If Wen Zhi had only been somewhat suspicious before, now he was almost certain that the little thing in front of him was highly intelligent.
That guilty little expression was exactly like the ones he’d seen on his students’ faces.
At this point, Wen Zhi couldn’t say he was especially wary or afraid.
No matter how he looked at it, this soft, squishy little Ghost didn’t seem capable of suddenly attacking him.
The most it could do was huff at him.
Of course, that didn’t mean Wen Zhi had let his guard down completely.
His mind was still full of worries and confusion, and countless questions had stirred up his curiosity.
He really wanted to find out where the Diary and the Ghost in front of him had come from.
Where had this Diary come from?
Why did it have these abilities?
Did it have some purpose?
If the Diary was essentially bait, meant to extract something from its user to revive this little thing before him, what kind of relationship did the two of them have?
If he kept using the Diary and filled its progress bar to the maximum again, what would happen?
Would this seemingly harmless little Ghost change even more?
And… was there some connection between this strange place, his transmigration, and the Diary?
There were far too many questions in Wen Zhi’s mind, but it was obvious that he wouldn’t find the answers by speculating.
So Wen Zhi shifted his gaze to the little thing beside him, floating in midair and pretending to be innocent while secretly peeking at him.
In that case, why not ask the one involved?
Meanwhile, the Ghost was already feeling a little uneasy under Wen Zhi’s gaze.
When it saw him crouch down to meet its eyes, they stared at each other, with the scattered tree shadows under the sunlight covering half the man’s face and making his otherwise friendly smile look indistinct and ambiguous.
The Ghost instinctively felt uneasy.
It wasn’t quite sure what Wen Zhi wanted to do.
After its abilities had changed, sensing Wen Zhi’s thoughts was no longer a passive, constant skill.
It had to actively focus to use it.
And if Wen Zhi thought about too many things at once, the information the Ghost sensed became blurry and inaccurate.
So the Ghost had been distracted just now and had no idea what Wen Zhi was currently thinking.
Just as it steadied itself and focused, preparing to find out what Wen Zhi was thinking, it heard him speak in a warm, friendly voice.
“I bet you can understand what I’m saying, right?”
“If you can, give me a sign.”
Wen Zhi wasn’t sure if the little Ghost in front of him could understand him, but the Diary had automatically translated the symbols it loaded for him into Chinese.
Since this being had come from the Diary, surely it could understand what he was saying?
In fact, Wen Zhi had guessed right.
The Ghost still couldn’t understand the language Wen Zhi spoke, but it did have a way to understand what he meant.
“(๑•̀ω•́๑) Ding~”
After understanding what Wen Zhi meant, the Ghost immediately responded.
It wasn’t the way it had hoped to, but at least communication had begun, which left it feeling thrilled and excited.
“…Can you talk?”
“( ๑ŏ ﹏ ŏ๑ ) Ding…”
The Ghost looked at Wen Zhi with an expression that said, “If I could talk, I’d have spoken already.”
“Why would I waste time here with you?”
Wen Zhi couldn’t figure out how he’d read that meaning from the emoticon, either…
In any case, he realized his question had been a little stupid.
He coughed awkwardly and rephrased it.
“Do you have any other way to communicate?”
The Ghost hesitated.
Strictly speaking, it did have a way to pass information to Wen Zhi, but it wasn’t exactly reliable.
Still… it was worth a try, wasn’t it?
Then the Ghost floated over to the Diary in Wen Zhi’s hand.
Under his puzzled gaze, the Diary began to grow warm and opened on its own, without any outside intervention.
Ink began to appear on the originally blank page…
Wen Zhi was a little surprised.
He’d expected the Ghost to have some connection to the Diary, but he hadn’t thought it could directly interfere with it.
Maybe he’d gotten their relationship wrong from the start.
Perhaps the Diary hadn’t given rise to the Ghost.
Perhaps the Ghost was the real source…
On the blank page, ink strokes appeared out of nowhere, sketching a man wearing a Coconut Garment and a small Ghost floating in the air with just a few simple lines.
The drawing was rough, but it captured their features well enough that Wen Zhi could tell at a glance it showed him and the Ghost.
His interest piqued, he picked up the Diary, looked at the Ghost, and asked expectantly.
“Can you write?”
‘I think… this stupid human naked ape probably can’t read what I write.’
The Ghost didn’t mean to insult Wen Zhi… but to be blunt, it was pessimistic about how much language and writing a mediocre creature like a human could master.
Of course, even as it thought that, the Ghost obediently controlled the Diary and wrote down the most common human language it knew.
Then it watched Wen Zhi’s expression with a glimmer of hope.
As expected, it saw confusion in Wen Zhi’s eyes.
The Ghost, unwilling to give up, tried several more languages, but Wen Zhi still couldn’t read them.
In the end, the Ghost even wrote every form of writing it knew that could be represented on a two-dimensional surface.
Wen Zhi’s expression shifted from confusion to clear, unadulterated stupidity, and it looked like he was about to descend into bewildered disarray.
“Stop!”
Wen Zhi hurriedly stopped the Ghost from writing.
He closed his eyes, held his forehead, and pressed his swollen temples hard with his thumbs.
For one brief moment, Wen Zhi felt as if he were under a DoS attack.
All kinds of wildly different scripts and languages kept appearing on the Diary, flooding his eyes and assaulting his brain.
By his rough estimate, several hundred scripts with clearly different styles and structures had appeared on the Diary just now.
Wen Zhi didn’t think the Ghost was just scribbling nonsense.
Even though he couldn’t read the writing, he could barely make out the patterns and coherence within it.
His intuition told him these scripts belonged to different, well-developed systems, but his brain refused to process the fact.
For Wen Zhi, aside from the first few scripts, most of the others challenged the structure of human vision and ordinary perception just by existing.
Those clearly weren’t languages humans should have created.
For some reason, a firm answer formed in his mind.
After calming the confused thoughts in his head a little, Wen Zhi grew even more curious about the little Ghost in front of him.
The Ghost was watching Wen Zhi with a (✧∇✧) expression, hoping he’d give it a satisfactory answer.
But Wen Zhi could only admit helplessly that he hadn’t understood a single word.
Ghost: [○・｀Д´・ ○]
So it had written all that for nothing.
A human monkey that could come back to life was still a human monkey, after all.
Wen Zhi’s head hurt a little.
He’d thought the Ghost could understand him because it knew his language, but now it seemed more like some kind of supernatural phenomenon.
If he’d had a pen, he could have tried exchanging written messages with the Ghost, but he didn’t.
And given the situation, it was impossible to know how many languages the Ghost knew, or whether it even knew Chinese characters.
The plan to communicate through writing was put on hold for now, so Wen Zhi had to choose a much less efficient method.
“…How about this?”
“I’ll ask questions.”
“If the answer is yes, ding once.”
“If it’s no, ding twice.”
“If you don’t know, ding three times.”
“If it’s hard to answer, add a drawing.”
“How’s that?”
“Ding (。・∀・)ノ”
The Ghost agreed.