“Not to mention,” Granny Qi continued. “Even if you were the first one to discover it, just because an ability is unique doesn’t make it useful. There are many Rank One grimoires that have effects that are virtually pointless.”
‘Just because you’re different that doesn’t mean you’re useful,’ was a similar saying from back on Earth as well, and I could see what she meant.
After all, [Poissonnier] could not make fish out of nothing, just make the taste more flavorful, and so was a grade even below [Create Water] in usefulness. And people were not going crazy over [Create Water] either.
Once we were done, I used another spell I had recently learned, [Clean] along with [Create Water] to wash the dishes and utensils. It made something that might’ve taken twenty minutes back home if we tried to do it by hand take less than a fourth of that time.
Despite all of these basic utility spells that I had learned, I had not yet found something that could recharge my phone.
Of course, there was no cellular signal or Internet in this world, but there was something else in it that would’ve made being able to use it very helpful - I had downloaded a library’s worth of books on it before I came here. There weren’t just textbooks and works whose copyright had expired, but also books I had purchased as well.
Not that copyright was a thing in this world - if you had read a grimoire, you could make more with ease. The concept of the original author ‘owning’ the text was completely foreign, and if you didn’t want other people to copy a grimoire you had made, well then, the wisdom was that you shouldn’t sell it.
I had run out of things that I remembered word for word, but I was sure that many of those things could’ve been made into grimoires. It would take away the effort it took to think of new things to write, and I thought I could easily reach Rank Three if not Rank Four if I just had access to the virtual library I had on it.
However, nothing like a [Recharge] spell had appeared no matter how much I tried to write about my phone, how it worked, or just about electricity in general.
And so, my phone was little more functional than a brick at this point.
The next day, I explored a different part of the city. I found a shop that was able to make me something akin to a fountain pen- up till then I had been writing using brushes which was something I was not very used to.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
There was nothing as convenient as the ballpoint pens back home, and this pen was basically a hollow reed with a reservoir of ink that could be filled into it. It was still cumbersome to use, but much better than using a paintbrush, and even though it cost me a day’s wages to commission, I felt that it was worth the money.
I tried again to make some more grimoires later on in the evening, but none of them really gave me anything that was interesting.
And with that the weekend was over, far too soon I felt. But that was the schedule this world worked on, so there was little I could do but complain about it - not that I did so openly.
Granny Qi had been right about the grimoire that gave the [Poissonnier] ability not being very high in demand - I did show it to Mark, but he said to focus on making more copies of Sonnet 95 and that there would be few buyers for this kind of grimoire.
Rose had decided to bring her pet axolotl to work that day.
“She gets a bit antsy when I’m not there, and I thought I would bring her along for today,” she explained. Her axolotl was a light blue color, and the other scribes took a moment out of their workflow to pet it, which it was quite receptive to. I knew some dogs which wouldn’t let anyone but their owners near them, and others who were quite friendly to everyone - this pet seemed to be more of the latter.
When there was a lull in traffic in the shop, and it was just me, Rose, and her axolotl, I decided to bring up what she had said last time. She hadn’t expected it, and still looked like she wanted to escape the situation somehow, but no such convenient excuse appeared.
“Listen, I won’t get upset or offended based on what you say,” I told her. “I just… I’m new here to this city, and I want to know if there’s something awful the humans here did.”
Rose’s tail drooped a bit. “It isn’t very nice to say…”
“Like I said, I wouldn’t mind,” I told her. This had been weighing on my mind over the weekend.
She didn’t look at me directly while talking, and stroked her pet in an effort to calm herself down somewhat. “Well… I want you to know that none of this is something I’ve experienced or think about… but other lizardmen they…” she gulped. “Promise you won’t get mad?”
“I promise I won’t hold any of this against you,” I told her.
“They say that… humans always think only of themselves,” she said in a low whisper. “That in places like Chipker, where they are a minority, they always talk of equal treatment, though when they gain power, they oppress everyone else around them. They always take the best areas to settle in, strike down those who they don’t agree with, and when they are in power they demand taxes from other races.” When she saw that I still had a poker face on, she continued. “There is a country near the center of the continent - I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but they practice a religion worshiping the Goddess Serragnin. But they don’t just worship her, they say that she invented and gave Liberomancy specifically to humans and humans alone, and all other races that use it ‘stole’ it and don’t deserve to use it. They try to actively suppress other races who wish to use Liberomancy.”