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From that perspective, Emiliana found the book hilarious, though not intentionally. It discussed the man's creative process, and it described ad nauseum how he came to develop each of his supposedly supernatural inventions. Those parts, Emiliana didn't fully understand--or even mostly understand, for that matter.

The exposition in that book was some of the most incredible she had ever seen. At first, she'd thought it was written by an actual child. In fact, she would have certainly dropped it before finishing the first chapter if Ibai hadn't recommended it to her beforehand.

How or why he had managed to make it any further through that book, Emiliana had no idea, but regardless, as she'd continued reading, it gradually became clear that, no, these were not the words of a child. The word choice, spelling, sentence structure, punctuation, and capitalization were all over the place; and each chapter seemed to contain at least one rant about someone in Unso's life--usually a woman--who didn't understand him or had wronged him in some way.

But whenever the book got around to the inventions again, the author's technical expertise began to shine through. Even if Emiliana couldn't follow a lot of it, the sections where she could, she found sufficiently impressive.

It was like reading something that had been written by an absolute genius who had somehow never read a single book in his entire life.

Maybe that didn't make sense, but that was the impression that Emiliana had gotten, at least. And of course, books and literacy weren't nearly as common a thousand years ago, so perhaps it was possible. Emiliana just didn't understand how someone could become, of all things, an inventor without relying on any written knowledge for guidance.

And when she thought about it like that, she found the book a little sad, too. How much more brilliant might the man have been if he'd gotten a proper education?

But then she remembered the story at the end of the book about how Unso had once tried to seduce another man's wife with the power of his "allmytee intelekt," only to be chased out of town by the "ignerent pezentree."