NOVEL NEXT 74 - Spreadsheets Are Unreasonably Effective For Tracking Personal Growth
Tap. Swipe. Other appropriate onomatopoeia.
In the early hours of the winter dawn, young noble heir Archmund Granavale sat at his desk, mentally describing the motions of his fingers.
Before him was an ancient magical artifact that he'd rightfully won from a Dungeon: his Gemstone Tablet.
A remarkable cerulean slab of crystal that had the functions and form factor of an iPad. It gave him the ability to see into an underlying System that either governed reality or perfectly described it. (If you can't tell, does it matter?)
He could see his stats. He could see his achievements. He could see his relationships. He could see his magic Gems, artifacts salvaged from Monsters that granted the nobility vast magical powers. And he could see his Skills, magical abilities that had become instinct, that he could activate through thought alone.
And what was he doing? What was he doing with this ocean of vast and overwhelming information, that described who he was and his place in the universe? How did he make sense of more information than any mind might be able to?
Trying to make a spreadsheet.
Not for the first time, he wondered how he had been reduced to this.
Archmund Granavale was reincarnated. Isekai'd, in the parlance of earth, specifically nerds and Japan. His awareness of the genre and the tropes placed his new life in the semi-fourth-wall-aware sardonically ironic isekai, which clashed with the heavy and oppressive reality that this was his real life now and he had to actually deal with it.
His memories of his past life were sparse.
But he was sure of one thing.
He'd lived what he called a spreadsheet job. A job, as the moniker implied, consisted heavily and entirely of looking at spreadsheets, moving numbers and letters around. A job that did little for the world, was abstracted from any labor of true meaning of value, where he clocked in at dawn, clicked buttons, and clocked out at midnight.
Once he was reborn, or rather, once he remembered, he knew in his heart his soul wouldn't survive a second lifetime of that work.
But reality had other plans.
In simple terms, stuff had happened.
A Dungeon had opened up in his County. Dungeons distorted local economies so he wanted to create robust economic institutions using its wealth instead of allowing his home to be looted dry by adventurers. He'd gone into the Dungeon himself, instead of hiring hands to do so, developing his own magical abilities so he stood a chance.
It had worked. He'd gotten a ton of loot.
That was also when he'd gotten his Gemstone Tablet.
Then, the autumn had come, and the Harvest Festival with it. He'd hosted a tournament to select a personal guard to use some of the miraculous magical items he'd looted from the Dungeon. He'd found some promising candidates, and met some local nobles from neighboring counties. His social stock in the world had been looking up.
But then things went wrong. Monsters had erupted from the Dungeon at the worst possible time, and the Omnio Empire intervened. His friend, the Crown Princess Angelina Grace Marca Prima Omnio, placed a spell on the Dungeon, a genuine restriction that weakened its Monsters but also choked its potential as a spawning pool of infinite wealth. He'd be able to draw some wealth from it — but he'd had to say goodbye to his retirement plan.
And that brought him to the present day.
Where he sat in his room, alone.
Poking at his Gemstone Tablet, tapping at the various fields, reflecting on his life.
With so many tasks to juggle:
A personal training regimen he had the time and wealth to pursue.
A list of questions about the nature of the universe, magic, life and death, and souls that he hadn't looked at in weeks.
A journal he hadn't touched in months.
A whole bunch of raw materials he'd sent out to be refined and all of the loot — Gemstones, Gemstone Gear, looted clothing, horsehides, and a Starbeast hide—
At least seven Skills (he couldn't quite remember), not practiced nearly enough to trust in battle, each deserving practice.
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Two different types of swords, each of which drove him mad in different ways.
A personal honor guard that needed to be both lethal and loyal.
An inflationary economic environment.
A gaping hole in the earth that spat out deadly Monsters.
And a cousin, two neighbors, and a princess he needed to stay on good terms with.
The thing he'd wanted more than anything in this life was to live slow, keep quiet, and be comfortable.
He needed to stop lying to himself.
He wanted to be lazy.
Well, that was out the window already, joining the silent fields of snow. The Gemstone Tablet alone made that impossible. Simply by having it, he was capable of engaging with the true nature of reality in a way that other people could not. The System and its interfaces were a state secret, and if word spread he knew of them, he'd be painting a target on his back.
The last thing he wanted was to spend any more time looking at spreadsheets than he needed to.
But some of the information he needed to keep track of benefited heavily from being put in the spreadsheet format. Or, at the very least, having some pretty charts made of it.
