CH58

“Pretty sure you’re never seeing me again. Goodbye Thera, this is my home now.”

“We close in about five hours,” A friendly staff member said as they walked by.

“You close? Stonewalls guild never closes,” He asked, crestfallen.

“That’s mostly an adventurers guild,” Thera told him. “They’re always open in case of emergencies.”

“Ah, so lame,” In front of him were rows and rows of books on various topics, with all of the ones before him being in the public domain. There were shelves of the more popular patented ideas as well, but he wasn’t looking to spend money to use someone else’s ideas in the things he would make and sell, so it was better at the moment to not even touch them and risk using one by mistake.

He asked for one of the guild staff to point him towards books on different materials and their properties, and he came away with five large volumes to flip through.

“You aren’t finishing all of those before they close,” Thera told him.

“Not even going to try to. I’m just going to flip through them to see if anything pops out. If this is going to be too boring you can head back Thera, I’ll probably be here until I’m kicked out.”

She shook her head. “I’ll stay, my parents are being a bit too comfortable acting like themselves around me at the moment. If I give them some space they may calm down a little.”

“Suit yourself.”

Ben cracked open the first book while Thera looked for something that she could read to pass the time, though Ben doubted how much luck she would have. She seemed to lean towards history and fiction, not technical manuals. Of course he never would have sat down to read anything like this himself if he wasn’t tossed into this world, now that it was his job it became significantly more interesting.

As he spent hours skimming through hundreds of pages he learned about numerous materials he would be interested in working with one day for their unique and interesting properties, but none matched what he was looking for. Sure there were plenty that seemed to be explosive in the right conditions, but Ben wasn’t even sure if saltpeter was an explosive chemical, or if it was something mined or organic for that matter, all he had was a name to go off of and for all he knew it was the process of combining it with charcoal and sulphur that made it work.

Once he closed the last volume he gave up. He wouldn’t be bringing guns to this world, at least not right now. Maybe he would see if Pelenia would help him send some letters to the various classmates he didn’t know how to contact to see if they could help him out at all, but for the moment he would just have to do his best not to let any other creatures sink their teeth into him. He put his books away, a bit dejected, before wandering through the isles for the last hour.

There were a lot of titles he found interesting that he decided he would be coming back to read later, and occasionally he found something that sounded intriguing enough that he needed to open it and give it a flip through, but he didn’t have the time to throw himself into his reading the way he wanted to. He kept a mental list of things to read later and went to find Thera.

She had been seated beside him, reading through a book despite what he had expected, and he got her attention.

“What did you find?”

She looked up and saw that they were about to start closing up, so she returned it to its shelf. “It’s ‘The use of earth magic spells in enchanting’. It was interesting but nothing that could really help me improve.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Well dad’s going to want to try practicing with me soon anyway so we’ll see how it goes. I wish I packed more than one staff.”

“Can’t we get you a new one in town to use?”

She shrugged. “I can, but aside from Falk’s, yours are probably the best that wouldn’t be disgustingly expensive.”

Considering how long they last, that’s pretty sad. He thought, but he decided to keep that to himself and take it as a compliment. “Well thanks, my enchanting went up since I made your last one too so hopefully the next one I’ll make will be even better.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” Even though her face was covered, he felt like she was smiling.

They joined her parents for dinner, though this time Karly and Glob were unavailable, and spoke about the plans for the immediate future.

“Since Ben seems to be a faster enchanter than I expected, I don’t have anything set up for you tomorrow and I was planning on giving you the following day to rest, so use the next two for whatever you’d like,” Pelenia told them. “I’m receiving reports from the various embassies though that their independent testing is showing the braces you’ve made today are working as advertised, and they want to start commissioning more from you immediately.”