"But…" Sun Jiao said, sounding a bit hesitant at my proposal. "Ah…"

"Are you afraid it's not glamorous enough for you?" I asked. "When I had been 'fired' from my job as a scribe - no, even before that, when I had no job at all, I would've agreed to do something like this with no issue."

"No, the issue isn't that…" Sun Jiao said. "But… do I really need to serve lizardmen?"

Oh.

This was going to be somewhat of an issue.

"They'll easily be a good customer base for you, just because there are so many of them, and they like fish much more than humans do," I told him. "They also don't mind at all when it comes to buying fish from humans, at least not in my experience, so long as it is good. Why? Do you have any problems with working with lizardmen?"

"No, but they have problems with me," Sun Jiao said. "Whenever I've spoken with them, they tend to look at me with contempt or like I'm an idiot - yeah! Just like that expression you're making right now! Except their faces are y'know, more reptilian-like!"

"So it has nothing to do with you being a human then…" I said. "Their behavior, I mean. Look, if you just want to cook for humans that's also possible, though I used to make things for both but had more success with lizardmen. I've even eaten in a fancy restaurant that was almost entirely frequented by lizardmen. I'll teach you the recipes I know - the most popular ones at least, which are popular with both species. Whatever you choose to do with them, I leave to you."

"Ah…" Sun Jiao said, seemingly uncertain.

"Do you want to think about it?"

He tapped his chin thoughtfully. "Alright! Teacher! I will place my fate in your hands - if you say that this is truly a great business opportunity, then I will take your word for it!"

I took out a piece of paper and began writing.

"Ah, your writing speed is much better than mine!" Sun Jiao said.

That wasn't much of a compliment - while this fountain pen was more similar to what I would've used back on Earth, it was different enough that it still felt alien in my hands. I ideally would've wanted something like a ballpoint pen, but nothing so convenient as that existed in this world. After I had memorized the [Poissonnier] skill-giving grimoire, I had had its words etched into my memory permanently. My pen flowed seamlessly between letters, until it was done.

"Incredible!" Sun Jiao exclaimed.

"This is nothing - I can go on for around two hours straight now," I told him.

"Ah, that is impressive Teacher - but wouldn't most woman grow tired of a man who could last that long?"

"...Get your head out of the gutter, I mean that I can write grimoires almost continuously for two hours straight. That's how big my mana reserves are," I told him. Granted, my hand would get tired far before then, but the main limiting factor up until now was mostly my mana bar, not my sense of fatigue. As my mana pool became even larger though, it reached the point where my hand could not keep up with it.

"Now, I'm done," I said, as the gentle blue aura turned green. I laid out the grimoire in front of him. "I'm going to translate this for you, okay? Now, focus…"

This ended up being far more challenging than I had expected. I could translate things for him - but that also required the reader to understand what was being translated to them and then read the translated words on the piece of paper. That's why you couldn't act as a translator to someone who couldn't read in any language.

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Sun Jiao stumbled over several of the words. I had to explain what each of them said - but this was an issue because sometimes there was no true direct translation for some of them, and so if I said something that was different from what he was reading - or was written in a different style in the script he knew, I wouldn't be of much help whatsoever.

For example, say that you found a word while reading that you didn't understand, or whose meaning you had forgotten about. Most of the time, I found that it was good enough to infer what it meant from the context and I could keep on reading successfully. I couldn't look things up on my phone like I could back home, though there were dictionaries in this world that some Liberomancers carried around - the issue was of course none of them would be in English. I couldn't do that while translating.

Still, the only time this had been a serious problem for me was if I was reading something that was translated using my translating device - it was somewhat okay at translating most things but it was kind of like a smarter version of translating AI software that existed back on Earth. It still made some mistakes, which was why having an in-person translator was much better.

The issue was that most of the grimoires I read were Rank Two or Rank Three, and you could only translate a grimoire for someone else if you were at or above the Rank of the grimoire in question. And Rank Three Liberomancers had better things to do then read to me all day long. Most of the time I could get by, but there had been one case where I had had to ask Drake to help me interpret a very confusing paragraph that I was stuck on for hours until he told me what it meant and the grimoire started to make sense.

Sun Jiao had a more fundamental issue though - it wasn't that he couldn't understand what a word meant - I could help him with that. The problem was that he couldn't connect the individual letters to form what the word was. It was important that he be able to figure that out, otherwise, he would be stuck. I could try to help him by pointing to the word he was stuck on and then telling him what it was - the issue was that many words had differing translations, and it seemed the world's speech translation magic and this written translating effect were occasionally out of sync.

Not to mention that the same letter could have various meanings depending on the context in the way the human script worked in Chipker. The human script here had far more letters than English, so I wasn't sure how that factored in either. I couldn't even see what he saw - the words that appeared over the mana being emanated over the letters were visible to him and him alone.

I didn't fully understand the nuances of the human writing system used in Chipker, so I couldn't really do much for him but be patient as he tried his best.

I had also not really run into this issue as I had been transported into this world with a built-in language that I could read. So I didn't know what it was like to struggle to read grimoires like this, and if there were any tips or tricks that he could use, because I had never run into this problem myself.

I hated to say it, but he really was going to be stuck at Rank One if he didn't make some sort of effort to improve in this aspect. This grimoire I had made was not nearly as complicated as some other ones.

Still, it might've taken longer than I'd expected, but it wasn't like he couldn't finish it. The paper crumpled in front of me and turned to dust as Sun Jiao took in its meaning. It seemed he had exhausted nearly all of his mana in doing so as well - which meant that if he didn't have me and was using a translation device, which would've doubled his mana consumption, his mana would've ran out before he could finish the whole thing.

If he ended up forgetting a good portion of what he had read, which I thought was highly likely to happen, he would have to start over again.

Indeed, that meant that there were grimoires that he might not even be able to finish due to a limited mana capacity. Granted, this was not a phenomenon unique to him - once you went up the ranks and grimoires became longer and more complex, this problem would start to happen to nearly anyone, as I had heard that by Rank Four this would be an issue. It hadn't been for me unless I took a big break from reading, say, four or five days. But to struggle with even Rank One grimoires...

No wonder Sun Jiao was so frustrated and had been desperately asking if there was some shortcut that could help him earlier - I would be much the same if I were in his position. Would I have stopped to theft when I had first came to Chipker if I hadn't been able to eventually get a job?

I liked to believe I wouldn't have - but what would've happened if Granny Qi hadn't helped me out when she had? Who knew? I liked to think that I would've at some point discovered what Liberomancy was eventually, but a tiny bit of doubt still remained in my heart.

Maybe that was why I couldn't help but feel a bit of pity for him. Our situations weren't similar, but he was also 'stuck' somewhere where he didn't know how to advance any further.

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