"Urp!"
Roland let out a drunken belch and stopped talking at just the right moment. With a laugh, he changed the subject. "That's about it. So when I create-or transplant-Oracle Inscriptions in the future, I plan to use this approach to record dates and events. Some strange things might get mixed in, so don't be surprised."
"Well, what geniuses do is always hard to understand."
The others noticed nothing amiss.
In the corner, only Yvonne sat in a daze.
"Come on, let's keep drinking! Fill them up!"
That night, Roland returned home and, riding the inspiration, wrote more than a hundred Oracle Inscriptions, intending to compile them into a paper and submit it to Characters.
He had read the Collected Oracle Bone Inscriptions in his previous life. It contained 41,956 selected rubbings, photographs, and facsimiles of oracle bones from the Yin Ruins collected over eighty years, providing an abundance of material.
Producing such a collection from scratch and making sense of it would be enough to occupy someone's entire lifetime of research, immersing them in it for decades.
For Roland, the Oracle Inscriptions themselves were actually secondary. What mattered most was the method of creating-or transplanting-them.
There were now two paths before him. One was the fictional linguistics approach, whose defining features were unfettered self-expression and flights of imagination.
The Yther School represented this approach, and the Homir School had brought it renewed glory.
The other was the Katria School's archaeological approach.
This school originated with a discovery by the archaeologist Yuris. A place called Catria Island had once given rise to a primitive magical civilization that might have developed into a magnificent nation like Atrelin, only to die in its infancy because of its unfavorable geographical location.
Catria Island was also hailed as the birthplace of modern Runology. Since