CHAPTER 34: THE RESTRICTED SHELVES

The library disappointed Joe for perhaps three minutes.

There were fewer books than he had imagined after years of watching older trainees disappear through the locked rear door. The entire collection probably numbered only a few hundred volumes, and many of those were thin manuals, handwritten compilations or repaired copies of the same work rather than entirely different books. Several had been stitched together so many times that the repairs looked newer than the pages they protected.

Then Joe opened the first anatomy text, and the size of the library stopped mattering.

The illustrations were crude compared with the medical diagrams he remembered from his previous life, but the structures were recognizable. Major muscle groups had been drawn with reasonable accuracy, bones were named and compared, organs appeared in roughly the correct locations, and several diagrams followed larger blood vessels through the body. The explanations varied much more in quality. Some were clearly based on practical observation, while others mixed accurate descriptions with assumptions about blood energy or spirituality that Joe had no reason to trust.

That was fine.

He did not need every writer to understand why something happened. He needed observations he could compare.

Merek's knowledge had always been practical and deeply experienced. He knew what happened when a root was boiled too long, which symptoms made a wound dangerous, and when a patient who looked fine should still be watched for another day. The books gave Joe something different: organization. They recorded cases Merek had never encountered in front of him, compared preparations systematically and sometimes preserved arguments between healers who disagreed about the same treatment.

For the first time, Joe could study medicine as a body of knowledge rather than a collection of lessons attached to whatever work happened to enter Merek's shop that day.

He needed somewhere to keep notes.

Mary still technically owned Simon's old household writing board.

Joe discovered that fact remained important to her despite the board spending most days untouched near the wall.

"You gave it to me," she said when he picked it up.

"It still belongs to you."

"Then why are you taking it?"

"I'm borrowing it."

"You didn't ask."

Joe stopped, held the board toward her and tried again. "Mary, may I borrow your writing board?"

She considered him with suspicious seriousness. "What do I get?"

"Your board back afterward."

"That's already mine."

Pam, sitting near the hearth, laughed loudly enough that Lily looked over from the storage jars.

Joe eventually surrendered a small portion of the sweets he had bought with his medicine-shop wages. Mary declared the arrangement fair and immediately lost interest in the board again.

Joe began filling it.

The medicine shelves produced the quickest benefit because Joe already possessed enough experience to recognize what mattered.

One wound-treatment book repeatedly emphasized washing damaged tissue before applying anything else. Its explanation for why was incomplete, but Joe did not particularly care. Another compared the same medicinal plant when fresh, dried, boiled, steeped or ground into powder and recorded noticeably different results depending on preparation.

Joe already knew those things individually.

Seeing them organized changed how he thought about them.

Temperature mattered.

Timing mattered.

Dosage mattered.

Storage mattered.

Sometimes the same ingredient behaved almost like a different medicine depending on how it was processed.

His reconstruction of Merek's common healing paste improved rapidly once those observations began connecting.

Previously, Joe had identified most of the likely ingredients and several important processing steps simply by watching what disappeared into Merek's final preparation room. Now he started understanding the role of each component. One seemed primarily responsible for reducing heat and swelling after strain. Another appeared to improve circulation around damaged tissue. A third contributed little direct healing but kept the finished paste stable enough that the active ingredients did not separate or lose effectiveness too quickly.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

His next experiment was therefore not a guess.

He chose proportions deliberately, processed each ingredient according to a reason he could explain and combined them in an order based on what he believed each step accomplished.

The finished paste was weaker than Merek's.

It also worked.

Joe brought the small jar to the shop the following day.

Merek smelled it twice, rubbed a little between his fingers and finally tested a thin layer on his own forearm after irritating the skin enough to redden it.

Then he looked at Joe.

"You made this."

"Yes."

"From my scraps."

"Mostly."

Merek's eyes narrowed. "Mostly?"

"I bought one ingredient."

"That wasn't the important part of the question."

Joe waited.

Merek examined the paste again and began listing problems. The ratio was wrong. One root had been processed too long. Another component had been ground too finely, and Joe had come dangerously close to ruining a more delicate ingredient during heating.

Joe agreed with most of it.

Merek eventually stopped.

"You look pleased."

"It worked."

"Badly."

"It still worked."

The old healer stared at him, then pushed the jar back across the table. "Yes. It did."

That sentence mattered more than the criticism.

Joe checked the panel that evening.

Medicine — Lv.3 3/100

He stared at the line longer than he expected.

Major Success.

