As he drew the last line of the last letter, Alec felt his stomach tighten. Although he had understood that this was going to be bad, there was no way for him to reverse the process of creation as far as he knew.

As mana started draining from his body, Alec got more and more uncomfortable. The drain rate was too fast. He barely managed to pop open a bottle of mana potion and started downing it before he almost ran out.

Fortunately, the rate at which he could drink it seemed to be enough. The more he drank, the more his mana depleted. While drinking with one hand, he had to open another potion. The drain only stopped when he had gone through one and a half bottles of mana potion.

“What was that..?” Alec muttered as he looked at the singular white, small, oval-shaped antibiotic pill. ‘This little piece of shit cost me that much mana? That definitely disproves my theory of ‘need equals cost’.’

‘But it brings forth another question. Why?’ Alec kept thinking. ‘What is the difference between an antibiotic and an anti-infection potion?’

When Alec saw the two next to each other, he managed to produce an idea.

‘The antibiotic is from Earth, therefore it’s more expensive? No, that’s too vague and sounds stupid. It should be caused by a more general rule.’

Left without a choice, Alec started thinking of a plethora of different web novels in his head. There had to be something that could help his imagination.

Unfortunately, he came out empty-handed from that too.

“Ugh… This doesn’t make sense!” Alec shouted in anger, tousling his hair with both of his hands. However, his sentence caused his heart to jump.

“Doesn’t make sense…” he mumbled once more. Immediately, he took out The Author’s Pen and wrote a very low health potion. He then got up and left the training room, rushing to the alchemy labs as fast as possible.

By now, his credit budget was running very low, however, the fee for an alchemy room was a price he was willing to pay for.

When he reached his destination and entered an unoccupied lab room, Alec was left gasping for breath. Disregarding his situation, he focused on his mana and wrote down another very low health potion. Just like he had guessed, the price of the potion had dropped by about thirty percent.

‘This is it! The answer!’ Alec shouted in his head. He felt his heart start beating faster and faster in his chest. ‘The pen doesn’t arbitrarily make up mana-costs. It has a self-consistent rule for it!’

As Alec’s heart rate started becoming more stable, he sat down on the ground.

‘The rule is simple! The more sense it makes for something to be there, the cheaper it will cost!’ he thought. It’s related to its possibility. There are a lot of elements that affect how possible something is, but still, I should be able to get a vague feeling.’

‘The reason the antibiotic was more expensive than the potion is that it doesn’t make sense for me to have an antibiotic. No one in this world knows about antibiotics, the methods to create one are unknown. I don’t even know how this antibiotic is made so I wouldn’t be able to make it even if I had the ingredients, and I wouldn’t be able to outsource the task to someone else.’

‘On the other hand, the possibility of me getting my hands on a potion is much higher. There are a lot of people who can make them, they are sold in stores, and the ingredients are both known and accessible. Even if the ones The Author’s Pen creates are different, it’s normal for them to be cheaper than the antibiotic.’

‘Furthermore, as soon as I learned the recipe for the potion, I became capable of making them myself, which increased the possibility of me having it. That was why the cost decreased after I took the alchemy class!’

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‘And my last experiment confirmed this further!’ He thought. ‘When I went to the alchemy lab and paid the entrance fee, I made a possibility into reality. I eliminated some of the possibilities that the pen has to actualize by having alchemical tools nearby. Which reduced the mana consumption!’

As Alec’s internal monologue came to an end, he noticed himself to be out of breath again. Even though he hadn’t talked, finally figuring out the workings of the pen was too good to not be excited.

‘It’s good that I didn’t try making a gun or something. That would have been a great recipe for a three-day-long coma,’ he thought. Now that he had completed his grand theory of mana consumption, it was time for Alec to focus on his real problem.

‘That bastard of a teacher gave me an impossible task, one where it doesn’t matter even if I complete it,’ he thought. ‘If I want to come out of this victorious, I have to display the abilities of a genius, but not the abilities of a cheater.’

