Ascendance of a Bookworm (LN) - Volume 5.6 - Chapter 8

Making Maximal-Quality Samples

After looking over the paper and tools lined up on the workshop table, I turned to Hartmut and Clarissa and said, “Shall we begin?” Our first task was to check the elements and quality of our ingredients, which I started doing with some of the tools Ferdinand had left behind. My current plan was to see how much we could improve the effon and nanseb paper through experimentation before working on the rarer trombe paper.

“You want this to reach maximal quality...?” Clarissa asked, frowning as she held up a small piece of effon paper. It was made by commoners without using mana, so its quality as a magic tool was fairly low—it had few elements, weak elemental power, and a low capacity for mana. It paled in comparison to trombe paper, which was the highest-quality paper we had.

To clarify, “maximal” was not just an arbitrary descriptor Ferdinand had tossed out for emphasis. Rather, ingredients were strictly delineated into tiers based on a variety of criteria which could be objectively measured. There was maximal quality, high quality, normal quality, and low quality, for starters, and Ferdinand wanted nothing but maximal-quality paper. It was worth noting that the same ingredient or material could be placed into different tiers based on the criteria used; an ingredient that was maximal quality in terms of mana capacity would not necessarily be maximal quality in terms of elemental affinity. Ferdinand wanted paper that was maximal quality in terms of mana capacity.

Clarissa continued, “Lord Ferdinand did not specify what materials we should use to make his paper, so why not use feybeast skin, as is customary? That would greatly simplify this process.”

Indeed, parchment made from feybeast skin was far superior to everything we had prepared—even the trombe paper. It was the kind of paper on which one would draw magic circles to support one’s brewing and magic, so its production process was taught at the Royal Academy. That didn’t mean it was easy to make, though; ingredients of an especially high quality were necessary to use the paper for an advanced spell, and to obtain those high-quality ingredients, one would need to secure a strong feybeast and collect its skin.

“Feybeast skin would be ideal if our aim were simply to improve the quality of our paper, but Ferdinand has requested at least three hundred sheets,” I said. There was an abundance of materials in his workshop, but not even those would be enough. “If we were to gather the skin ourselves, how many dangerous feybeasts would we need to capture? As long as Ferdinand receives maximal-quality paper, I do not think he will mind what materials we use.”

Hartmut nodded. “Once a feybeast has been slain, its skin disappears alongside everything else. Gathering such a massive quantity of the stuff would be anything but simple. Even if all of Lady Rozemyne’s guard knights were to mobilize, I doubt we would be able to get enough in time.”

“I think I could manage it,” Clarissa replied, her blue eyes burning with determination. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that Dunkelfelger’s scholars went hunting as well.

Three years might have been enough time for Clarissa to gradually acquire enough materials, but not when we were this busy with handover work. I could guess that Ferdinand had made this request of me because he knew our only option was to improve the quality of our feyplant paper ourselves.

“Still, three hundred sheets of maximal quality...” Clarissa murmured. “I wonder, how does Lord Ferdinand intend to use them?”

“A normal person would probably use them in extreme moderation,” I replied, “but this is Ferdinand. I expect him to use them unsparingly to make his brewing easier.”

I couldn’t even begin to imagine why Ferdinand would need so much paper, but I remembered that he had used tons when brewing. I was well aware by now that one could not trust him to brew with common sense.

“For now,” I continued, “let us focus on improving the quality of the paper we have with us, using our joint research with Drewanchel as a base.”

We started removing mana impurities from the paper and stirring in high-quality ingredients of the same element, hoping to see some improvements. It took us more attempts than I cared to count, but the effon and nanseb paper eventually went from being low quality to normal.

“But this still isn’t good enough...” I sighed. We had brewed the paper again and again and again, but it was improving at a snail’s pace. It was starting to bother me. Before now, I’d only ever used recipes that Ferdinand had perfected through extensive experimentation or that Raimund had already improved in my stead; I’d never had to go through the mind-numbing trial and error of attempting to make my own improvements. I couldn’t help but despair that things weren’t going as smoothly as I’d anticipated.

“How is Ferdinand able to make new magic tools and improve them so easily?” I mused aloud. “My spirit is already about to break.”

“Do not look so down,” Hartmut said, trying to encourage me. “We have already made some progress, and it is only our first day. The sound-producing fey paper is now much easier on the ear, and the paper that can re-collect itself now works faster than ever before.”

I turned my attention to the results of our labor. Before, the effon paper had only been able to produce a jerky sequence of noises, but improving its quality had smoothed that out. The sounds it made were now impressive enough that it could probably be used in some equivalent of a music box. As for the nanseb paper, its smaller pieces had only crawled toward the larger ones before, but now they moved at a much brisker pace.

