A Hospital in Another World?

Chapter 40

Chapter 40

Around a dozen books.

All needed to be read or, rather, memorized.

With a farewell to Elliot, the mage who had already done his favor, Garrett stood by the table, gazing at the stack of thick textbooks before him. He breathed out softly.

He measured them with his hand: around a dozen books, larger than the standard 16-k format of his previous life, piled up from the sturdy oak table to his neck. Leaning forward, his head lowered until his chin rested on the pages.

This thickness...

Well, just a minor thing.

Medical students' textbooks, exercise collections, picture albumsthey wouldn't even stack up to a person's height.

Following Elliot's instructions, Garrett flipped through the pile. The first book, unreadable. The second book, unreadable. The third book, still unreadable...

Boom!

All written in magical script?

So, to learn magic, I have to learn a whole language first?

And it's a mute language...

Hoping against hope, Garrett went through all the books except for "Study of Magical Script." Disheartened, he returned them to the shelf, opened the last book, and reluctantly began wrestling with the magical script.

4500 words in Level Four Vocabulary.

Back then, memorized in a month.

5500 words in Level Six Vocabulary.

Can't remember how long it took. Under the pressure of major courses, cramming was the norm, and passing Level Six seemed relatively easy.

Magical script...

How many words does this dictionary contain?

Garrett never counted, nor did he want to.

The only certainty he had was that "Study of Magical Script" was the thickest among nearly a hundred books on the shelfothers were at most the width of a fist, while this one could be two fists thick.

The text was small too. If the font size in other books was around Times New Roman or slightly larger, the font in this book was only about Arial 12.

The content almost rivals a comprehensive dictionary...

Garrett mourned silently. He gritted his teeth, flipping to the first page, and felt like he'd been hit on the head again.

The organization of this book was incredibly random, wherever the author thought of something, it was written there, or arranged according to what the author considered important. The first page started with the four major elements: Fire, Water, Wind, Earth.

Turning another page. Magic, Dragons, Spirit, Primeval, Mars, Venus, Sun, Saturn.

Third page. Macrocosm, Microcosm, Birth, Death, Sage, Devil...

Garrett:...

I need a dictionary!

At least give me the words arranged in alphabetical order!

English alphabet of 26 letters, Japanese hiragana, German's 30-letter alphabet, and even the International Phonetic Alphabet, please come back... I'll never find you too basic again...

Yet, nobody responded.

No dictionary, no phonetic symbols, no instant understanding of the language of magic, no mind-scan to store the unfamiliar language in his database.

Garrett concluded his internal lament, forced to pull out a pen and paper from his bag, and began the arduous struggle

Firstly, to catalogue all the encountered letters...

After roughly half an hour, flipping through dozens of pages, he covered a sizable area on the paper. Confirming no new letters appeared, Garrett took a deep breath and started arranging them.

Luckily, this magical script somewhat resembled the Latin script. Garrett judged purely by appearance, placing those resembling 'a' first, 'b' next, and for those unlike English letters, he followed German letters, then Roman letters, in sequence.

What? This letter looks entirely unique and unlike anything?

Put it at the very end!

After this round, he realized the script wasn't excessively complex; there were about sixty lettersconsidering some appeared only at the beginning of words, he roughly estimated upper and lower cases existed, making around thirty letters in total.

Garrett flipped his scraps of paper, writing each new letter at intervals. Then, staring at the sprawled "Study of Magical Script," he steeled himself and rubbed his wrist...

I have to reorganize this entire book!

Too difficult, compiling a dictionary is just too difficult... No wonder "Dictionary Publishing House" takes a decade to update their comprehensive dictionary, just revising this book could employ half the company. The workload is enormous...

And now, all this workload is solely mine T_T

Oh well, in online novels, some predecessors had to decrypt magical languages themselves. Comparatively, having ready-made books to copy from is quite fortunate...

Page by page, Garrett copied the words and their corresponding common language meanings beneath their respective starting letters. Surprisingly, copying aided in memory retention. At least after a page, Garrett realized he had memorized what he copied.

Garrett toiled away for half a day, his eyes sore, wrists aching, suspecting the onset of tendonitis. Just as he thought about using a healing spell to soothe his wrists, he encountered his first hurdle:

He ran out of paper.

He had brought five or six sheets, filled both sides densely, and now had no space left...

Where could he get a blank page?

Garrett felt he couldn't do such a thing.

Ask someone for paper?

He didn't dare. Gelman had strictly prohibited copying, and seeking help now would be akin to walking into trouble!

Seek help or plead with Gelman?

Garrett felt he hadnt lived enough and didn't want to be turned into charcoal by a fireball...

After a quick deliberation, he stowed his paper, pen, and ink in his bag and hurried off. The reference books could still be accessed tomorrow; if he didn't return to the city now, the shops would be closed, and there'd be nowhere to buy paper~~~

He dashed back to the city, bursting into his home. Locking the door, he went to the table, moved aside the chair with a broken leg, and shifted the brick supporting its foot, digging a few shovels underneath. Neatly nestled in the earth lay a small money pouch. Garrett took it out and emptied it into his palm, coins clinking.

Two silver coins, seven copper coins.

At the other end of the street, Uncle Simon's bakery sold black bread at one copper coin per loaf. He could manage a day if he ate sparingly.

One silver coin could exchange for ten copper coins. This little pouch was his monthly expenses in his original form.

His salary in the city guard was five silver coins a month. Patrolling in the city meant he could get a meal in the military camp. Calculating, he could save two silver coins a month for other daily expenses.

But for buying paper... this amount might not be enough. Productivity in this foreign world wasn't much better than the Middle Ages; in his impression, during this era, paper and pen were outrageously expensive...

Garrett hesitated, climbed under the bed, pushed aside the book box, and dug out a small box.

---------------

• Your invaluable feedback and ratings mean the world to me. Please take a moment to rate this novel at Novelupdate.
• If you come across any mistakes within this chapter, kindly notify me in the comments below, so that I can make the necessary corrections.