Chapter 190. Plans After Arriving at the Society
After working with the Mana Communication System for five minutes, Fulan was already driven back by how awful it felt to use.
At first, she had been delighted to find sothing that resembled an object from her previous life, but this system was simply terrible.
While reading the paper with the Number 1 designation, she discovered that it had been published by Elise, the society president of the Northern Society.
Its title was 【A Required Subject of the Alchemy School — thods for Forging Various Precious tal Materials】, which imdiately made Fulan want to take a look.
But after she used the page-turning function, only a few pages later, a dense mass of text suddenly overlapped and piled together in a chaotic jumble.
When Fulan turned the page again and returned to that page, it had sohow fixed itself.
After asking one of the mages nearby, she received this explanation:
“This Mana Communication System was an experintal version that the society president bought at a low price from its developer. In this version, the text will randomly scramble itself. You just have to flip the page again.”
Faced with that situation, Fulan could only endure the occasional bursts of garbled text disrupting her train of thought.
After she finished learning the thods of counterfeiting materials, she wanted to see whether there were any other papers worth reading.
But after entering the numbers in sequence all the way up to Number 20, she found that every one of them required Points to view. That left Fulan deeply frustrated.
Still, it also made her wonder: if papers could only be searched by number, then how was anyone supposed to find the content they actually wanted if they did not know the number?
With that question in mind, she asked the mage who had answered her earlier question. The answer she got was that so people specialized in doing business in exactly that area.
“So people go through every paper one by one, record all the titles, and then publish them in specialized journals.”
As he spoke, that mage took out a thick book titled “Complete Paper Catalogue, Thirty-Seventh Edition,” which recorded every paper title along with its specific number.
Within the Northern Society, finding specific papers had already beco a line of business, one that nearly replaced the excellent filtering and search functions from Fulan’s previous life with sheer manpower.
The ones that directly listed the specific numbers of every paper were actually the better option. At least those were only updated once a year.
As for so others, they would purchase papers themselves, study them carefully, then publish curated collections of selected papers.
“This is Snowflake Selections, the largest curated feature in the Northern Society. Would you like to buy a copy? It’s only thirty silver.”
At last, the mage revealed his real purpose. No wonder he had been so enthusiastic in answering Fulan’s questions earlier. He had been trying to make money off her all along.
The corner of Fulan’s mouth twitched. After hesitating for a mont, she still bought a copy, making the smile on the mage’s face grow even brighter.
Although gold coins were nowhere near as valuable as Points within the Northern Society, gold could still be used to purchase many precious materials.
“Oh, right. Do you have any free collections? The kind that only includes papers that don’t cost Points?”
Fulan suddenly asked. For the ti being, she had no way to obtain Points, so she could only read the free papers first.
“Yes, I do. Let find one.”
The mage rummaged through his bag for a while, pulled out a sowhat wrinkled booklet, and handed it to her.
“This one is only ten silver. Oh, and would you like a copy of our Snowflake Weekly too? It’s only one silver.”
The mage spoke with lively enthusiasm.
Snowflake Weekly was a publication dedicated to compiling the newly released papers from the past week and recomnding whichever ones were worthwhile.
Since the quality of weekly papers varied wildly, its price had to be reduced to a single silver coin, all to encourage mages to subscribe to it.
Moreover, Snowflake Weekly also offered paid recomndation slots. What if you had written a truly excellent paper, but worried no one would be willing to buy it?
No need to worry. A recomndation slot in Snowflake Weekly would let more people learn about your paper...
After refusing the mage’s attempts to sell her even more books, Fulan took the items she had bought and walked to a long bench, where she slowly began looking through them.
In truth, thods like curated paper collections and weekly publications were extrely common throughout the Alliance.
After the Alliance was established, the number of mages had only continued to grow, and the amount they wrote had also increased more and more.
Although there were dedicated reviewers to ensure the quality of those papers, ti still rendered that insufficient.
As the years passed, the volu of papers produced in a single week alone could fill an entire small room.
Under those circumstances, mages who specialized in sifting through papers appeared. They were highly skilled at identifying the outstanding ones among them.
“In this era before keyword searches, those mages relied almost entirely on manual effort to organize papers and sift through the research findings within them.”
If you want it a little more literary, this also works:
“In this era without keyword searches, those mages relied almost entirely on human effort to organize papers and sort through the research results contained within them.”
Nearly every major society had a dedicated organization that published relevant curated selections for other mages to choose from.
There were even services for those who wanted to search for material in a particular field. As long as one paid the fee, those people would conduct the search for them and gather every remotely relevant paper.
Elise’s decision to adopt this system had also been born of necessity. After her Society was established, the number of papers in her possession had grown larger and larger, but unlike those older major societies, she had no professional personnel to handle those papers. That left her no choice but to adopt this new system.
Overall, this new system still surpassed the traditional manpower-based structure. After all, no matter how much strain those mages put on their eyes, they still could not compare to the convenience of a system that required no paper to carry information.
Sitting on the bench, Fulan began thinking about the road ahead.
There were two main reasons she had co to the Northern Society. One was to learn more spells, and the other was to advance here.
She knew that Habos possessed the advancent thod for a Third-Tier Mage. If she returned to him, she would probably be able to obtain it. But as for the advancent thod for a Second-Tier Mage, she would need to acquire that herself within the Northern Society.
Her gaze fell on one section of Snowflake Selections, where a title was written: “So Discussions on the Advancent of Second-Tier Mages.” According to the note beside it, after its publication, this paper had remained in Snowflake Selections’ must-read advancent category for ten years straight. That alone showed just how valuable it was.
The only problem was that the paper required a rather steep price: fifty Points. Even most of the new papers listed in Snowflake Weekly only cost three or four Points.
It was obvious that the society president had deliberately raised the Point cost in this area in order to preserve the scarcity of mage advancent thods.
So Fulan began thinking about what exactly she should publish in order to earn that many Points.
After much thought, she decided to begin with mathematics.
She had no choice. She did not know how far mathematics in this world had developed, but from everything she had seen so far, she had yet to encounter anything resembling calculus.
Part of the reason lay in the fact that casting spells did not seem to require a completely precise sense of correctness.
Normally, when people followed the teachings of their predecessors in casting spells, they often did not need to reproduce every step exactly as their predecessors had done.
They only needed to find that particular feeling when casting the spell. Of course, having a standardized casting procedure was still extrely beneficial.
As long as one followed those summarized standard steps, one could generally cast the spell successfully.
But in Fulan’s case, the scientific frawork she had brought from Earth depended to a considerable extent on a comparatively complete mathematical foundation.
Without those mathematical expressions, many conclusions simply could not be established.
So before anything else, Fulan needed to first “build” a mathematical system in this other world.
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