The Liberomancer [Isekai Progression LitRPG]

First off, there were a number of fees that had to be paid before I could get a license and the amount quickly added up. Putting that aside, first off, there was a huge list of forms that had to be filled out which I would have difficulty doing given I couldn't read or write either of the languages they were in. Even if I could get help with that, say, from Granny Qi; it would still pose a problem as to how I was going to afford the seed money needed for this kind of operation.

There was another 'background check' that I had to pay the fee for in addition to the one the guards had already done. Secondly, I needed a 'Premium Guild Membership' fee on top of the usual Guild Membership fee. Then, there came the actual license fee for selling grimoires. It turned out that there was a minimum 'paper quality standard' that most grimoires had to be written on if they were to be sold, and such paper was sold at a premium. Rank One [Create Paper] could not make paper of that kind of quality even if I wanted to waste mana and a slot just to use it. I had noticed while working at the shop that the paper was much nicer than the one I used for my personal needs, but I hadn't realized that there was a reason for it beyond 'customers want their products to look nice.'

There was also a cursory inspection that had to be done, which not only required another fee to be paid, but also would take up quite a bit of time to resolve.

On top of that, although the grimoires didn't have to go through the Guild so long as they were not Rank Three; there was a tax that had to be paid on each transaction.

Back on Earth one of my mother's friends had complained about something called the 'self employment' tax in which it costs a lot more to do your taxes if you aren't working for a company. She said it was just a way for the government to discourage entrepreneurs and the like and to encourage people to work under 'the corporate boot' as she put it.

I was pretty sure something similar was going on here - the rules and fees were so onerous and byzantine they seemed deliberately designed to keep people from selling grimoires independently.

Given how much of a stranglehold I had seen the bookstores had on buying and selling grimoires, this was likely the case.

My suspicions were further cemented that they were doing all of this to deliberately make it harder by the smug look on the receptionist's face when I walked away, defeated. I caught it while glancing back at her - yup, there was definitely some deliberate maliciousness if not outright sabotage going on here.

I didn't know if it was specifically targeted at me for being a foreigner, or was just something that was targeted at people in general who weren't Rank Three yet.

Regardless of the underlying cause, this crossed that option off of my list.

It would cost too much to get started and would take too much time before I started getting a profit. That was assuming I would get any customers at all - the market in Arconia was already saturated with most of my more popular grimoires. As for the newer ones - the issue was that I wasn't likely to get any lizardmen customers. And as for the humans; Granny Qi had already warned me that I would face quite a significant backlash if I tried to go against the big three families that controlled it on the human side.

There were an additional number of logistical concerns - where would I sell them from? I couldn't just stand at a street corner and it would take a while before I would be able to build the reputation of a good bookstore and attract a sizeable number of customers. And that required a building too; I couldn't do it out of Granny Qi's house after all. I would have to find a building in a desirable location and pay its rent, adding to the costs of starting such a business. I had no experience running a business on Earth, and the thought of all of these headaches made me realize that it was for the best to give up on the idea of selling my grimoires independently.

Many of the rules were relaxed during the Book Fair, but I couldn't write several grimoires and sit on them waiting for that time as I intended to leave the city by then. I wanted to be at Rank Three when it came around if possible so I would have better negotiating power when I decided to leave. I didn't even know if Stella was still traveling with them - she had promised to put in a good word for me when she had been here. Looking at the situation I had ended up in, I regretted not taking her up on her offer at the time even if it had been the correct decision given what I knew at the time.

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Despite how much I disliked the Liberomancer's Guild at the moment, they did end up helping me in a roundabout way down the line.

A few days later, I was told that there was a request specifically for me. It seemed to have something to do with a magical beast, but I only got to know the details when I spoke with the client myself at the guild headquarters.