“Still, this is nowhere near the maximal quality that Ferdinand wants...”

“We have a long road ahead of us, but it should also be interesting to see how the paper changes as its quality improves further. Let us put our all into it.”

Hartmut and Clarissa chugged heavy-duty mana rejuvenation potions, then suggested that we take a break for lunch. I agreed—I was getting fed up with brewing anyway—and together we exited the workshop.

As we ate, we discussed ways that we could improve the paper even more. “Lady Rozemyne, let us increase their elements,” Hartmut suggested. “Seeking out materials with a high affinity for the paper might prove troublesome, but if we are successful, our efforts will improve its quality. Shall we add new ingredients in the hope of making our paper omni-elemental?”

“I expect this to lead to even more failures, but... I suppose we have no other choice,” I conceded.

Starting that afternoon, I selected some random high-quality ingredients from the workshop and gradually added them to our brew. If any of them induced a positive change, I would add more and observe the results. This process of trial and error succeeded in giving the paper more elements, but its quality didn’t improve enough to bump it up a tier.

This is just getting annoying.

It was one thing to brew while following a recipe, but I really wasn’t fond of spending ages experimenting as we were. This wasn’t like reading where I could remain fully immersed for hours and hours every single day—we were just getting started, yet I was already feeling the strain.

During our next break, my usual cup of tea was replaced with a rejuvenation potion. According to Hartmut and Clarissa, we had made exceedingly good progress for a single day of work, but I had to purse my lips at how slow-moving it felt.

“Few people can make their mana last as long as yours does, Lady Rozemyne, so brewing is seldom repeated this often in quick succession,” Hartmut explained. “You have experimented as much in one day as an archnoble such as I would manage in three.”

Because of my abundance of mana, I was better able to rely on brute force when doing my experiments. This made me a lot more effective than other scholars, as we had seen through our results thus far.

“Hmm... If my strength is my excessive mana, then perhaps we should next add gold dust to the brew. After all, those are clumps of pure mana, right? It could make the quality of our paper shoot up all at once.”

“Your gold dust...?” Hartmut repeated. “That certainly could produce a substantial increase in the quality—and since it is your own mana, it should add some familiarity as well.”

I drank another rejuvenation potion, then started draining feystones of any miscellaneous mana to make them purer. Then I poured my own mana into the feystones to turn them into gold dust, one after another. Hartmut and Clarissa watched the spectacle with wide eyes.

Oh yeah... Lady Hannelore was just as surprised when I made gold dust during our archduke candidate class.

But while Hannelore had seemed a bit repulsed, Hartmut and Clarissa leaned forward and intently stared at me, a distinct sparkle in their eyes. That made for two very distinct ways of expressing surprise.

“Such intoxicating magnificence!” Clarissa exclaimed.

“I would expect nothing less from the wondrous Lady Rozemyne,” Hartmut added. “A normal scholar would never do this for fear of wasting both their mana and their feystones!”

And so, as planned, we used the gold dust made during our break to further improve our paper. I stirred the pot and poured in my mana while sprinkling in some gold dust as well. Once we were done, I cut up the effon paper and placed the pieces on the tools for detecting quality and elements.

“Oh, it actually did turn into high-quality, omni-elemental paper...”

It had taken a stupid amount of mana, but the quality had shot right up. It still wasn’t maximal, though.

“I don’t know what we can do to improve it any further...” I said. “I wish Ferdinand were here to tell me.”

To my surprise, I was the only one losing hope and getting depressed. Hartmut and Clarissa looked genuinely moved as they inspected the improved paper; then they started doing all sorts of tests with it.

“Lady Rozemyne, if we use this fey paper’s new attribute of re-forming itself, we might be able to reuse the same sheet over and over again!” Clarissa exclaimed, her eyes sparkling.

As it turned out, fragments of the improved nanseb paper could actually fuse together again instead of merely gathering in one spot. That was an amusing development, but it didn’t change the fact that I needed maximal-quality fey paper.

“Lady Rozemyne, this paper produces sounds so smooth that I would almost think it were singing to me!” Hartmut professed. “It may be able to reproduce not just sheet music but also the chants of spells, assuming that the correct magic circles are drawn upon it. Let us experiment to see how much support they can provide.”

“Hartmut, Clarissa, I am not interested in either of your suggestions,” I said, “but you are welcome to carry out such experiments yourselves, if you wish.”

My task was to improve the quality of the paper, not find uses for its enhanced attributes. We’d experimented with gold dust, but not even that had raised the quality above high. It seemed best to stop brewing for today and start thinking about how to break through the next quality barrier.

