Rose handed the grimoire she’d made over to me. The paper was different from the kind we used in the shop, of course, if we wanted to make grimoires for our own use, we had to get our own materials. This was of a lower quality, but if it had been made with the intent to be consumed almost immediately, it didn’t matter that much.

“I don’t have the money for this,” I told her. That was not entirely true - I could probably buy a few Rank One grimoires, but I was saving up to buy a translating item.

“Oh! I wouldn’t dream of charging you for this - it’s thanks to you I managed to make it after all, I just thought that you deserved a copy,” she said.

“Thank you very much, but… ah, I can’t read it…”

“Not a problem! I can help you read it!”

It was the first time that someone had helped me read a grimoire - before then I had always been on the other end, being a translator. As Rose read out what the poem said, I noticed that the writing did not change, but instead, the green aura above the letters became stronger and brighter, until it morphed into different letters entirely.

So, this was how translation worked? It now looked like there was another set of letters, in English, written in the bright green aura hovering over the original words. The direction of the translated text was still along the direction of the original text, and the lizardmen script was read vertically instead of horizontally so this took a bit of getting used to.

The poem went like this:

“A tiny ball of fur and full,

Upon four moving limbs of bones,

And fangs twisted into a smile,

Running along the dusky road,

Returning home with a wagging tail,

Consuming everything and anything,

That passes their fancy,

Coming back home,

To their warm smiles,

As radiant as the rising sun,

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Upon the sea of grass,

In the Eastern Lands,

A blessing in and of itself,

Ever advancing forward,

Through thick and thin,

With its master.”

The poem didn’t make a whole lot of sense, truth be told, and it lacked both meter and any kind of structure that would be familiar to me. It wasn’t even like modern poetry in the sense that it was all over the place.

However, that was likely just because it was written in a very different language than English, and all of these things were just a product of multiple things getting lost in translation.

Was this how my grimoires sounded to the customers I read them aloud to? No wonder some of them seemed to have confused faces while I did so. Despite my confusion, it did work, and I could feel this grimoire occupy another slot within my mind as the paper it was written on crumbled until none of it remained.

However, although I had managed to use it to fill a slot in my mind, it still felt alien somehow. As if my understanding of it was limited compared to the other ones I had. All the other grimoires I had memorized were all in English, and this was likely a result of the translation.

Likely that was also why, if I wanted to, I couldn’t write this specific grimoire and replicate it. Most grimoires that were in different languages than what you knew couldn’t be replicated as many essential things were lost in translation. No one had managed to make a lizardmen script translation of anything I had written, after all. Still, I was able to gain its beneficial effects. ‘Luck +1’ was what it granted. How could I gain its effects but not replicate it? It was another one of those things that I had asked about but no one seemed to be able to adequately answer as to why this world worked like that.

“Huh, do you know why it raises luck?” I asked Rose.

With most grimoires you could make some sense of why they did what they did, but sometimes, there did not seem to be any correlation whatsoever.

Rose shook her head. “Maybe pets are considered lucky?”

I shrugged. “Or perhaps I was just lucky to have met so many wonderful people like you.” It was empty flattery, though as far as I knew, flattery was still effective even when people knew that it wasn’t sincere. And that didn’t seem to be any different for the lizardmen.

“Ah - you’re too kind!” she said, tail thrashing about for a few seconds. “You’re very nice for a human!”

“Thank y-” I was about to say, before I caught onto the last part. “Um, what do you mean ‘for a human?’”

“Oh I uh - nothing!” she said, her tone suddenly shifting by quite a lot. She likely had realized she had just said something that she hadn’t meant to. “I um… remembered I had to go somewhere, sorry!” With that, she turned tail and ran away as quickly as she could.

I walked back home, wondering what it was that Rose was going on about. Aside from the mystery regarding her last statement, I still wasn’t sure what stats in this world did .For one, there was no easy stat screen for me to see anywhere. I knew how much mana I had, but that was the only one that I was privy to. I knew how many boosts to stats I had, but I had no idea what the total was.

Secondly, did the stat ‘Wisdom’ really increase one’s wisdom? I asked Granny Qi, who told me that it didn’t actually improve wisdom in the sense one was used to, only that there were some spells whose effects relied on ‘Wisdom’ as a stat. True wisdom, she said, came only from experience. As in, boosting your ‘Wisdom’ wouldn’t make you smarter in any way or let you see some deep, profound truth about the universe that you couldn’t before.