I thought it was a monster-hunting mission, some of which I'd gotten requests for before. A few of the monster-hunting teams wanted to recruit me specifically because they had heard I had [Crimson Lance] and they had found out through the grapevine that I was looking for work. I rejected them as there was a good reason behind why monster-hunting teams were almost always recruiting new members and the pay was rather handsome - it was because the turnover was quite high in a profession that risky.

I had been going to decline the request, but that was before I got to know the details of what it entailed.

A lizardman greeted me, which immediately begged the question as to why a lizardman would specifically ask for me, a human, for a job request? Even back when things had been more cordial between the two species in Arconia, this would have been more than enough to raise a few eyebrows.

"Ah, you must be the Liberomancer I was looking for," the lizardman said. I was pretty sure I had never met him before, though there was a slight possibility that I was wrong given how I was only somewhat decently able to tell different lizardmen apart even now unless they had some particularly striking features that would set them apart. He gave me his name - though like most lizardmen names it was quite convoluted and I ended up just calling him 'village chief' in my head, given that was his designation as I later found out.

He was the head of a lizardmen village that was close to the city, and they wanted my help specifically with a problem.

"An Elephant Frog has appeared close to our village," he explained. "It has occupied the lands close to where the river comes near our fields - we tried chasing it off, but it is resistant to all of those efforts and just snores away. We do not dare do anything more drastic. It may as well be a boulder, but it will wake up one day, and we fear what might happen to our houses should it start to feel threatened and go on a rampage. But, we would like to avoid killing it if possible." He stressed that last bit when describing the situation to me.

I would've found such a sentiment to be strange if I was still the same person who had just come to this world, but with what I knew now, it was quite understandable.

Magical beasts had various abilities, and though some of them were dangerous to humans and were therefore called 'monsters'; the Elephant Frog did not fall into that group. There were even some magical beasts like the Petalcrests who were very gentle and known to find injured lost travelers and tend to their wounds while nursing them back to health before sending them on their way. It was even said that in ancient times, before humanity had Liberomancy to rely on, some groups of humans had survived by essentially becoming the cattle of more benevolent magical beasts.

Given this, many magical beasts were revered or even worshiped by certain communities. I did not understand the religion of the lizardmen as well as I did that of the humans, but it was commonly considered an invitation to misfortune to kill an Elephant Frog as I had discovered. This belief was likely rooted in the fact that they had a rather high Luck stat.

Given this, if possible, they would prefer to just have the Elephant Frog chased back off into the wilderness rather than seeing it slain. A lot of people back on Earth would not kill a spider that had wandered into their house, choosing to throw it outside instead for a somewhat similar reason.

There were other reasons, of course, some that the villagers might not even fully comprehend. The Liberomancers of old had once sworn to the belief that it was best to kill all magical beasts unless they were directly helpful to humanity. There were two major problems with this, the first being that it was simply not feasible to kill them all.

The second thing was that they quickly realized that many magical beasts occupied a specific niche in the ecosystem, and needlessly removing them could lead to various unforeseen repercussions.

Take the Elephant Frog for example, a magical beast I had come to understand quite well. It fed mainly on bugs, so getting rid of it would mean those bugs it preyed on would proliferate. They might even come into contact with humans, and through them, spread a deadly disease. Not to mention, the Elephant Frog would have its own territory out in the wilderness. Because it occupied said territory, something more sinister could not encroach upon that area and in that way, it would keep other potentially more malignant magical beasts in check. Better the enemy you know than the one you don't, after all. The villagers might not fully understand this kind of reasoning, but this wisdom had been passed through generations of Liberomancer who had learned it the hard way and sprinkles of it still trickled down to ordinary people.

The ideal solution was to chase it off back to where it had come from without it destroying anything in the village, and without causing it significant harm. Of course, if it began to rampage, the villagers would kill it. They would just like to avoid that scenario if possible.

"I get it," I said, remembering the incident back in Granny Qi's village. I had pretty much decided by then to take up this job request, though I had a few questions I wanted to ask first. "Is the Elephant Frog in question male or female?"

The village chief looked quite perplexed at my question.