‘What if I wanted to recreate the entire magic circle using the pen?’ Alec thought. Although it was probably going to need some serious amount of mana, he would be able to take out what he wanted from the circle and display as much information as he wanted.

‘The problem is, I don’t know how much mana I actually need. If I dump all my mana on this and then fail, I’ll have no choice but to accept my fate,’ he contemplated. Weighing the risks, Alec decided to go to the library. He didn’t have the necessary knowledge to decide on such a matter. It would be better to get more knowledge to reduce the production cost of the magic circle if he were to decide to create it.

The short jog from the alchemy lab to the library was exhilarating. The student body was mostly busy with club activities at this time, which left the regular pathways empty.

The library was not very similar in that sense, as it always had a certain amount of people. The visitor amount would go on overdrive before every exam and immediately dip right after the said exam happened. But it would never go below a certain threshold. As the mid-term exams were getting closer, the library was a bit more crowded than normal.

Alec had come to learn more about gravity magic but didn’t know where to search for it. So he approached the librarian. The librarian was a stylish young man with light brown hair, green eyes, and a black suit. He had a weird accent of Toalqeshi, which was a bit hard to understand. Especially because Alec was somewhat new to the language.

Although he had spent a lot of time in the library, that time was mostly him reading textbooks that Evan had recommended to him. This was going to be his first time doing extra-curricular reading, which left him with the need for guidance.

“Hello sir,” Alec greeted. The librarian didn’t respond, which made Alec look closer at what he was reading. It was a book called, ‘My Beloved Princess and I’, which Alec presumed to be some sort of romance novel. He didn’t react in any particular way. As an author, he knew not to judge other’s tastes in books. He was about to speak out again, however, the librarian suddenly shut closed the book, making a loud noise that startled the nearby students.

“I don’t want to overreach here, but you know this is a library, right?” Alec asked as he threw a few glances at the students looking at them.

“You are saying that to the librarian? Gutsy, aren’t you?” the man asked. “I saw that face you made. Can’t appreciate real literature?”

“Not really,” Alec answered. “Even though I still read, writing is more of my thing.”

“Writing? Now that’s interesting,” the librarian said as he placed the book down. “What genre?”

“I write fan-” Alec was about to say before he stopped himself. ‘Well, I was writing magical academy stories before so…’ he thought.

“I write realistic fiction,” Alec changed his answer. Which made the librarian snicker in contempt.

“Boring. Fantastic fiction is better. Nothing beats ‘The Legendary Swordsman Marries the Mage Queen and Has to Live as A-”

“Stop,” Alec said as he facepalmed. The disgustingly long title made him remember his own books and caused him to cringe in retrospect. ‘On the other hand, do books with those kinds of titles exist even in this world? It’s not going to be some, ‘Erm… This was actually the Earth all along!’ type of thing, right?’ he thought to himself.

“I just want books about gravity magic,” Alec urged the librarian. He didn’t want to waste any more time chit-chatting.

“Killjoy,” the librarian said as he closed his eyes. The next moment, a blue magic circle started rotating behind his head, releasing a gentle light. When the circle disappeared, the man opened his eyes and started talking.

“Most books about gravity magic are on the second level of the library, as the discipline is highly specialized and almost entirely lost to time. You won’t find much other than some rudimentary knowledge on the first level,” the man said. “Still, if you want to read them, here is a list,” he continued before handing over a paper.

Reading through the small list of books the man had handed him, Alec sighed deeply.

“How do I get to the second level?” Alec asked.

“You don’t. You either contribute greatly to the school and become acknowledged by one of the teachers, or… do some other thing I can’t imagine right now. Don’t try to break in though, you won’t be able to do so. There are a lot of defensive wards. Don’t want you getting yourself killed,” the librarian explained, which made Alec turn around in defeat.

‘It is what it is. I’ll have to do with whatever I find in the first level.’