Journal entry 4
'Sometimes days happen in weeks and sometimes weeks happen in a day.
I think that was the quote.
So my house is gonna be burned down in a week, my neighborhood is uninhabitable due to the smell of the dead people, and I moved into the church housing, giving me a better room to stay in.
I met with Victor yet again and he taught me things, such as how to use instability or facts about magic. I finally escaped from the constant pressure in my stomach.
I spent half of it to make a ring along with Victor that stores Instability, and whenever it goes beyond 3 meters, it will bias events to make coincidences to return to me—true magic at work here.
He did say he will send a carriage over every day. Honestly, I want to ask him to reduce the frequency; I still need to work to sustain myself.
I doubt that Captain Varen will be willing to give me jobs when he finds out about the Instability Crystal.
I'm tired. Even if I don't feel exhaustion or frustration due to the instability stopping my feeling of sleep, I'm tired.
No, rather than that, I want to feel tired. I want the excuse to just not do anything.
I've been here only for a few days now and I'm already tired of it all. I may look for ways to return back to Earth if possible.
I want to go to sleep, but even then I will be awake the entire time in the wasteland.
Maybe the skeletons will keep me company.
Heh. Now that I think about it, from what Victor told me, that wasteland might be the land where most Instability is contained.
It isn't a space made for me specifically. I don't know why I had such a self-centered idea before, but I still don't know why I wake there in the first place.
Damn it. Just now I wanted to read the other pages I wrote, but I forgot to bring them back from Jack's original house.
I don't want to go to that place, it reeks of death.'
...
That night, back in the foggy wasteland, Jack woke up as a foggy humanoid creature yet again, this time lacking the red glow in his chest.
Where are the skeletons?
...damn it, in this fog I can't tell which way to go.
After temporarily giving up the thought of finding them, Jack began recalling what happened that day and the previous ones.
He had a few questions on the paper Victor wrote, for example.
When choosing the raw mana input for the compression, do I need to use the suppressed amount or remove the suppressed amount?
This tied to the 'c' of the compression formula spell.
After a while of recalling most mathematical knowledge, he realized that due to his life before transmigration, he lacked math past the eighth grade.
After some time, Jack picked one of the rocks from the ground and began experimenting with it. He wanted to find the skeletons. By using this wasteland, which he now called the Land of Instability, he gathered local instability and placed it into the rock with a few lines of text etched into the ground.
The gist of the entire line was simple: 'Find the skeletons.'
The lines themselves were meaningless scratches, but the intent behind them gave direction to the instability.
The rock floated and guided Jack to the skeletons.
Sensing Jack, all of them, who were waiting the same way as before, right at the edge of how far they could go, immediately rushed to him while chanting different words which he taught them.
It would have been cute, even, if it weren't for the fact that they were a bunch of walking human skeletons.
Or the fact that now they were no longer sounding distorted, but in the exact same voice as Jack's.
Or the fact that he himself re-solidified his body into a skeleton.
Those guys just stood there lined up waiting for me? This feels saddening somehow.
He looked at the skeletons who were repeating old words; some even repeated actions he taught them before, like jumping or crouching.
I wonder how much I could teach those guys.
With that train of thought, Jack began to give them another concept: the concept of chatting and socializing.
He picked one of them, and both of them sat down. It was simple to teach them, since they immediately understood the meaning behind the word, but what Jack really taught them was to interact with each other beyond their overlapping perception.
He also taught them tones, teaching them that high pitch meant good and low pitch meant bad, as well as an asking tone.
Soon enough, all of the skeletons, in pairs, one in front of the other, 'chatted' to each other.
"Chatting?" - High Pitch
"Chatting." - Another High Pitch
"Standing?" - High Pitch Skeleton Standing up
"Standing." - Low Pitch Sitting Skeleton
"Sitting." - High Pitch Now Sitting Skeleton
"Sitting." - Previous High Pitch Sitting Skeleton
Soon enough, Jack's teaching lesson ended as he woke up back in the bed inside the Church-provided residence.