I went on for paragraphs, drawing on stuff I had learned in high school and college, until I felt I was done with this rather long essay, and as I saw the faint blue aura turn green, I breathed a sigh of relief. I had been worried that I might’ve failed to successfully create a grimoire, in which case I’d have not only wasted my time, but my mana as well.

I memorized this piece of work with the mana I had left, and the grimoire granted the ability to use the spell, [Create Water].

Grimoires, much like the genetic code, were degenerate - as in, many grimoires could do the exact same thing. Two different grimoires could not only raise the same stat, they could also grant the same spell or ability. I now knew the spell [Create Water] though I had not read the grimoire that Granny Qi had used to gain it, nor the one the Goddess Serragnin had read in that story she had told me.

However, unlike with grimoires that raise stats, you could not read multiple grimoires that granted the same spell or ability. So even if I had a translating item, I couldn’t use the grimoire that Granny Qi had that gave the same spell. Well, technically I could, by overwriting the grimoire I had made - but that would just be a downgrade because then I wouldn’t be able to replicate it by writing it out later. Doing so would just be a waste of time, mana, and resources.

[Create Water] was hardly a huge breakthrough if you thought about it combat-wise, but it was still quite useful. As it was, most Rank One spells had very little combat prowess as far as I understood.

Regarding said usefulness, for one, a reliable source of clean water was very useful if you were in the wilderness or desert. Even within a city like Arconia, there was no running water system like you’d find in a modern city. And a lack of fresh water would lead to easy spread of diseases like cholera or typhoid - Arconia had a population somewhere between four hundred thousand and six hundred thousand people, and it would not be able to support such a large populace unless it had fresh water readily available. True, a branch of the Ragini did pass by the city before it flowed into the ocean, but as it was said ‘a river is a pipeline connecting the digestive systems of those who live upstream with the mouths of those who live downstream.’ I had struggled to find potable water many times back when I had been homeless, and looking back on things, it was a miracle I hadn’t developed dysentery at any point.

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Secondly, it could function as the foundation for more advanced spells. Many higher ranked spells required that you knew lower ranked spells first - you could not learn [Aquatic Slingshot] without knowing [Create Water] first. You couldn’t learn Rank Three [Grand Fireball] unless you knew the Rank Two spell [Fireball], which you couldn’t learn unless you knew Rank One [Create Flame] first. This sort of made sense to me - you couldn’t obtain advanced knowledge without mastering the basics first. You had to take Chemistry 101 before you could advance to Chemistry 102.

Hei Nan, Granny Qi’s husband, had specialized in using fire-elemental magic, which is why I knew quite a lot about that particular tree of spells.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to specialize in, if anything, but that was fine. At the lower ranks, especially Rank One, it was not too difficult to alter one’s repertoire of grimoires. If I forgot something and wanted to relearn that grimoire, I could just have it written out before I deleted it, assuming it was in English. I could then relearn it whenever I wanted to if I thought I had made a mistake forgetting it. It was starting at Rank Three where there was a real cost to not thinking through which grimoires you wanted to learn.

I had not seen a Rank Three grimoire by this point, but from what I was told and was confirmed by Granny Qi they were about the size of an average novel back home. In other words, around one to two hundred pages - my hand already cramped up just thinking about how long it would take to write even a single book like that out. Let alone trying to write multiple copies to sell, to memorize for later, to keep for your children later on in life, and whatnot. The length of the grimoire put aside, the mana requirements to write one were enormous. No wonder everyone valued mana-raising grimoires so highly!

And if you wanted to try to make a new Rank Three grimoire which had never been made before - the very thought of possibly spending months writing out one only to possibly have it fail and all of your effort be for nothing in the end made my head hurt and stomach turn. Forget failing - even if you succeeded after all that effort, once you wrote it, it could only be used once. I still had trouble, even after all this time, wrapping my head around the fact that grimoires could only be read once before they disappeared. The fact that you would need thirty of such grimoires to get to Rank Four made my head hurt even more. Many of them also required you to have learned lower ranking grimoires before you could memorize them! Lauren was working on writing a single Rank Three grimoire, which was likely why she didn’t actually run her shop and let Mark do it given the amount of time that would take.

This was made worse by the fact that all trade of Rank Three grimoires had to go through the Liberomancer’s Guild. It was illegal to buy or sell them to anyone without government permission, which would involve a background check for both parties before the transaction would be approved.