“Stylo,” Hartmut and Clarissa said in unison. Normal writing utensils would only work on low-quality fey paper, so they were going to use their schtappes instead. Magic-tool pens that used mana as ink were also an option.

“Lady Rozemyne... we have a problem,” Hartmut said. “Not even a stylo can write on this paper.”

Frantic, I examined the effon paper. No matter how many times Hartmut ran his schtappe pen across it, no marks appeared.

Clarissa was experiencing the same problem. “It feels as though your mana is so strong that it deflects my own,” she said. “Could you try writing on the paper?”

I transformed my schtappe and gave it a go. A line formed without any issue. Hartmut nodded and said that this was a reasonable development, since I was the one who had made the paper, but the blood still drained from my face.

I sighed. “If only I can use the paper, we have failed. This won’t be of any use to Ferdinand, even if we manage to make it maximal quality as he requested.”

“It isn’t particularly rare for a magic tool to be usable only by its creator or those with more mana than them,” Hartmut remarked. “Clarissa and I will try to make some high-quality fey paper as well. If you are able to use it, Lady Rozemyne, then Lord Ferdinand should be able to use yours. He... He does have more mana than you, right?”

Hearing the worry in Hartmut’s voice made me a little worried too. I’d made sure to spread my mana thin at the Royal Academy so that it wouldn’t overflow, and while this had allowed my body to grow, it hadn’t done much to improve my capacity. My schtappe had grown, though, and I was back to compressing my mana as much as I’d used to for religious ceremonies, the entwickeln, and past brews. I would probably be able to hold more mana to match how much bigger I’d gotten.

Even then, I don’t think I’ve surpassed Ferdinand. Nothing strange had happened when I’d used the shining ink, so it seemed very unlikely.

“Yes, I would think so,” I replied.

“I wonder about that... In my opinion, it will only be a matter of time before you overtake him.”

“Well, I don’t intend to push my body to an unnatural degree as he does.”

I wasn’t about to become a mad scientist who compressed her mana to the point of developing mana sickness. But despite my declaration, Hartmut and Clarissa began giddily discussing how much they were looking forward to my coming of age.

“It will take Clarissa and me much longer to prepare gold dust than it took you, Lady Rozemyne, so let us continue this tomorrow. We shall have everything ready by then.”

“Certainly.”

I gave them rejuvenation potions and some purified feystones, praying for their success. Their results tomorrow would tell us whether we could expect Ferdinand to be able to use my paper.

Hartmut and Clarissa returned the next day with the required amount of gold dust—though it had apparently been quite a struggle to obtain—and started brewing fey paper. As I waited for them to finish, I drew magic circles on the high-quality paper I’d made yesterday and performed the experiments that had interested them.

Just as Hartmut had predicted, channeling mana into a magic circle drawn on the effon paper caused the chant to be performed automatically. It required a bit more mana than usual, but it could prove useful in situations when one couldn’t chant, or when the chant was just too ridiculously long.

Still, the problem is that I’m the only one who can draw on it right now.

Clarissa had hoped to make the nanseb paper reusable, but not even our high-quality version was that durable. It erupted into golden flames as any other paper would, leaving only a few burning fragments behind. I had to admit, there was something quite satisfying about them gathering together on their own.

“Lady Rozemyne, we’ve finished,” my two scholars eventually announced. They had each made some high-quality fey paper, which I attempted to draw on. I could put a clear line on Hartmut’s but nothing on Clarissa’s.

“Does this mean Clarissa has more mana than I do?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” they both replied at once. The speed with which I’d turned my feystones into gold dust made it clear that I was still very much ahead, but it hadn’t even been a genuine question. I’d asked them in jest, assuming that the answer was obvious.

“What is causing this, then?” I asked, cocking my head at them.

Clarissa immediately came up with an idea: “It must be the name-swearing! That’s about the only distinction between Hartmut and me, in any case.”

I really didn’t want to believe that the name-swearing was the only distinction between them, but she was probably right. “As name-swearing binds one in the mana of another, that most likely is having an impact.”

It was through name-swearing that Roderick had managed to become omni-elemental, at least to some degree. Hartmut was similarly under the influence of my mana, which seemed to explain why I could write only on his paper.

“If our suspicions are correct and the paper can be written on only by its creator or the person to whom they are name-sworn, then it really is a failure,” I said.

“The problem is that the paper deflects mana, correct?” Hartmut asked. “Perhaps we could try adding mana-absorbing ingredients.”

I gave him a quizzical look. “Do you mean black feystones?”

