learning to read. "set aside 2 days"

[Icedfate]

so, i'm on the time sensitive quest "in god's hands", and henry still doesn't know how to read yet. i made the trek across the entire map to get to the scribe in uhshitz and he said i need to "set aside 2 days to learn".
does this actually cause 2 days of time to pass? because i reas that the guy that needs the purple herb dies after only 3 days, meanwhile, henry needs to know how to read to look in the herbarium and figure out what herb to use and i already lost a day traveling up here if i lose 2 more days, i'm gonna fail. . like wtf, this quest, it gives you this long ass laundry list requring henry to go to rattay, and go up north to rovga and then nortwest of skavig and it's so broken, the quest marker for the priest is in the completely wrong place and there's no hint or clue where you're really supposed to go, like it points me to the villager in rovga and i talk to the villager and henry said " i found tha priest you were looking for" and i never saw this guy at all in my playthrough, meanwhile, you're supposed to go northwest of skavig and then i have to brew potions, and then go poach 100 meat. . and i'm supposed to do all this in 3 freaking days?

and yes, i realize i could just metagame it. i already know what herb i need because i spoiled it, looking for info, but the game expects henry to know how to read here, and the player could blindly walk into the monastery before having learned to read and now gets roped into thismtime sensitive quest , with no way to complete it successfully? (without looking up a guide of course )

[2GenL]

You could have learnt to read (do all of bernards fighting lessons and by a horse if you want) before meeting nightingale

[Icedfate]

i thought you have to learn it from the scribe in uhshitz.
i ended up in sasau earlier, because i was over there pursuing a couple of sidequests for people in rattay and got embroiled in the whole monastery thing with all the sick people in there and i had 3 days to run all around the map to the far corners looking for npcs to tell me how to make potions and set broken bones. .only to get robbed of success by the passage of time and i was gonna succeed, but then a scripted event caused me to end up in jail for 2 days, just because i didn't have 15+ on speech craft, so wasting another 2 days to learn to read was not an option.

i ended up failing to save the guy with the broken bone and didn't want to reload and go back to 6 hours earlier in real time so i just said frig it.

and i guess the devs expected me to go learn to read much earlier. the game did prompt me with a side quest to go there from rattay , but then i looked where the quest marker was and it was so far north, i couldn't even scroll to it on the map screen and it looked so far away i resolved , oh well, i guess i'm not gonna be getting there any time soon.

but then, things aren't as far from each other as they look. .
the map looks biger than skyrim, but really everis onky a few hours aways from each other in game time. i could have gone there and learned to read before accepting the quest for "in god's hands", but the game gave me no indication that the quest was time limited until after i started it and it seems almost like they deliberately designed that quest that you would fail it unless you metagme it and know how to do it and have all the items and skills and knowledge that you need ahead of time

[2GenL]

Yeah the same scribe.

But you can go to him before you meet nightingale. Which saves a lot of time later on in the game.

My first run through the game went the same way. So, try not to get too frustrated with it. There are a lot of choices you can make at every turn and sometimes, takes you to do the quest anyhow to see how you could have done it differently