Chapter 26: The Diary of He Bo Rost

Adeline leaned back in her chair, examining the new card that had just popped out from the edge of the box.

The front of the card was no longer a silhouette of a building or a person, but a thin, open booklet.

Black ink lines outlined its shape, the pages slightly curled.

At the bottom of the card was a line of cursive script: “The Diary of He Bo Rost.”

This was the first time Adeline had obtained this kind of card.

Should she call it an Item Card or a Document Card?

She flipped the card over.

Dense text almost covered the entire back, as if someone had tried to cram as much content as possible into a small space.

[A man named He Bo Rost recorded the various experiences he had seen in his life. Most of the content was tedious and dry, like some kind of ascetic life. However, some of the text still mentioned some unbelievable and bizarre deeds in a restrained and vague way.]

[Interpretation: I have seen similar texts from Mr. Slone. Perhaps I can interpret them?]

Mr. Slone?

He sounded like a scholar or someone that Lein knew.

She just didn’t know what this similar text was.

She still knew too little about Lein Kelin.

Since she had basically confirmed the possibility that this game was actually reality, she would have to pay more attention to this aspect in the future.

Adeline pinched the card and pressed it against Lein’s card.

The ink began to squirm, and the edges of the card gradually melted, turning into black trickles that seeped into Lein’s card face.

A clock appeared and began to turn.

Lein opened the first page of the diary.

The feeling was strange.

His fingers touched the rough, yellowed paper, feeling the fibers that had become fragile over the years dimpling slightly under his touch.

He could smell the musty odor emanating from the pages, mixed with a scent similar to dried grass.

All these sensations clearly entered his consciousness, but his fingers did not obey his command.

That invisible hand controlled him, turning the pages one by one.

The handwriting in the diary was scribbled and unstable.

Some paragraphs were written with such force that they left raised marks on the back of the paper, while others were so faint as to be almost illegible.

The ink showed different degrees of fading on different pages, indicating that these records were not written at the same time but spanned a considerable number of years.

The first few pages mostly contained daily trivialities, recording the investigation work of the diary’s owner, He Bo Rost, in a certain place.

He had asked the sailors about their life on board and recorded their oral accounts: about the patterns of the monsoon, about the unique fish catch at a certain port, about an anecdote of an old captain who was said to have lived over a hundred years.

He also investigated the customs of several villages, describing the locals’ practice of dancing around fig trees during the harvest festival, and a custom of weaving wheat ears into rings and hanging them in front of doors.

The writing style was not good.

Lein had read many books.

Although the collection in Mr. Slone’s shabby night school was mostly cheap prints, they at least allowed one to read smoothly.

But He Bo Rost’s writing was sluggish and clumsy, as if a person who was not good with words forced himself to record what he saw and heard, with a reluctant tone between the lines.

Reading through the whole thing, rather than a diary, Lein felt that this man named He Bo Rost was recording some kind of investigation work.

The content was arranged in chronological order, each paragraph following a similar format: first he wrote where he went, who he met, and what he did, then he attached a short personal impression.

Occasionally, at the end, he would add one or two strange rumors of unknown authenticity.

A fisherman claimed to have seen a huge shadow on the sea that did not belong to any known species; an old man in a village told of a town that did not exist on the map; and so on.

These rumors were recorded by He Bo Rost in a rather restrained tone, neither embellishing nor judging, just faithfully relaying them, as if he himself was not sure whether to believe them.

Lein read haltingly.

Not only because the content was obscure, but also because it was too dry.

Those words seemed to have been deliberately polished to remove all edges and interest, leaving only a dry pile of facts.

His eyelids began to droop, and his consciousness became scattered.

But his hand did not stop.

Page after page, the sound of paper turning was particularly loud in the quiet study.

Lein’s gaze was forcibly fixed on those words, not allowed to shift or close.

His eyes became dry and painful from this, but he still had to continue staring at the next line.

Just when Lein had finished reading the entire diary and thought it was over—

His fingers flipped back to the first page.

Lein was stunned.

He had clearly just read it, from beginning to end, not missing a single page.

Why did he have to start again?

But his body ignored his confusion.

His fingers turned the pages, and his gaze fell again on the words he had already read once, starting from the first word, reading line by line and sentence by sentence all over again.

The first time, Lein just found it boring; the second time, he felt his eyes were about to give out.

Then the third, the fourth… until an unknown number of times later, the text began to feel a little off.

At first, he thought it was an illusion caused by extreme exhaustion.

Those paragraphs describing the sailors’ lives, those records of village customs, those strange rumors attached at the end—they were clearly identical to what he had read every time before, but they began to undergo subtle changes in his eyes.

It was as if certain words appeared too frequently, and after looking at them for too long, one gradually lost accurate judgment of that word.

After repeatedly chewing over the same text, his brain gradually developed an indescribable dizziness.

Those originally dry and boring words and sentences began to become obscure and strange with each repetition.

Some words seemed to lose their original meaning, becoming mere symbols arranged on the yellowed paper.

Some sentences in his eyes were scrambled and reassembled, becoming something specious, describing content that could not be understood with normal thinking.

It seemed that some grotesque things were hidden between the words and sentences, watching Lein, just as Lein watched these words.

They seemed like eyes hidden in the darkness, or like some twisted, unceasing strange colors in the deep universe—perverse and bizarre.

Lein’s vision was gradually filled with those things that should not exist.

A sharp pain shot through his eyeballs, as if someone was lightly pricking his pupils with a needle tip.

Tears uncontrollably flowed from his eyes, rolling down his cheeks onto the table, soaking the edge of the diary.

His vision blurred into a mess, and the handwriting trembled and deformed in the water, wriggling like living creatures.