Li Jiehao suddenly remembered something and stopped what he was doing. "Wait, there might be something that wasn't taken."
Carlo asked, "What is it?"
"I wrote it after I arrived; I didn't hide it in the house."
Li Jiehao got up and left the room, and the two followed him to the washroom at the end of the corridor.
Carlo stopped at the doorway, covering his mouth and nose. "Couldn't you find a cleaner place to hide things?"
"Clean places are easy to spot." Li Jiehao said confidently as he walked into the washroom, moved a low stool from the corner, stepped on it, and reached out to feel around on the wall where the plaster had fallen off and the bricks were exposed. He pried into a crack and pulled out a loose brick.
He reached into the gap, pulled out a stack of papers, and jumped off the stool. "I found this while I was staring blankly at the wall while squatting on the toilet. It's a great place to hide things."
Carlo stood at the door without coming in. "You're a genius for being able to look up at the wall while squatting on the toilet."
People should always look up.
Li Jiehao unfolded the paper, and Isaac, who had followed him in, glanced at it. It was covered with some kind of... script that he couldn't recognize, completely different from the alphabet system of Common Language, with complex strokes.
"It's my diary," Li Jiehao showed it to Isaac.
"You wrote in your diary... and hid it in a crack in the toilet wall?"
"I noticed this brick was loose and hollow inside, and I felt it was a waste not to use it. But I couldn't hide anything else inside, so I thought about it and decided to write some diary entries inside. This is the culmination of my wisdom!"
"The crystalline smell is quite strong..." Isaac thought.
Back inside, Li Jiehao closed the door and laid the diary out on the table. Carlo glanced at it a few times. "It's still written in Chinese."
Li Jiehao rubbed his nose. "It's all about secrecy. If I wrote it in common language, what if someone found it and read it? My research ideas would be exposed. If I wrote it in Chinese, not many people could understand it, and maybe it could even be seen by younger generations in the future!"
"Hehe, the culmination of wisdom, is it..." Carlo read the contents of the diary directly in Common Language.
"June 3rd, cloudy. The hospital deducted another half shilling from my pay today because I broke a corpse's arm while moving it. How was I supposed to know that corpse was as brittle as a biscuit? Saving money is really hard. I'm eating bread and drinking water every day. I've decided that the first thing I'll do when I get superpowers is hang that foreman up and beat him up!"
"On June 7th, they came knocking on the door again to collect the rent. The monthly rent for this run-down apartment is too expensive, and I can't afford to eat every day. When I become rich, the first thing I'll do is buy this run-down apartment and then rent it to them for ten times the rent."
"On June 12th, I drew a magic circle, which is supposed to summon minions. I tried it, but there was no response. Maybe my posture was wrong. I'll try again tomorrow."
"June 17th. I saw a beautiful young lady today. Good heavens, shouldn't transmigrators be directly transmigrated into noble families, blend into high society, and marry rich and beautiful women? Why am I only able to move corpses?!"
Li Jiehao's expression changed from smug to embarrassed, and he reached out to snatch the diary. "Stop reading it, stop reading it..."
"When you showed this to others, didn't you consider how awkward it would be to read it aloud? And you call this the crystallization of wisdom? Where's the wisdom in it?"
"This records my journey through time and the psychological changes I experienced! Looking back later, I can learn from my mistakes..."
"The summary is: terrible food, high rent, and incredibly beautiful girls?"
Li Jiehao was speechless. It seemed that his diary was indeed full of complaints and reflections. "I... I had just transmigrated back then, and my emotions were unstable... Besides, these things are very important to me; they are witnesses to my journey!"
Isaac smirked. Although Li Jiehao didn't seem very bright at the moment, his mentality was quite good. He could still write and draw in his diary, thinking about how to take revenge on the foreman and landlord after he became rich, which made up for his lack of rationality.
Carlo stopped reading from the diary and said, "There's another point: not only is speaking dangerous, but writing these otherworldly characters is also dangerous."
Li Jiehao was taken aback. "Writing can be dangerous? But I've done it several times..."
"You think only sound can be tracked? Text is a medium too. Every time you put pen to paper, you're digging your own grave. You're lucky to be alive. Of course, it's also possible that your brain can't come up with anything long and rambling; you just write these little complaints and rants, not enough for that thing to track."
Li Jiehao's face turned pale. "Damn it, then I'll burn all of this when I get back."
"Make sure there is ventilation when burning."
Li Jiehao picked up the stack of diaries, about to roll them up and stuff them into his coat pocket, but stopped abruptly after glancing at one of the pages.
He paused for a moment, brought the page closer to his eyes, rubbed his eyes, and looked again.
Isaac noticed his unusual behavior. "What's wrong?"
"N-no..." Li Jiehao's tone was somewhat uncertain, "It seems like I saw it wrong."
The paper was written in his own handwriting in Chinese, and the content was his complaint about the poor food and his longing for fried rice.
He certainly recognized his own handwriting, but just now, for a fleeting moment...
He seemed unable to recognize what he had written, as if what he had written on the paper was a string of symbols he didn't recognize at all.
But he blinked and recognized what they were; his own handwriting lay neatly on the paper.
Did I misread it?
Li Jiehao turned to another page of the diary, confirmed that the handwriting was normal, and then turned back to the previous page.
Normal characters, no abnormalities...
Before Li Jiehao transmigrated, there was a time when a word appeared too many times and he suddenly felt like he didn't recognize it anymore.
In the past, Li Jiehao wouldn't have taken this situation seriously. But now, knowing that something was hunting down time travelers, he was somewhat uncertain.
"Have you suddenly found yourself unable to recognize the words?" Carlo's voice rang out.
Li Jiehao nodded quickly. "That's right, how did you know? Is it...?"
"Semantic saturation, where the brain experiences a temporary difficulty in recognizing a word after looking at it for too long, is a normal neural response."
Li Jiehao's expression froze, not expecting Carlo to give him a scientific explanation. "So it's normal?"
"There's another possibility: you've already been noticed by that thing. The fact that you can't understand the characters written in your hometown script, and can't understand the language spoken in your hometown dialect, is a sign that it's noticed you."
Li Jiehao's face paled slightly.
"Of course, you might be seeing things."
"Can you give me a definite answer...?"
"I can't predict what will happen. Among the private cases I handle, a significant percentage involve people scaring themselves, thinking there's a monster under the bed, only to find out it's just a big rat or something. It's still pretty scary, though."