On first glance such a plan seemed like a waste of resources, but in reality, it was far quicker and faster than trying to create whatever build you wanted from the get-go.

And that was why the price of Sonnet 95 continued to climb- because even some Rank Three Liberomancers wanted it to fix their build. After all, they also wanted to have extra mana given how important mana was, and because they had more money (although this shop didn’t sell Rank Three grimoires I had heard offhand that their starting price was twelve thousand Denarii, which could buy you a small house depending on where you lived) the price could climb to extraordinary heights.

And since it was in English, they couldn’t exactly just go to a competitor.

The price of Sonnet 95 went to two hundred Denarii by the end of the day, meaning it was likely that no Rank One Liberomancer could even afford it.

That felt a bit odd to me, but I guess that was just how this world worked. It did give me a new goal however - clearly it would make sense to advance to Rank Two as quickly as possible.

There was a problem with this, however. In this, my ability to write in English, a foreign language, was a hindrance rather than a help. I couldn’t read the script of the lizardmen, which meant the availability of new grimoires I could read were rather limited. A translating item would be a big help in this regard, but I had heard they easily went for a thousand denarii or so, which I could not afford at the moment.

When I went back home, I regurgitated what I had learned to Granny Qi. It wasn’t that I didn’t fully trust Mark, but he was a lizardmen and though I didn’t know what the full details were on the matter, there was some friction between lizardmen and humans. I thought that just to be on the safe side, I should also confirm what I had learned from her.

She nodded along to my words. “Indeed, most Rank Three Liberomancers spend the first half of their lives trying to get to Rank Three, and the second half trying to optimize themselves to actually be useful.”

There were several more questions that I had, which I hadn’t felt comfortable enough bothering Mark with. “How big are Rank Three grimoires?” I knew that they were expensive, but I hadn’t seen one before.

“Around two hundred pages,” Granny Qi said.

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Grimoires had to be written manually, as in each letter had to be written by hand. When I told her what a printing press was, she said she had heard of something similar in a faraway country, but that if you wanted to make a grimoire, you had to imbue each letter with mana while you wrote it. You couldn’t just make a template and then stamp it onto a page; you wouldn’t be able to imbue it with mana after the fact. Because after a word had been written, if it had not been imbued with mana while writing it, you couldn’t do anything to fix it.

“Don’t look for shortcuts, dear,” Granny Qi said. “There are no shortcuts on the path to become a Liberomancer.” She then paused. “Well, I suppose if you had parents who would support you, they could write out all the grimoires they had memorized for you to soar to their levels but…” She clearly thought that I either did not have any parents, or that they were illiterate given how little I knew of this world and how Liberomancy worked. Ironic given that both my parents had doctorates, but I saw no point in mentioning this.

Yeah, it figured that even in this world, so long as you had influential parents life was so much easier for you. That, or if you had enough funds, you could buy your way to the top.

“Don’t despair,” she said, perhaps seeing my crestfallen look. “After all, history is filled with tales of people who reached great heights although they started from nothing. My husband was the son of two farmers who could neither read nor write, and yet he reached Rank Three!” Her eyes lit up and like always she became far more animated when talking about him.

I didn’t interrupt her as she told me more about the man. The two of them had been married for fifty-four years, and it was clear as water that she greatly missed his company.

“Oh, heavens, look at the time,” she said, realizing suddenly that she had been going on and on for nearly an hour, not that I minded. She turned to me and said, “You need a haircut.”

Eh? Where did this come from? “Why?”

“It’s far too long and it looks ridiculous.”

“Many men have long hair,” I told her. I had noticed it while walking around, definitely, there were different hairstyles for men and women with some being far more popular than others, but some men had long hair.

It wasn’t like I had grown my hair to below my shoulders or anything, I had just let it grow out slightly, though my hair was naturally curly while growing upwards and so I thought it looked fine. At least, no one back on Earth batted an eyelid at it.

“That suits them, with you, long hair just makes your head look like a crow’s nest the way it is,” she said. “Now, you need get it trimmed somewhat!”

I sighed, but honestly, this was not the hill I wanted to die on and I let her cut it short.

Later that night, I was once again outside in the backyard, stick in hand, wondering what it was that I should try writing.

It wasn’t like I had memorized all of Shakespeare’s work, not even close to it, so I couldn’t replicate much more if I relied on him. There were some other poems I remembered, but rather than that, I settled on something else.

I wrote about water - about its properties, its chemical makeup, how it covered so much of the Earth, and its qualities that were the reason it was called ‘the elixir of life’ in the first place.