fish before returning.

My experience was informing me that if I took the weight stone I was holding and hit it against a boulder on the seafloor a little ways back, I’d be able to acquire a decent haul of fish—naturally, buoyancy affected this stone, but I’d heard rumors before that shock waves were easily transmitted through the water. Apparently, they were transmitted more easily than rumors themselves.

Basically, if I were to drop my weight stone towards the ocean floor and didn’t get away from the area quickly, there was a possibility that I could make myself faint and end up floating to the surface. But seeing as I was constantly choosing between life and death at all hours of the day, I was getting pretty used to making these kinds of decisions.

Death by drowning, or death by starvation?

They were the worst possible choices, but in terms of which one would cause more suffering, I vaguely thought that the latter was worse with how it took more time—and so, I let go of the weight stone and headed for the surface at full force to get some oxygen.

At this point, maybe about eighty percent of the air in my lungs had been converted into carbon dioxide—however, this attempt at escaping as fast as I could was probably not something a cleverer person would have done.

Experience ultimately brought forth negligence.

Because of the buoyancy of the stone, the impact of the shock wave was weaker than I was expecting, and I did not faint. And had I expected a school of fish to rush out in surprise, perhaps I could have killed one of them with the kelp sickle I’d been holding in my mouth—but among the fish that had rushed out, there was a big one.

And though I said “among the fish”, the big one was not exactly a fish—it was a squid.

Assuming my eyes weren’t wrong with my vision being blurry from being underwater… It was probably a squid, but if not for that, it was some kind of cephalopod. Among the fish that scattered in all directions, there were some other fish large enough to be worth eating, but out of all of them, I really wanted to get the squid the most…!

But as they say, the biggest fish was the one that got away.

Although, this wasn’t a fish, but a mollusk.

To properly explain why I was so frustrated, my irritation wasn’t just due to my hunger—and it certainly wasn’t that I was feeling so lonely that I wanted to play pirate with a giant squid.

After all, squids will squirt ink, right!?

Together with octopuses, they were considered the ninjas of the ocean, but from my perspective, they were basically the mangaka of the ocean! I didn’t care about frying up the tentacles to eat, if only I could get my hands on its ink—well, there was something like squid ink pasta, so the ink was probably edible, too, but rather than that, right now, I was a maniac for ink.

I was thirsty for some squid ink.

Even if I hadn’t been in the middle of rising to the surface for oxygen, I don’t think I could have successfully caught the ninja of the sea with my fishing skills and without a long-range harpoon, but if I had at least tried to aggressively capture it, it might have at least squirted ink at me… Ah, I really let that chance slip by, didn’t I?

It was a shock to me, on the same level as learning that my favorite weekly magazine had been discontinued.

…No, no, I had to calm down.

I really was becoming crazy, here.

I wasn’t frying up any tentacles, but it was like my brains were fried.92

Even if the squid were to squirt ink at me, how would I have retrieved it from underwater…? It probably wouldn’t be as easy as carefully ladling it out and boiling the water away. There could be a plan of capturing the squid alive, raising it in the shallows, and using it as a living inkwell to squirt ink whenever I needed it, but it really wasn’t the time to be seriously considering that.

What would I even do with only ink?

I didn’t have a G nib pen or a spoon nib pen, or even a writing brush—for that, I could maybe whittle down a branch to use (maybe it was the wilderness’s influence, but my hair seemed to have grown a lot in the past two weeks, so I could cut some of it off and tie it up to make a brush), but I certainly didn’t have any manuscript paper to work with.

Was I really going to strain wood chips and dry it out in the sun to try and make paper? Or look for wood pulp? I may have become an ability user of “stone”, but I wasn’t an ability user of “wood”.

If I at least had a carton of milk, I’d be able to make a picture postcard.

Aah, I was losing my mind.

If anything, I’d probably been mistaken in thinking it was a squid. It had to have just been an optical illusion created by my desires, a shade of fatigue, and the magic of the coral reef—it was probably a needlefish, or some other long type of fish, right?

No, no, let’s be optimistic here. I could interpret this as me having exercised my imagination skills during this survival lifestyle—goodness, I was feeling like a house built on sand.

"............ (Burble, burble, burble.)”

On sand? Sand?