My mana was drained after making two copies of Sonnet 95, and I handed both of them to Mark, who took them away. There was an area in front of this room, which was the actual shop that the customers visited. For now though, there wouldn’t be buyers for anything I made until they advertised it a bit, but Mark was confident that people would come soon enough.

It took four hours for my mana to come back completely, though in this time, I had thought of writing something different. Till now, I had only written things other people had written, but I decided to write out one of my own poems.

It was a poem about summer, and one I had written a few months back. I didn’t remember it verbatim, but most of it was still clear in my mind as I imbued my mana into every letter I wrote.

When I was finished, instead of the gentle blue aura turning into a friendly green around the letters, it turned an angry red, and the paper dissolved into ash as I felt a sudden headache assault me as backlash to whatever I’d done.

Mark had noticed what was happening and said, “Experiment on your own time - or the next sheet of paper’s coming out of your pay!” I nodded, despite the throbbing pain in my temple which thankfully went away quickly.

Mark asked me to stay behind while the others left after getting their pay. I thought he was going to lay into me further on experimenting and wasting paper beforehand, but instead, he handed me a few extra coins compared to some of the other Rank One scribes.

“Ah, normally, we provide housing or housing subsidies to most of our workers,” he said. “And I would take a cut out of your pay in exchange for that but… all the houses we have deals with only take lizardmen. I’m afraid you’ll have to find lodgings on your own.” He sounded genuinely apologetic while saying these words. “But ah, another word of advice- I would not go around asking any lizardmen for lodging. It would be better to ask your own kind.”

“Understood,” I said. I hadn’t even thought about where I was going to stay - I was so used to being homeless in this place and sleeping wherever I could find shelter for the night, but of course, that wasn’t sustainable. And I needed to get a bath and get cleaned up if I was going to be selling things in order to be presentable while doing so.

Where to go though? And who would I ask?

After a bit of contemplating, that’s how I found myself back at that granny’s house.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Oh, it’s you. What happened?”

“I uh, was just wondering, can I rent one of your rooms?”

Later that night, I found that I couldn’t sleep. Far too much had happened so quickly and I was still trying to process all of it.

Qi Nan, as I learned, was the name of that old woman, who was now also my landlady. She had been kind enough to answer even more of my questions about how magic in this world worked.

I now had some basic understanding of the rules of Liberomancy.

Liberomancers were people who gained power through the use of texts imbued with mana - commonly called grimoires, though they were given other names like scriptures, manuals, holy texts, etc. depending on who you asked.

Both grimoires and Liberomancers had ranks, and for Liberomancers, each rank was divided into ten levels, with each level being able to hold three grimoires.

In other words, I was currently level one, given I had only imbibed a single grimoire- Shakespeare’s Polonius Advises Laertes. For each level, you had three slots, each of which could fit a single grimoire. All that was needed to advance to the next level was to fill each of the slots.

Leveling up by itself did nothing - your stats did not increase when you leveled up. However, a level seven Liberomancer would generally be stronger than a level two Libermancer, simply because the level seven one had at least eighteen grimoires memorized while the level two one only had a maximum of five.

And once you had filled up all thirty slots of a certain Rank or in other words, gained ten levels, you would advance to the next one. Slots of a Rank could only be filled by grimoires of that rank - you would get access to thirty new slots on leveling up to Rank Two, but they could each only be filled with a Rank Two grimoire.

Grimoires could give stat boosts, give access to spells which required mana to cast, or skills which did not consume mana but had other restrictions on them.

Skills could either be active, which could usually only be used for a few times during a set time period, or passive which were always active but generally much weaker.

In this way, grimoires were not only like XP in most video games in that they were what allowed you to ‘level up’, but also what gave you skills, spells, and stats all rolled into one.

Usually, it made some sense on what a grimoire did relative to what was written to make it. A grimoire describing the properties of fire, for example, might give you the [Create Flame] spell. I could also see why Polonius Advises Laertes gave you +1 to Wisdom given that it was a poem giving life advice, but other times it made very little sense as to why a grimoire did something. Why did Shakespeare’s Sonnet 95 give a point to mana? I couldn’t figure it out despite going over the poem multiple times.

Also, not everything could be turned into a grimoire, as I had learned earlier. Most Rank One grimoires were either three or four pages long, or were famous short poems.

Grimoires needed mana while they were being written to be imbued into each word.

As for what I was currently doing - I was outside the house in the backyard, writing Sonnet 95 into the dirt with the help of a stick.