The reason why I ended up giving him a fake name was because I had mentioned ‘America’ or the ‘United States’ to people, and all of them told me that they had never heard of such a place. And the thing was that I was not eager for people to suddenly think that I was crazy by thinking that I was talking about some other world or a country that didn’t exist.

I later spoke to someone else who I decided to call Rob - I noticed that he was writing on a huge leaf rather than a normal piece of paper. After some introductions, I decided to ask him about it.

“Oh, this is a special grimoire that has to be written on the leaf of the Agugav tree,” Rob said.

“What tree?” I asked him.

“Oh, it’s this large tree that grows by the village I come from,” he explained. “It has a lot of medicinal properties, and grimoires made using its parts can give skills like [Minor Poison Resistance] and spells like [Detoxification].”

I scratched my head. “I assumed that you could write a grimoire on anything,” I told him. I’d written several of them in the dirt after all, and it seemed like, at least to me, you could write a grimoire revealing the secrets of the universe on a stack of used napkins and it’d still work.

I hadn’t questioned why we still used paper in the shop though - for one, customers would not want to buy something that was not on at least decent quality paper. Secondly, just because a text was a magical grimoire didn’t confer any properties on it that would save it from physical damage. If you wrote something in the dirt, the moment it rained it would be washed away, even if no one had read it. If you wrote it on paper, if it fell into water, or was burnt, or otherwise harshly exposed to the elements, it would degrade all the same. Once it had degraded to the point that you couldn’t read it, the mana and time you had poured into making it was wasted and of no use.

Since many people bought grimoires in order to store them for later or gift them, it made sense that you’d want to write them on something somewhat durable. The actual best practice would be to have them inscribed in something extremely resistant like chiseling them into iron, though of course this was impractical.

“Most grimoires can be written on anything,” Rob told me. “And most of them can be written with anything. However, some special ones require specific materials to be used either as ink or as the paper which it is written on. In return, they are usually either more powerful or much shorter than corresponding grimoires. A grimoire made of the Aguvav’s leaves grants [Minor Poison Resistance], that made using its bark grants [Detoxificaton], and there is one using its sap as ink that grants [Major Poison Resistance]. Er, but that last one is a Rank Two grimoire and I do not know it.” He added the last part rather sheepishly, as if embarrassed.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Oh, this is actually the first I’m hearing about stuff like this,” I told him. Granny Qi had not mentioned anything like this, though Rob talked about it as if it was something quite elementary.

“Really? I thought it would be common knowledge… I mean, even if you hadn’t seen one before, I’m sure you must have heard of such things,” he said with an air of smugness. Perhaps that was why Granny Qi had forgotten to mention it - because it was such common knowledge?

“No, thank you, that was quite informative,” I said, ignoring his smugness. I wasn’t sure how decorum worked with the lizardmen, but I was acutely aware that I was on their turf. Yes, there were humans here I wasn’t even sure how the power structure worked between the two species and if they’d even bother defending me if something happened - I was a foreigner after all.

As such, I decided to absorb all blows to my self-esteem and let small things like this slide. As it was, I did not have much pride left after spending several days homeless. No, I had decided to make myself seem as small, unassuming, and harmless - though useful, as possible.

“Ah, no problem,” Rob said. “No problem whatsoever- ah, if you have any other questions, you can always ask Mark, but I would also be happy to guide you. Oh, we could also swap grimoires sometime, what say you?”

Swapping grimoires was basically saying that he would let me read one thing that he wrote, and I would let him do the same with one of mine. We would both help each other with the translation. The only issue was, of course, that during working hours, we had to completely devote our mana to writing for the shop, but there was nothing stopping us from staying behind after hours and exchanging things then.

I had a feeling that most of the swaps he would likely offer wouldn’t exactly be entirely fair - after all, Sonnet 95 was a mana-raising grimoire and not only was very highly coveted, it went for a very high price as well. Still, even if he offered me a more mundane grimoire, I wouldn’t mind. In that way, the two of us could advance to Rank Two faster.

“I look forward to it, I’m sure we can help each other out,” I told him. “And get to Rank Two together as fast as we can.”

Swapping grimoires was easy enough to do with Rank One grimoires, and occasionally with Rank Two grimoires of course. The issues came when you got to Rank Three and higher as there were several problems that were difficult to reconcile when thinking of a trade. For example, the sheer amount of mana and time it would take to write one was a big barrier.