“If we can use ingredients harvested from Darkness fey creatures to add absorption properties to the paper—without changing its fundamental qualities, of course—then we should be able to apply mana ink to it.”

Darkness fey creatures? Does he mean things like ternisbefallens and trombes?

I gazed at the trombe paper while recalling the Darkness fey creatures I’d encountered in the past. “I see. Let us try that, then.”

I tried to fuse a sheet of trombe paper with the high-quality effon paper that Hartmut had made. Then I gave the finished product to Clarissa, who cut off one of the corners and attempted to draw on it.

“I can do it, Lady Rozemyne!” she exclaimed. Hartmut’s idea had worked—and the quality of the paper had risen, putting it just a few notches below maximal. That was probably because the trombe paper had chugged so much of my mana while I was brewing it.

Next, I drew some time-saving magic circles and used them to raise the quality of the effon paper. By the time I was done, it had adopted the trombe paper’s fireproof attribute alongside its own chant-repeating attribute.

“Lady Rozemyne, this fireproof paper hasn’t yet reached the high-quality tier, right?” Clarissa asked, blinking in surprise. The paper was burning up wherever she drew on it.

“Indeed. I used it as it was earlier. Increasing the quality even further might allow it to remain completely intact. There doesn’t seem to be much conflict between different kinds of paper, so we might as well try to make them all high quality and brew them together.”

And that was what we did. It had sounded reasonably simple, but it was a kind of brewing which required an insane amount of mana. We had to create gold dust to elevate each sheet to the high-quality tier in the first place, and it took extra mana to fuse high-quality ingredients.

In the end, though, our hard work bore fruit—we had made some maximal-quality fey paper. Hartmut and Clarissa attempted to draw on a torn-off scrap, and neither one of them had any trouble. The fragment then floated over to the sheet it had come from, and the two fused back into a full piece of paper.

Adding a magic circle to the paper resulted in a sheet that could cast magic spells simply by being provided with mana, did not completely burn up on its own, and could reform itself afterward. “I don’t really know how this paper should be used... but it should satisfy Ferdinand, right?” I asked Hartmut while showing him.

He smiled and nodded. “I doubt there is a single scholar in the world who would be able to find a fault with this paper. That said... I also don’t expect anyone else to be able to make it.”

“Well, it certainly was a little inconvenient.”

To reach this point, we had needed to use gold dust to increase the quality of our paper from low to high. Then we had needed to fuse three of our newly improved sheets. The end result was some ultra-expensive fey paper that cost an insane amount of time and mana to make.

Incidentally, fusing the three sheets of paper created a larger one the size of two smaller sheets put together. Most people would think to halve it, but the pieces would always put themselves back together, which was annoyingly inflexible.

“It took me an entire night of drinking rejuvenation potions to make enough gold dust for one sheet of high-quality paper,” Clarissa said, “then the brewing itself required me to drink another. As far as I’m concerned, this was more than just ‘a little inconvenient.’” It was her job as a scholar to brew in my stead, so her struggle to do it meaningfully was making her feel inadequate. “I have no choice but to increase my mana capacity and pray to the gods for more divine protections!”

While Clarissa burned with renewed determination to be of as much use to me as possible, Hartmut curiously reached out to the trombe paper. “Lady Rozemyne, what material is this fireproof paper made from?” he asked. “You purchased it from the Plantin Company rather than from Illgner, so it must be made by either the Rozemyne Workshop or some local paper-making workshops.”

I smiled. “It’s made using wood from a growy-stretchy tree.”

“A growy-stretchy tree?” Hartmut looked even more curious. “I have heard the orphanage children mention it before, but I did not realize it produced the wood used to make this paper. I wonder, what feyplant could it be...?”

I didn’t mind telling Hartmut, since he had given his name to me, but I couldn’t say anything when Clarissa was here too. Instead, I moved the conversation along. “We have a sizable stock of fey paper from Illgner, but there won’t be enough of the fireproof kind for our needs. We will need to make so much more over the summer.”

I started calculating how many taues we would need while making another sheet of maximal-quality paper. This one would go to Ahrensbach with Sylvester—and if it received a coveted “very good” from Ferdinand, we would start mass-producing it.

“My intention is to have Sylvester take not only these samples but also brewing implements and materials,” I said. “We will need to prepare for that.”

I fished through the workshop, looking for things that Sylvester could take with him to Ahrensbach’s funeral. I wanted to send Ferdinand some ingredients for rejuvenation potions and poison antidotes, at the very least. Hartmut and Clarissa joined me, seemingly enjoying themselves.

The spring coming-of-age ceremony was right around the corner—and that meant summer was too.