Although I had written it before, I had not memorized it yet, which is why I was doing this now. Once I had written it and then read it- a process which also consumed mana, the letters written into the soil disappeared as a wind blew and covered the soil so that it was now fresh like before. I felt the second of the three slots deep inside my mind fill up.

All grimoires were consumable, as in they could only be read once. However, now that I had read it, the information on it was inscribed into my memory more permanently than if it had been saved onto a computer. I would never forget it so long as I lived, and so if I wanted to, I could easily make more copies of it.

This simple activity had already exhausted me, and though I wanted to do more, I felt that it was more important to sleep right now. After all, I didn’t want to be late in the morning on my second day of work.

Turns out that I didn’t need to worry about that at all as Granny Qi shook me up at the crack of dawn, telling me I needed to take a bath and make myself presentable. She had made me take one before she had let me rent out a room last night, and after I had finally made myself somewhat presentable in her eyes, she smacked my hand away as I reached for my old clothes.

“What is the point of bathing if you’re going to put those back on?” she demanded.

“But I don’t have any other clothes,” I told her. It was late when I had left the shop, so I hadn’t had the time to pick up another pair.

“Take these,” she said. “See if they fit you.”

She handed me a set of plain green robes which were tied at the waist with a green sash. They were slightly tight around my stomach, but not to the point where they were unwearable. At least, I didn’t think so. “Not perfect in the least, but, what else can we do?” she said, shaking her head.

“Whose are these?”

“My husband’s,” she said. “Oh well, I’ll head to the market today. Get to work, you’ll be late if you don’t head out now.”

She gave me some more pointers on Liberomancy before I set out for the day.

The shop was already open by the time I got there even though it wasn’t time for the scribes to start yet, though Mark nodded approvingly as I had come a bit early. He was always the first one there, he explained, as he had to open up the shop.

I started working right away. No one was bothered by me using my left hand, so it turned out that I had been worrying for nothing. Once I had written enough to exhaust my mana, I went to work near the front of the shop.

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We were not just expected to write our grimoires, but were expected to sell them to potential customers as well. It made sense - there were countless grimoires out there in the world, and who better to be salespeople for them than the ones who knew the most about them - that is to say, the writers themselves. I had not been asked to do this yesterday because my appearance wasn’t deemed adequate, but I had tidied up considerably.

However, for me, there was another reason that I had to be there when any of my grimoires were sold.

“Ah, I heard you had a new mana-raising grimoire,” I heard a lizardman say as he walked in. Okay, so that was my cue to take action.

Mark greeted the man, and then gestured to me with his hand. “This is the scribe who wrote this new grimoire.”

The customer took one look at me and seemed quite startled - I could tell that despite his reptilian features. Then again, I hadn’t seen any humans enter the shop since the morning, and as I couldn’t read the lizardman script there could have very been a sign out front saying ‘No Humans Allowed’ and I wouldn’t have noticed it So his shock could very well have been warranted if this was a store exclusively for lizardmen.

“It is a grimoire written from an exotic land,” Mark said, trying to sell my work for me. “A bargain at eighty denarii!”

Rank One grimoires usually cost between thirty and forty denari depending on what they did, but mana-raising ones could easily sell for double that amount.

The reason was rather simple: of all the stat-boosting grimoires around, mana-raising ones were the most useful.

After all, for a Liberomancer, mana was everything. It was what helped one write new grimoires, read grimoires, and also cast spells. And so, a larger mana bar would make everything else easier. No matter how big your mana bar was, it recovered completely within four hours, so it made sense to dedicate a disproportionate amount of slots to mana.

From what Granny Qi told me, though an ‘optimum’ build was a matter of opinion, a widely accepted rule of thumb was that it was a good idea to dedicate two-thirds of your Rank One slots to stat-boosting grimoires, in other words, twenty of them. The other ten should be dedicated to spells and skills.

The reasoning was simple - you had to find a balance between the two. If you just raised your stats, you would have no spells or skills to make use of them. If you just learned a bunch of spells, they would be nearly useless without the proper stats to back them up.

Of your stats, your mana was the most important, so two-thirds of the slots dedicated to raising stats should be dedicated to raising your mana, or roughly twelve to fourteen.

But, there was a problem with this. You couldn’t memorize the same grimoire twice and fill up multiple slots with the same grimoire. And it turns out that since stat-boosting grimoires only give you a single point, you would need to find many different mana-raising grimoires to reach that threshold.

As such, given there was a greater demand for them, mana-raising grimoires naturally cost far more than usual. The customer haggled down the price to seventy denarii while I struggled to remember the above points again which Granny Qi had told me.

Mark and the customer eventually settled on a price of seventy-two denarii.