I snorted - of all the grimoires I had made, this was almost certainly the most useless. Really - was there even a skill for something as specific as cooking fish? I hadn’t even heard of a skill like [Poissonier] before, likely because no one would want it.

Perhaps if there was a professional chef in Arconia, this would be helpful to them, but the thing was that I wasn’t sure how many people in Arconia could read. Reading and writing was clearly an important skill in this world as it gave you access to its magic system, Liberomancy, but how many people could actually do so?

Granny Qi had told me that around sixty to seventy percent of adults were literate, which astounded me. Given this world’s level of technology, that was an incredibly high figure - though this realization was dampened by two ‘asterisks’ to that assertion.

One, ‘literacy’ was measured as someone who could write their own name in any language. That was all that was required, but that would not allow someone to read even the simplest Rank One grimoire. Most people could sign their names, but they amounted to things closer to drawings than signatures made by practiced hands.

Secondly, this figure was for the human population of Arconia, who despite being a minority population-wise, boasted a disproportionately larger number of Liberomancers. So the overall percentage in the city was likely even lower than that when you factored in the lizardmen.

Most people couldn’t read such a grimoire like the one I’d made, and even if they could, they likely wouldn’t find it profitable enough to purchase one.

As I looked out at the ocean, I remembered something I had either read or heard about somewhere - that if you knew how tall you were, and you stood at a beach like this, you could roughly tell what the circumference of the earth was.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember what the details of that had been, so I had no way of trying that out myself here to see if this world was the same size as Earth. Was this world even spherical though?

The fact that gravity was not noticeably any different from that back on Earth seemed to imply that it was the same shape and size, though given the fact that this world was magical I couldn’t be sure of that.

I kept walking along the shoreline, wondering if inspiration for another grimoire might strike. After all, I did not have to go to work today or tomorrow, which meant that my mana could be fully devoted to this task.

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I couldn’t think of anything immediately - though my thoughts did wander over to the axolotl I had seen earlier.

Rose had managed to make a grimoire when she heard about me and my dog - could I do the same but with someone else’s pet?

I tried, but even as I wrote the last letter in the sand, I could tell that it had failed even before the blue aura turned red, and the writing disappeared.

Up till now, I had about a fifty percent chance of successfully making a grimoire. Perhaps this was why most people didn’t even bother to try to do so? I mean, it was far easier to travel along a path someone else had made.

The only reason that I pretty much had to try creating ‘new’ grimoires was because there were no grimoires written in English for me to copy, compelling me to be the pioneer of such an endeavor in this world.

I wandered around the city for a while longer, though I didn’t find anything of value. For lunch, I had a skewer with something that looked like shrimp, though strangely enough tasted more like chicken.

Towards the evening, after wandering a bit more, I found myself in a spot where I hadn’t been before, and there was a large crowd gathered in a small clearing which I decided to check out.

It looked like there was a play going on, and with nothing better to do, I decided to stay around for the show.

I found it a bit odd that there was no admission fee, surely these performers couldn’t be doing this for free, right? But, I did not complain as the play started.

The stage was semicircular, and there were curtains and other props set at the side behind which I could see the silhouettes of the other actors.

A man dressed in white robes walked up front, and silence quickly fell as the audience began to stare at him in anticipation.

“Long ago,” the man began. Even though he did not have a microphone - because none existed in this world, his voice was far louder and carried further than it otherwise normally should’ve. Was this the effect of some sort of passive skill? It wouldn’t surprise me honestly if there was a skill or spell to amplify your voice after today - given that I had discovered there was one to make cooking fish easier. “Thousands of years ago, humanity was in crisis.”

Someone walked onto the stage, another human actor, though he was an old gentlemen dressed in what were supposed to be rags.

“Humanity, with its soft arms and flesh, could not deal with this world,” the narrator said softly, each word dripping with importance. “Disease, famine, drought, all of these were ever-present threats. And on top of that, man was hunted like an animal by other creatures.”

Several actors spilled onto the stage. All of them were wearing masks, some of them were of animals, while others were of things I had never seen before. I wasn’t sure if they were supposed to represent some kind of creatures that only lived in this world and did not exist back on Earth, or something more abstract.

What I was certain of was that the people wearing animal masks were meant to represent other kinds of demihumans. I even saw one person wearing a mask that looked like a lizardman, with the actor even having a prop tail. Looking around at the crowd; I didn’t see a single lizardman among them. Everyone was human, so I had clearly wandered deep into the human-exclusive section of the city.