“Hehehehe…”

A young boy’s childish voice rang out pervertedly throughout the dim room.

A ten-year-old boy was sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring with bloodshot eyes down at an opened book. On the page was a diagram of a graph with multiple connected nodes and edges. Tracing the graph with his finger, he followed the dots and lines down the page, but every few moments, would stop and start from the beginning again. Occasionally, he would grab a stick laying beside him and trace a seemingly random path on the floor.

It was Emmet Laghaz.

A month had passed since he had first received the book from the tribe head, and so far, it was better than anything he could have ever expected. Despite having little to no words, the book was somehow still incredibly intuitive, its puzzles’ goals and stipulations clear. There would sometimes be diagrams, sometimes graphs, sometimes strange intersecting shapes and even maps. However, for each puzzle, there was no answer key. Emmet would have to guess-and-check himself to make sure he did everything correctly. Thus, he was extremely strict on himself - if the answer wasn’t absolutely perfect, with no flaws at all, then he wouldn’t move on.

At first, the puzzles in the first few pages had been simple, even easy. Breezing through the first ten pages within a single day, Emmet was at first concerned. Was this book actually just full of simple puzzles like these? Would it not be able to challenge him? Emmet was fairly sure in his answers were correct. In fact, he had abstracted a lot of these early puzzles shown in the book in his own mind before.

But he was worried for no reason. Starting from page 15 forward, the puzzles got harder and harder. Every subsequent puzzle Emmet would tackle would be much more complicated or include a brand new concept. Starting from page 20 onwards, its difficulty rate began to progressively increase, and began utilizing barely introduced concepts from pages previous pages, cumulatively building on concepts. Emmet had thought the solution to a problem on page 18 was complicated. However, how could he have expected, a problem on page 20 expected him to use the solution to that problem as a mere building block to build up the answer!

Currently, he was on page 25. After breezing through pages 1-10 in a day, he had taken two days for 10-15, and then three days for 16-19. Then, who could have expected… he took an entire three days just for each of pages 20 and 21! Then, he spent four days on page 22… five days on page 23… and then six days on page 24!

Emmet was shocked. The entire book was more than 150 pages! How long would it take for him to get through the whole thing?

Every new problem that Emmet solved, he would have somewhat of an enlightenment. He would get introduced to an entirely new method of thinking about things, expanding his mind more and more. He realized that his previous scope had been so pitifully little… he had no idea that there was such a world to puzzles! So many different types of useful abstractions and methods he had never thought about… the more problems he solved, the more he added to his toolkit of problem-solving methods.

On the current page, page 25, the puzzles were starting to become more and more practical, some even including real-life situations/objects. While in the previous problems, the prompts and structures were purely theoretical, the latest problem on page 25 had included mentions of sunstones - also of some mysterious object called a “vitality leaf.” Although he didn’t know what it was, Emmet could infer its function from context.

The real-life practicality made him think back to his own contraptions. The more he thought, the more he slowly came up with more and more ideas about how to build them better, more efficiently, and more powerfully! The more puzzles he solved, the more he felt that the contraptions he had made were extremely crude.

As he kept pondering puzzle after puzzle, he became more and more absorbed in the book, to the point of addiction.

In the past month, he didn’t think there were many moments, besides when doing farmwork, that he even looked away from the book for any reason - other than sometimes applying the concepts from the book to test building new contraptions. In the bathroom, he would be holding it and pondering the questions. During dinner, he would hold it as he ate. Even when tackled by Yorick, he would remain unphased and merely continue to stare at the book even while getting sat on. If he could have held it while doing farmwork, he would have, but mother had chided him and forced him to leave it back in his room.

Thus, his entire day was packed full. When he wasn’t doing necessary farmwork, eating, or sleeping, his entire time was filled with puzzles. Even when harvesting the fields and tending to the chickens he was obsessively thinking about the problems he was currently working on, the whole time craving to rush back and test out his theories that he had developed. Many a time, as he was doing some mundane task, he would randomly have an enlightenment and shout out “hallelujah!”, causing not less than a few strange looks.

Just at that moment, there was a knock on the door.

“Emmet, you loser! Come out and fight!”

“...”

Emmet ignored it, staring at the floor and tracing a path on it with his stick.

More knocks rang out. “Emmet, I haven’t seen you in a whole month! You bum, always looking at that damn book, come out and do something for once!”

Emmet’s brows slightly furrowed, but he still continued to focus on his task and trace paths with his stick.

The knocks grew louder and more urgent. “Em-ETT! Don’t ignore me! I found a giant horu-beetle pest in the fields, and I’m gonna go fight it! Come and help me!”

“Shut up!” Emmet finally turned his head and yelled out. “I can’t focus!”

“Haha, I knew you were in there,” Yorick’s irritating voice cackled out. “Come on, come with me! I found a huge horu-beetle! I know you wanna see it.”

“Horu-beetle?” Emmet blinked a couple times, seemingly interested. “How big is it?”

“It’s gigantic! Over a person tall!” Yorick’s voice raised up high. “It’s got huge pincers.”

Emmet paused, pondering for a moment. He shifted his eyes to glance at several new contraptions that were lying beside his bed and his expression suddenly lit up. “Fine, let’s go!”