Such a degree of regulation seemed very odd to me, before I was told just how powerful Rank Three spells were. [Grand Fireball] could kill close to a hundred normal people if they were standing close together, as per Granny Qi. Given this, it was only natural that the government wouldn’t let you sell it off to any random person walking down the street. There were likely too many Rank Two and lower grimoires for them to successfully police, which was why nothing of the sort was required for them.

I had asked Granny Qi, out of curiosity, how big a Rank Four grimoire was and hypothetically how much it would cost to buy one. She told me to forget about ever buying one - Rank Four grimoires were almost as big as a textbook back home, and they were practically never offered for sale on the open market. Most Rank Four Liberomancers had memorized only one or at most two Rank Four grimoires. Rank Four grimoires were considered national treasures and usually passed down certain family lines, and as such, Granny Qi explained, it was usually not possible to buy one.

As a matter of fact, Arconia only had one Rank Four Liberomancer in the entire city: the current governor.

As for Rank Five Liberomancers and grimoires; they were so rare that were it not for one fact many people would’ve just considered them to be myths.

The one fact that went against this narrative was the existence of the Ruler of the Astral Winds - a Rank Five Liberomancer who had lived seven hundred years ago. At the height of his power, he had ruled over eighty percent of the continent, and it was well documented through too many sources and eyewitness accounts that he could use Rank Five spells for it to be just a rumor.

That said, after his death, there had been no subsequent Rank Five Liberomancers, and no one even knew how big a Rank Five grimoire would be as no one in living memory had seen one. The idea that there might be a Rank Five Liberomancer hiding away from the rest of the world in some remote cave somewhere was a fantastic and unrealistic one. They would almost certainly be detected at some point, disregarding the fact that more likely than not there would be no need to go looking for them as they would’ve declared themselves to the world.

After all, the shadow cast by the Ruler of the Astral Winds was only rivaled by the Goddess Serragnin herself.

Granny Qi told me that in some versions of the story about the Ragini she had told me earlier, the Goddess Serragnin was said to have created the river via a Rank Six grimoire some five thousand years ago. But again, these were all myths and legends, and some people doubted whether or not there had ever been an actual historical figure by the name of Serragnin.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I went over all of this, my head feeling heavy as it was weighed down with the sheer amount of new information, as I fell asleep.

The next day, now that I was more familiar with how the shop worked, I decided to try to get to know my coworkers a bit better.

I was a bit too eager at the beginning, as evident by the fact that I hadn’t formulated a response to what the most normal questions would be for them to ask. Where did I come from? What was it like there? And why was I in Arconia?

I didn’t have good answers prepared for them. “I come from a country far away from here.” I hadn’t even thought of a good name to tell them yet about where I came from.

Still, they thankfully didn’t seem to mind or care that much. I couldn’t understand any of their names, and so I gave them all fake names within my head.

The guy I had seen writing with his tail when I first came in was George. “If you don’t mind me asking, why do you write with your tail?” I wasn’t well-versed with lizardmen culture or customs, and I didn’t want to offend someone by doing something that was taboo without meaning too. I had asked Granny Qi about this, but she had not spent much time with the lizardmen and didn’t know much about their customs, so unfortunately this was one of the areas where she couldn’t help me.

Thankfully this was an okay question to ask. “Ah, when I was younger and still learning how to write, I ended up breaking both of my wrists trying to climb a tree. I couldn’t use either of them for a while, but my tail came in very handy at the time. I started using it to write, and I never went back to using my hands even after my wrists had healed.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I see you write with your left hand,” George said. “Is that common for humans?”

“Ah, no,” I told him. “Most humans are right-handed.”

“Same for the lizardmen,” George said. “Those of us who are left-handed usually just learn how to write with their right hands.”

“Yeah, it was like that where I came from too,” I told him. “Or it used to be - my parents weren’t like that though as times changed, and so no one really stopped me when I used my left hand.” However, in saying this I had unknowingly dug my own grave.

“Really? Where did you come from again?” Of course he would ask that when I brought it up myself.

“Uh…” I trailed off. “Libraria.” I told him.

I had made up that name for the huge continent of this world in my head as its residents didn’t have a name for it other than calling it ‘the continent’- come to think of it, I could use it for this entire world as well.

Books were important here after all, and since names were not translated into their components, no one would know that the name sounded fake in English.