The Liberomancer [Isekai Progression LitRPG]

"Many thanks, Liberomancer," the village chief said. He sounded pleased, though some voices that were not quite so came from behind us.

"Was that it?"

"Oh, it just ran away."

"I was expecting a bit more…"

I turned to see a large crowd of what was basically the entire lizardman village gathered some distance from us.

"They sound… disappointed?" I wondered.

"Oh, don't worry about them," the village chief said, waving his hand. "They were expecting a spectacular fight or some very flashy magic. They weren't expecting that you would essentially just wave your hand and solve the problem…"

"Oh, well, looks like I couldn't please the crowd then," I said.

"Oi! All of you! Don't you have work to do now? Quit gawking around and scram!" the village chief yelled out to them before turning to me. "Sir Liberomancer, don't mind them, without a doubt, what you did was the best possible outcome. It's just some of the youngsters were hoping for some sort of excitement."

"It's alright, I get it," I said. I could only assume that things got rather boring in villages like these and the Elephant Frog was likely the most interesting thing to happen in the last year or so here, maybe even longer.

"Regarding your payment…"

They gave me a portion of it now, and would pay out to the guild the remaining balance after the harvest.

"Well, I think I'll be heading out now then," I told him.

"Ah, Sir Liberomancer, won't you stay a while longer? You have done our village a great service, and we would like to throw a small feast for you," he implored.

"Thank you very much for that generous offer and your hospitality - but there are things back in the city I need to attend to," I told him. "And it will be far faster to go back if I ride my summon, but it'll be gone in about six hours."

"I see," he said. "Well, I would like you to stay, but if there are other things you must take care of… oh well. But I thank you once again."

"No problem," I said.

There was another reason I wanted to get out of the village as quickly as possible - it was sad to say, but I wasn't fully comfortable staying in a village of lizardmen for too long. Even in the city, I had been discriminated against, but at least I was surrounded by humans there. Nothing of the sort had happened in the village as of yet, but then again, they had needed me for something - and that something in question was now resolved. People's attitudes could change on a dime when they no longer needed you.

I would've loved to stay back for a few more hours if things had been different just to see more of how lizardmen villages differed from human ones, but with the way that relations between humans and lizardmen were right now, I thought it was best to just hightail it out of there the first chance I got.

Not to mention - I wanted to spend more time with my frog!

Summons might share knowledge and thoughts with their summoners, but they were also distinct entities all the same. As I ran up to my summon, it turned towards me with a happy expression on its face, clearly satisfied that I was happy. "That was a good job!" I said, and it happily gave out a small croak. "Do you want a belly rub?"

It flipped around and let me try to rub its belly - I say 'try to' because it was so big that in order to rub its belly I had to climb on top of it, which greatly limited how much of its belly I could actually rub.

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I had kind of missed having its company - it really wasn't possible; given its size; to summon it within the city limits. And people were hard to relate to - even if there weren't several other barriers that made it hard for me to socialize with other people in Arconia, such as the fact that I was clearly a foreigner.

This was much easier. There was rarely any judgment from animals, and what I had said earlier rang true - it was like having a pet, but with all the fun and none of the responsibilities. I sorely missed Cheddar, and though the frog couldn't replace him, it did help make the heartache at Cheddar's absence feel a little bit more bearable.

"Let's go!" I said to it, and it flipped back over as I found myself a perch on its back.

With its speed and the fact that it wasn't pulling a cart unlike the horses that had brought me here, we managed to make it to the city gates before time ran out and it disappeared just as suddenly as it had come into being.

I didn't get any more offers to deal with frogs through the guild, and as it was, I didn't want to be known as the 'Frog Whisperer' around these parts.

My journey to the lizardmen village bore fruit in a way other than monetary payout. There was something that had stood out to me - the way the village chief had described how the continent had been formed. It wasn't too far off from how islands were made. My teacher once showed us an experiment with a candle and used the wax to make an 'island' in a small bowl of water, showing how islands were gradually formed in some places from underwater volcanoes.

And with that, the pieces had finally come together and I began working on a new grimoire. But I was busy with other things too.

I was always on the lookout for something else that I could do in order to rake in a little extra dough.

One thing that I was able to do was make use of the [Poissonnier] skill to work as a cook. I had thought about doing so as a joke initially but quickly realized that it wasn't such a bad gig. I found a small stall that was really desperate for help and once they had a taste of what I could do, they took me in in a heartbeat.

They also wanted me to work full time but that was a hard 'no' from me - I needed as much free time as possible to work on writing and reading grimoires.

"You sure lad?" the owner asked. "How 'bout I pay you fifty percent extra for those other hours?"

"No thank you," I told him. I liked to work during the busiest time which was in the late afternoon, that way I had time before and after work to read and write.

The guy sighed. "I don't know what it is with the food you make - what is this, some secret recipe from your home country?"

"Those are all things I learned here," I told him while tapping my forehead. It was just that it was enhanced via the [Poissonnier] skill which made it taste better and also gave me small instinctual clues on tiny changes I could make to recipes.

The best part about this job was that [Poissonnier] was an entirely passive ability, and did not consume a drop of mana. Even if it paid slightly less than other jobs given the time involved, it was still worth it due to the nil mana cost involved in it.

I could spend my mana early in the morning making water, cook later on in the afternoon while it recovered, and then work till late at night on my own grimoires.

Four weeks later, I had managed to fill all of my Rank Two slots. I bought two of the grimoires I needed and made the rest myself, so my funds had taken a bit of a hit, but now I could finally work on Rank Three grimoires!

I had a large number of ideas for a Rank Three grimoire, but which one should I start with?

I had thought about it long and hard, to the point that I didn't actually write anything for a whole day, until I decided on what I would do.

It was a bit risky to try and write a long piece of nonfiction based on what I knew from my world - I had little experience writing something of that length, and so there was a high likelihood of failure.

I really wished at that point that I had a way to get my smartphone working again…

But, unfortunately, no such method had materialized up till now.

After some deliberation I decided to write out Charlotte's Web. The main reason I chose it was because I had read it very often when I was younger not just because it was schoolwork but because I had liked it, and had recently reread it.

I still didn't remember all of it word for word, of course, and it had been nearly a year since I was in this world, and there was a part of me that was afraid that I had forgotten too much for me to successfully replicate it.

Still, there was always a small margin for error when it came to grimoires - I had learned that much. As such, I didn't necessarily need to write it down exactly as it was, I just had to be close enough and hopefully it would all work out.

This effort took me nearly another month - the main reason for this was not just the book's length, but also the fact that I was running into a new problem. I was running out of mana which was now more of a limiting factor than how much I had to write, something that I had not really encountered up till this point, though people had told me that it would eventually end up like this. When the last word was finally etched into the paper in front of me, I watched while sweat began to coat my forehead as the text's aura shifted from blue to green and only then did I let out a huge sigh of relief.

I had successfully made a Rank Three grimoire!