Papermaking

Lavoisier left with his mission and a lean escort "caravan," and the settlement's focus seemed to return to internal construction and accumulation. Zhou Beichen finally had a few peaceful days. He no longer needed to figure out how to "borrow" people, nor did he have to deal with Lavoisier's work reports, delivered as though he were burning his life away. Each day, he inspected every corner of the settlement, listening to the young yet clear voices reading aloud in the schoolhouse, watching the workshop district steadily produce clay, coarse salt, and ever more respectable glassware under windmill power, and seeing that stubborn patch of green in the fields continue to spread.

Yet that calm was soon broken by a specific, trivial problem.

That afternoon, he was inspecting the schoolhouse.

After Lavoisier's departure, a Faith Guard member who knew a few words and had a fairly quick mind had temporarily taken over. Naturally, the quality of instruction had suffered greatly. Zhou Beichen watched the children scratch away at heavy clay tablets with crude stone styluses. With the slightest extra force, flakes crumbled from the tablet edges. One child even accidentally dropped his tablet, and it shattered into several pieces the instant it hit the ground. The child's little face went pale with fright, while the other children stirred in a small commotion.

"Pastor Beichen, this... this is already the seventh one broken this month." The temporary teacher rubbed his hands, his face full of helplessness and heartache. "Clay tablets are too heavy, and once they dry, they become brittle. They're inconvenient for the children to use, and they take up space when transported and stored. Those lesson plans Pastor Lavoisier left behind are carved into tablets—we're afraid they'll break every time we move them. And quite a lot of the old supply records have become unreadable because the writing wore away or the tablets cracked from poor storage..."

Zhou Beichen frowned and picked up a broken clay fragment from the ground. Rough, cumbersome, fragile. This was not merely a problem with teaching tools; it was a bottleneck for the entire settlement's knowledge records and information transmission. Lavoisier's management required data, technological improvements required recorded diagrams, and the spread of New Covenant doctrine required a written medium... Could they rely forever on these heavy, brittle clay tablets, or on expensive, scarce Sand Beast hide? The efficiency was too low, and the margin for error far too small.

He paced to the window and looked at Colchis's eternally unchanged orange-red sky, so dry it seemed capable of sucking away every trace of moisture. A thought flashed through his mind like lightning.

Papermaking!

Right—how had he not thought of this essential "divine skill" for transmigrators sooner? Colchis's environment was harsh, but its dry climate might actually be an advantage in certain stages of papermaking. The key lay in the materials and the process.

He immediately searched through his scattered memories from his previous life concerning ancient papermaking. Tree bark? Hemp scraps? Rags? Fishing nets? As he recalled, Cai Lun had seemed to use precisely such cheap and readily available materials when he improved papermaking.

Tree bark... Vegetation in Colchis was sparse, and mature trees were even rarer. No good. Hemp? He had never seen any. Rags? Everyone in the settlement could barely scrape together enough clothes to wear—where would they get rags? Fishing nets? That was even more absurd.

His gaze swept outside and landed on the mountain-like piles of dried desert wormwood stalks used for firing clay and construction. This wormwood was the most common plant in the Colchis Desert. Its stalk fibers were coarse, but exceptionally tough. It endured drought and barren soil, and possessed remarkable vitality.

Grass? Could they make paper from grass? In theory, it seemed feasible. Plant fibers were the foundation of paper.

Another image flashed through his mind: when Old Buck processed Sand Beast hides, he removed sinews and scraps of skin. Those things were usually discarded as waste.

Plant fiber plus animal protein glue?

Zhou Beichen's eyes lit up. A rough idea for papermaking based on local materials began to take shape in his mind.

He acted at once, summoning Old Buck and several of the most skillful and daring craftsmen. They cleared out a space in the corner of the workshop district and hung up a sign: "Experimental Area. No Unauthorized Entry."

"We're going to make something new," Zhou Beichen announced to the craftsmen gathered around him, their faces full of confusion. His tone carried an excitement that brooked no doubt. "Something light, soft, writable, and capable of mass production. Something to replace these clumsy clay tablets!"

He picked up a desert wormwood stalk, snapped it in half with force, and pointed at the threadlike fibers in the break. "See that? This is what we need." Then he pointed to a basket of scraps left over from tanning Sand Beast hide that Old Buck had brought over, mostly bits of skin and sinew. "And these too. Boil them down, and they should produce glue."

The craftsmen exchanged looks, clearly unable to understand what Pastor Beichen was trying to do this time. Make something from grass and hide scraps? Replace clay tablets with it?

Zhou Beichen offered no further explanation and began giving orders directly. The process was full of assumptions and frantic improvisation.

The first step was retting. They mixed chopped desert wormwood stalks with hide scraps and sinews, placed them in large ceramic vats, added precious clean water and a small amount of collected alkaline ash, then sealed the vats and let the mixture ferment naturally to soften the fibers. Several days later, the instant they opened the lid, the foul stench of rotting grass mixed with decaying protein nearly sent Zhou Beichen and the craftsmen straight to their graves.

"Ugh... Father, are you sure you're making a medium for knowledge and not... a biological weapon?" Even Lorgar, who had come to inspect the operation after hearing the news, frowned slightly at the smell. His violet eyes were full of confusion. Even his powerful senses seemed helpless before such an odor.

