In this sea of various grimoires and shopkeepers, a stall caught my eye because of the owner’s eye color. That may seem strange to say, but the person running this stall was a human (I was relatively sure of that), but when I took a look at their face, I saw that their irises were rainbow-colored.

I bent over low to whisper to Granny Qi, “Is… that person a human?”

“Why yes, why would you ask?”

“The eye color.”

“Oh, she must be one of the rainbow-eyed people from that country up north,” Granny Qi said. She frowned. “I can’t remember what it’s name was, but it’ll come to me the moment I stop thinking about it, just you watch. She’s a bit far from home, but rest assured, she is human.”

I was not afraid of encountering a demihuman, I mean, I spent a good portion of my time with the lizardmen, I just did not want to accidentally offend her.

The second thing that drew my attention was the scent - there was a soothing fragrance around the shop she had set up. She seemed to have caught my eye and said, “Hello there - looking to buy a book? Or perhaps a grimoire - I have cheap ones for only fifty denarii.”

That was pretty cheap, especially considering the fact that it must have come from far away. “So what do they do?” I picked up one of them and saw the faint green glow of a completed grimoire. It was written on paper that felt… different for a lack of a better word.

“Ah, that one gives the ability to use the [Fragrance] spell,” she said, stroking her hair.

I lifted the paper up, examining it, and took a sniff. “Is this… scented paper?”

“Absolutely it is,” she answered. “It’s a special grimoire that has to be written on scented paper.” I examined the script on it - it was a bunch of circles with parts filled in. I hadn’t seen a writing system like that before.

“I um, can you help me read this?” I asked her.

“Of course! I made all these grimoires myself,” she said proudly.

“And what does [Fragrance] do exactly?”

“Oh, it allows you to create an aroma around yourself,” she said.

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“Is…” I was about to say ‘Is that it?’ but then stopped myself at the last second as I didn’t want to appear rude.

“Sure, it doesn’t do much,” she said, seemingly reading my thoughts. “But, I want to experiment with it, to see if I can one day create a Rank Two grimoire with an even greater effect.”

I looked back down at the paper. I realized why she was selling it cheap - sure, the fact that it had to be written on scented paper and was written with a script from a country far away made this very unique, but as the saying back on Earth went, ‘just because you’re unique doesn’t make you useful.’

This was borderline useless, even something like [Create Water] or [Poissonnier] could be said to do something at the very least.

I noticed that nearly all the grimoires she had on sale were this exact same one. This meant that she very likely did not see a lot of sales, once again contributing to the low price. “Do you mind me asking something?”

“Sure?”

“Why don’t you sell something… more lucrative?” I asked her.

“Because,” she said, stroking her hair and raising an eyebrow as if this should’ve been obvious. “This is what I want to do. I want to make more spells based on aromas, and I can make a passable living by doing so, so why change?”

Ah, so she wasn’t going for the most optimized route - she was doing this out of artistic passion. I had to say that I kind of respected that, and well, I was looking for something to fill out one of my remaining spell slots, and this was cheap enough. I handed her the coins and she began reading me what was on the piece of paper.

It was a poem about flowers and the fragrances of spring, though much like with what Rose had written, it didn’t make all too much sense to me. The sentences were oddly structured and I’m sure that they were written like that for a specific reason in whatever language she wrote in, but they came off as very odd when translated.

Once done, it disappeared, and I found that I could use [Fragrance] if I so chose. I wished the stall owner good luck with her endeavors and then decided to set out to find one more.

“What do you think?” I asked Granny Qi after telling her about the grimoire I had bought.

“Well, you know how to use [Clean], a skill that makes you a better cook, and now this to make places smell nicer,” Granny Qi said. “If your goal is to become the perfect housewife, you’re certainly on the right track.”

She snorted sarcastically after saying that.

“I’m just trying to be done with Rank One so I can focus on experimenting with Rank Two grimoires,” I told her. “Once I find something better I’ll overwrite it.”

That was a viable strategy when I was only Rank One. Sure, at the higher ranks there was a significant penalty for doing something like this, but it was not too bad at Rank One or even Rank Two.

“Just remember that build composition is extremely important,” Granny Qi said. “You could advance to Rank Three and be completely useless if you don’t choose what goes into your brain carefully. And you might not get the chance to buy something like you’ll find here again for a long time - you should see if there’s something that might actually be useful to you.”

But something that would be more useful would cost more, and I wanted to hang onto the money I had for now. After all, there was no guarantee that I would win a translation device, and so I wanted to hedge my bets and keep my war chest full, so to speak, for as long as I could.