Chapter 88

“I’ve been thinking…” I announced as I thumbed through one of the alchemy books. “There is a skill that allows someone to cook better, and there is a skill that allows someone to use the sword. Should there not be a skill that allows someone to read?”

We had finished eating and cleaning, and I had set a fire. Despite the fact it was dark and spooky out, it was actually very comfortable in this little home. I was poking the fire and adding a log periodically. We’d need more wood for tomorrow night if we wanted to keep this up. As for outside, it was certainly active. Occasionally you’d hear the screech of an animal or the slamming of a door. Lydia stayed near me. I didn’t think we’d be using the rooms tonight. We were still in a ghost town, after all.

As for my heat vision, I found that it totally could identify ghosts in the dark. They were hotter but colder than the surrounding air. The didn’t seem to gather outside our barrier. A few had attacked the barrier, but it held out perfectly fine, and as long as I kept recasting it, we should be fine. That also meant I needed to be woken up every few hours to cast it, but I had a feeling that wouldn’t be an issue.

“It might be a skill of scribes.”

“Scribes, is it?” I asked, sitting up, a bit of excitement shooting through me.

“Wait… does this building have any ink and paper?”

“it does not.” I let out some air… but still felt excited.

It seemed so simple now. I had been thinking I’d be taught the long way, but I could skip a lot of difficulties if I just unlocked the language as a skill. True… I could only read with scribe equipped, but for a support class like me, that was really simple. As for the job, scribe, I already knew how to obtain it. Well, that wasn’t true, I hadn’t read anything on it. Rather, I had a really good idea of what might work.

What is the job of a scribe, after all? A scribe transcribes a work. In other words, they take a book and they copy it. Therefore, I reasoned that the means of obtaining the ability of a scribe was to take a transcribe an entire book. That was no easy feat. I would want to pick a book that was pretty small, and I would also need to practice my writing first. Both of these things would cost supplies. We lived in a world where books could only be transcribed by scribes. That’s why books were so rare. Most people only owned a few books, usually essential to their respective jobs. The guild had copies, but you couldn’t buy them from a store. Well, you can, if the store was big enough, but they would cost several gold coins, almost as much as a good slave.

I sat back and considered. There used to be a general goods place nearby. It’d be the best place to find wood, oil, ink, and parchment. Although it was more into the town, I think securing that place would be our best bet. As I had these thoughts, Miki looked up excitedly from her book.

“Master… I found it! I found what you were looking for?”

“What is that?” I asked, looking away from the fire and seeing splotchy lights in the relative darkness as a result.

“A Sage Rosary Spell. Repels and weakens spirits within any closed space!”

I smiled. It looked like the Old Chalm Reclamation Project was in full swing.