Holding his breath and covering his nose and mouth with a strip of cloth, Zhou Beichen forced himself to remain calm. "Cough, cough... The road is winding, but the future is bright! This proves the fermentation is working!"

The second step was boiling. They scooped out the reeking retted materials, placed them in a large cauldron, added water, and boiled them fiercely over high heat to further break down the fibers. Smoke billowed everywhere, and the smell remained just as memorable.

The third step was pulping. They put the boiled materials into stone mortars, where the strongest craftsmen—later replaced outright by Lorgar—repeatedly pounded them with enormous wooden pestles until they became a mushy pulp full of coarse fibers. Dust—or rather, fiber scraps—filled the air, and everyone involved turned into "white-furred monsters."

The fourth step was sheet forming. This was the most crucial and difficult step. Relying on vague memories, Zhou Beichen directed the craftsmen to weave fine Sand Beast hairs into screens, stretch them over wooden frames, and make paper molds. Then they poured the murky slurry, full of undecomposed fibers and impurities, into a large shallow trough. They shook the molds through the water, trying to spread the fibers evenly across the screen.

The results were either impossible to scoop up or became a layer of uneven, hole-riddled "grass pulp cakes."

They failed again and again. They wasted enormous amounts of water, firewood, and labor. The corner of the workshop filled with failed products of every bizarre shape and suspicious color. Some looked like rags, others like dried mud. Their only shared trait was that none could be written on.

Doubts began to arise. Even Old Buck tactfully suggested that perhaps improving the clay tablets would be more practical. Rumors also began circulating around the settlement that Pastor Beichen was conducting another "mysterious experiment," and that this one did not seem to be going very well.

Zhou Beichen shut himself inside the makeshift experimental shed, staring at the failures with deeply furrowed brows. He knew the principles and the general direction, but the missing details were fatal. Water quality? Acidity and alkalinity? Fiber ratios? Degree of pulping? Sheet-forming technique? Any single stage could go wrong.

Lorgar silently kept him company. Sometimes he picked up the failed "paper," feeling its rough texture with his fingers or carefully observing the distribution of its fibers. "Father, their 'veins' are chaotic," he occasionally observed. "They cannot gather into one whole."

Zhou Beichen irritably raked a hand through his hair. Was papermaking really this difficult for a transmigrator? Or did he, a humanities student—albeit one in finance—truly lack any talent for engineering?

Just as he was about to give up and consider making something like parchment as a temporary substitute, his eyes accidentally swept over the processed local clay powder stacked in the corner, the same powder used to make Colchis Clay. The clay powder was extremely fine and had excellent suspension and binding properties.

An idea surfaced.

He immediately got to work. He took some prepared pulp whose fibers were still coarse and prone to scattering, added a small pinch of fine clay powder, and stirred it evenly. The clay powder remained suspended in the pulp, filling the gaps between the coarse fibers.

He used the paper mold to try forming a sheet once more.

This time, when he lifted the mold from the trough with a thin layer of mixed pulp settled on it, it was still uneven, but it had at least formed a relatively intact, wet "thin blanket" that did not immediately fall apart.

He carefully flipped that "thin blanket" onto a relatively flat stone slab prepared beforehand, then gently placed another stone slab over it to squeeze out the excess water.

The wait that followed was agonizing. Colchis's dry air became his greatest ally.

Several hours later, Zhou Beichen held his breath and gently lifted the upper stone slab.

A grayish-brown, dry sheet lay quietly there. Its texture was rough, its surface covered in tiny particles and fibrous patterns, but it had undeniably taken shape.

Zhou Beichen's heart pounded. He picked up the "paper," thin as a cicada's wing yet surprisingly tough, and ran his fingers across its surface. It was rough, but countless times lighter than a clay tablet. He fetched a charcoal pencil and tried drawing a line across it.

A clear black mark remained on the grayish-brown surface.

It had worked!

Though the paper was rough, dull-colored, and uneven in thickness—far removed from the white paper he remembered—it was undeniably a sheet of writable paper!

"It worked! Damn it, it finally worked!" Zhou Beichen could not stop himself from swearing. He excitedly waved the rough sheet in his hand, his face overflowing with wild joy mixed with exhaustion and an immense sense of accomplishment.

Hearing the commotion, the craftsmen gathered around and curiously passed around the miraculous "grass sheet," exclaiming in amazement. Old Buck rubbed the paper's surface with his rough fingers, his cloudy old eyes filled with disbelief.

Lorgar picked up a newly made sheet and felt its featherlight weight and unusual texture. He looked at Zhou Beichen, profound light flickering in his violet eyes.

Looking at the rough paper in his hand, Zhou Beichen seemed to see the future already: children learning from light sheets of paper in the schoolhouse, administrators recording data in clear ledgers, and New Covenant doctrine spreading in the form of books... This would be a silent revolution, a revolution in the medium of knowledge and in efficiency.

He took a deep breath, suppressed his excitement, and ordered the craftsmen, "Have you recorded the process? The material ratios, retting time, degree of pulping, amount of clay added... Record every detail on this newly made paper! Then expand production! We're going to make this 'Colchis paper' replace every clay tablet!"

"Did you see the process? More or less like this—keep trying again and again, and eventually we'll find the best ratio!"