Hence his dilemma.
How did you manipulate, cajole, bully a mysterious magical artifact into mimicking Microsoft Excel 2018?
Would it be any easier to mimic Microsoft Excel 2003?
Or was this a fool's errand?
In this world, there was no user's manual. There was no Google. There was no tech support he could call up.
There was only him and his tablet and his pigheadedness.
That stubbornness had always served him, though not necessarily well, in the past. When there was a problem, he smashed his head into it, beyond logic and sense, when a bit of basic research ahead of time might've saved him hours of pain and effort.
For once in this life, he was in uncharted territory. Dueling, magic, statecraft, economics, dungeoneering — all these had established best practices.
Making a magical spreadsheet?
Brand new.
The sun was just starting to rise once he managed to get a time series of his (Strength) stat. He could see historically when his Strength stat had changed.
By lunch, he'd made a chart.
By looking at the chart, it confirmed his suspicions.
His stats grew in leaps and bounds when they did, but often went very long without changed at all.
His Strength had jumped up significantly when he'd first started doing pushups, but hadn't changed significantly until he'd entered the Dungeon — and then it had grown by 50%. And he hadn't been keeping up with those exercises at all, with everything else at stake — the tournament and sword training and getting a hand of everything going on in his County.
When they changed…
He pulled out his journal, which he admittedly had been neglecting. Another habit carried over from his past life.
After his first journey into the Dungeon.
After his training with Garth.
The day of the tournament.
It had seemed implausible, goofy when Raehel had suggested it. But it really did seem like his stats changed meaningfully in response to major pivotal life events.
If he was prepared, then the right kind of stress catalyzed his growth.
This changed everything.
His mind ran free with possibilities.
He could visualize all his stats, for a start.
He could cross-reference important life changes and events. The addition of a training regimen. A climactic battle. A new friend. How each changed his stats. Which actions changed them the most.
He could make a graph of all his relationships, who liked each other and who hated each other and how they worked together.
He could string his Skills together into a proper Skill Tree, delving into their mysteries and discovering his synergies.
Yes, he could do all these things and more, if he had the time and the will and the curiosity.
He could unlock the true mysteries and true power of the universe.
This was a very dangerous power.
The power of having more information than everyone else.
Yes, very dangerous, and frankly underrated.
But he stopped himself, pulled back.
For one, he wasn't the only person who could see this System.
He knew for a fact that the Princess Angelina Grace Prima Marca Omnio, the closest person he could consider a rival, had the same ability to peer into the System.
Her father, the Omnio Emperor, did too.
Doubtless the Church and the University of Mages did as well.
For two, this was the exact thing he wanted to avoid.
Making graphs. Making charts. Organizing numbers and spreadsheets.
That had been his past life, where he could hunker down and console himself with the thirtieth cup of coffee a day at 10 PM at night.
This life was supposed to be different.
Sparkly. Spiritual. Peaceful. Empowering. Whatever contradiction felt best at the time.
The outside world was quiet and peaceful, the noon sun dancing across fields of snow.
Granavale Dungeon, a passage to the Underworld, lied in wait, teeming with Monsters and the magical Gems and artifacts.
The Imperial Capital and Holy City and University of Mages all locked behind their august walls the secret keys to power.
The forests of Eth Darel were so dense day and night blended as one. The far shores of Salamar were so blue that sea and sky merged at the horizon. The peaks of Gundarr were so tall they scraped the belly of heaven.
And here he was, poking and prodding at a magic iPad.
There had to be more to life than this.
There was a knock on his door.
"You have got to stop shutting yourself in like this, 'young master'," said Mary Alisdaughter di Granavale, his personal maidservant. A whole thing had happened where he'd accidentally put her in a precarious legal situation if she didn't swear to serve the nobility for the rest of her life, and he was actively trying to put her in a position where she could get out of that.
Despite that, she seemed to have no intention of leaving. Either now or ever.
"You have three guests with as much social status as you, and you're just locking yourself in your room? It's fine when you're just slapping your servants in the face, but other nobles?"
It seemed one problem resolved the other.
As much as he enjoyed the edgelord lone wolf archetype (he thought of himself as one of these, though he suspected that others might actually think he was a 'team player' or something goofy like that), you could be an edgelord lone wolf and still coast by on the goodwill of other people.
It was time for him to be his own boss. To be the guy hiring others. To be the person getting other people to make and maintain spreadsheets for him.
Yes, that was the secret to a peaceful early life in another world.