It was here, after the deal was finalized, that I would come in. The grimoire I had written was written in English, meaning that this lizardman couldn’t read it. Whatever magic was in the air that translated speech didn’t seem to extend to the written word for whatever reason, and this was true for grimoires as well.

There were two ways around a language barrier like this. One was to have someone who could read that language, and was of the same or higher Rank of that grimoire, help you read it by reading it line by line.

In other words, someone like me could help him read it. Of course, the main drawback was that you needed a person with you who knew that language to help you if you decided to go this route, which somewhat limited sale of most grimoires to the country they were written in.

There were also devices that functioned as ‘universal translators’ for grimoires. Naturally, such devices were very expensive - most Rank Two Liberomancers did not own anything like that, though I knew Mark had one in the form of a pair of glasses which looked like they were made of crystal. While this eliminated the need for having an in-person interpreter, aside from the cost, another drawback was that such devices doubled the amount of mana you’d have to spend to read a grimoire.

Both methods, however, shared one massive drawback. You could memorize a grimoire written in a different language, but for whatever reason, you would not be able to write it out like you could with any other grimoire in a language that you understood without the aide of either of those methods.

I didn’t know why it was like that - and when I asked Granny Qi why it worked like that she shrugged her shoulders and said that was just how the world was. “You ask too many questions - like a child! Next you will ask why the moon waxes and wanes, or why the seasons change!” I didn’t retort that there were explanations for those things, I just accepted it because it was clear she was becoming exasperated with my constant need to inquire into why this magic system worked the way it did.

That said, this ‘drawback’ was actually greatly advantageous to me.

Simply put, there were no copyright laws in this world. If someone bought a grimoire from you and then memorized it, well, they could make more copies of that grimoire and there was nothing you could do to stop them. But something written in a nice language that most people couldn’t read - that could be a perennial source of income because they would not be able to replicate it! This would give you a monopoly over the production of said grimoire.

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Realizing this, I could see why this shop had chosen to employ me despite me not being a lizardman - the prospects of potential steady profit were just too high for them to ignore.

I took the customer to the side, and read out the grimoire line by line, and as we finished, the piece of paper burned away to a crisp.

It was a bit disappointing to see something I had worked on disappear like that. After all, it wasn’t like writing was easy in this world. The paintbrush took time to get used to, and the paper wasn’t of the quality I was accustomed with either.

The customer handed me two denarii - a ‘service fee’ for helping him translate the grimoire in question. I got to keep half of it as per my contract.

News of this grimoire seemed to spread, and in short time there was a line of lizardmen asking for it. It got to the point that Mark jacked up the price to one hundred and ten, and no one haggled on the matter anymore.

I had seen some of them buy Rank Two grimoires afterwards, which made me wonder why they were interested in what I had written. I recognized them as being Rank Two, as Rank Two grimoires were usually between ten and twenty pages long. As far as I could tell, we did not even sell Rank Three grimoires. I asked Mark about this once when the shop wasn’t too busy.

“Eh? They are probably just trying to optimize their builds,” he told me.

“Optimize?”

“Yes, you can sell Rank Two grimoires for far more than you can sell Rank One grimoires,” Mark explained. “Even considering the fact that they take far longer to write given their length.” The price for most Rank Two grimoires started at five to six hundred Denarii. “So think about it- if you wait for the right Rank One grimoires before advancing to Rank Two, you would end up wasting huge amounts of time. You might not find them for several months or even years if a grimoire you’re looking for is rare. Doesn’t it make more sense then to just take what you can get and advance to Rank Two, then start selling Rank Two grimoires for more money?”

Understanding dawned on me then. Although you could only have thirty slots per rank, you could overwrite them later on. So once you reached Rank Two, even if you had a horribly optimized build, you could always find Rank One grimoires later on to correct that. You could ‘overwrite’ a grimoire you had memorized just by wanting to forget it to free up a slot you had filled earlier, and then you could put in a new grimoire you wanted in its place.

That way, you could always tinker with your overall build no matter how far you had advanced. However, once you overwrote a grimoire, whatever benefit it gave, whether a stat boost, spell, or a skill, would also be gone. If you wanted it back, you would have to memorize a fresh one, but then you’d have to get rid of something else. You would always be limited by having only thirty active slots per Rank, so you couldn’t just memorize a thousand Rank One grimoires to make your mana bar absurdly large.