For months, routine preparation had left Medicine trapped at the end of Lv.2 despite Joe becoming faster and cleaner at work he already understood. The breakthrough had come only when he produced a real preparation independently and understood enough of the process to explain why it should work.

That confirmed something important about Every Hard Work Pays Off.

Genuine effort always produced something useful, but endlessly repeating an easy task did not have to produce the same kind of progress forever. Sometimes advancing required a harder kind of work.

Joe liked that.

It made the talent less mechanical than he had once feared.

The librarian proved much harder to understand than medicine.

His name was Ren, though Joe only learned that because Hall addressed him once while returning a book. Ren himself had never introduced himself and seemed entirely comfortable with that arrangement.

He was curt, grim-faced and remarkably efficient at ending conversations.

Joe tried asking about his past during the second week.

"Were you trained here?"

"Yes."

"Did you live in Blackwood?"

"Yes."

"For long?"

"Long enough."

"What did you do there?"

Ren looked up from his book. "Worked."

Joe decided that line of investigation had reached its natural conclusion.

Several weeks later, he noticed the small clay pot beside Ren's desk.

The tea smelled considerably better than the weak leaves occasionally boiled at home.

When Merek later received a bundle of decent tea from a traveler who lacked enough coin to settle his entire bill, Joe bought a small portion from him with several weeks of saved wages and carried it to the library.

Ren looked at the packet.

"Why?"

"You drink tea."

"I know."

"This one is better than yours."

Ren stared at him long enough that Joe briefly wondered whether criticizing a man's tea was more offensive in this world than criticizing his martial arts.

Then Ren opened the packet.

The following week, Joe asked where the older travel journals were kept.

Ren pointed toward a shelf Joe had overlooked.

That became the shape of their relationship.

Joe brought tea occasionally. Ren answered slightly more often. Joe learned almost nothing about the old man's past and eventually stopped trying.

He liked Ren more after that.

The maps consumed nearly as much of Joe's library time as medicine.

He started with the local ones because he wanted to understand where Green Hollow actually sat in relation to Blackwood.

Green Hollow was not marked.

At first that irritated him. Then Joe understood the scale.

Blackwood itself was only one small town among dozens of settlements, roads, rivers and unnamed stretches of land. On a larger map of their administrative state, Joe had to search carefully even to locate Blackwood.

Everything he had known since reincarnation occupied a tiny corner.

Then he found a map of the kingdom.

Joe counted the divisions once.

Then again.

One hundred and eight states.

The maps used local measurements, but by comparing known travel distances Joe could make a rough conversion to units from his previous life. The calculation was crude enough that he repeated it using several different routes.

The result remained uncomfortable.

Even the smaller states appeared to cover something on the order of seven hundred thousand square kilometers.

Texas had been roughly six hundred and ninety-six thousand square kilometers.

A relatively small state in this kingdom was therefore approximately the size of Texas.

Many were considerably larger.

Joe stared at the map for a long time.

One hundred and eight states.

Even if he used the lower estimates, the kingdom alone appeared to contain more than seventy million square kilometers. Earth had possessed only around one hundred and forty-nine million square kilometers of land in total.

Either this world was enormous, its continents were vastly larger than Earth's, or Joe had misunderstood something fundamental about the mapping system.

He checked another map.

Then a second set of distance records.

The scale remained broadly consistent.

For the moment, he accepted the simplest conclusion.

This world was much larger than he had imagined.

Green Hollow's state sat near the outer edge of the kingdom. The books described it with polite terms such as remote, sparsely settled and less developed.

Joe translated the language easily.

Poor.

Roads were fewer here, cities were farther apart, and official influence weakened quickly once travelers left important settlements.

Blackwood was the nearest town, but on the state map it looked insignificant.

The nearest true city lay roughly ten days away on foot for an ordinary healthy traveler following the recognized route. Ten days initially sounded inconvenient rather than dangerous, until Joe began reading the notes written beside the road descriptions.

Long stretches crossed lightly settled country.

Merchants preferred moving together.

Travelers waited for larger groups when possible.

People carrying valuable goods hired escorts.

Joe thought immediately of Theodere's new business.

The economics made far more sense now.

The royal capital was so distant that Joe could barely conceptualize the journey. One common route crossed through or along more than twenty states before reaching the central region.

More than twenty territories roughly comparable to Texas lay between his edge of the kingdom and its political center.

Blackwood had once felt like the outside world.

Now Joe understood that it was barely the first dot beyond home.