“If I can’t find any of the plants I know, then I should just look for new ones, right?”
Her inspiration had been the cotton sheep. Their tracks extended in a single line, and as a consequence, all the plants she would have been looking for along that line were eaten up. Fortunately, there weren’t many people living to the north of Gardenia, so they wouldn’t have been doing too much damage to people’s crops.
“I thought there’d be way more medicinal plants where there aren’t any people, though.”
She didn’t think she’d be competing with cotton sheep, rather than other gatherers, for the herbs. Even the cliff face was chewed up at the height of the cotton sheep’s mouths, so there was nothing growing on it that Sara could reach. All she could do was look around, lamenting the fact that the cotton sheep were probably quite hungry.
“Huh? Umm...”
Sara was relaxing in the carriage, unlike everyone else, who was running around using physical strengthening, so she noticed something gazing out at the rocks around them.
“They haven’t eaten the moss on the tops of the rocks. I guess they can’t reach up there...”
She felt sorry for the hungry cotton sheep. That didn’t stop her from taking interest in the moss, of course. It was a deep, purple color, almost black, a variety she had never seen before. The driver was from the area, and he told her that it could be dried and eaten. It was good for upset stomachs, it seemed. He also said it grew slowly, so they wouldn’t be able to harvest much from around here for a while.
“Well, I have nothing to make potions with, so I might as well try this, right?”
Cotton sheep were big, so Sara couldn’t reach anywhere they couldn’t either.
“At times like these, you’d think wind magic, right? But you’d be wrong...”
The Hunters were all gone, so she was only talking to herself.
“The moss is stuck to the rocks, so I think you could only cut a little of it off at once with wind magic. Times like these call for...baaarrieeer!”
She patted her stomach where, if she were a particular sort of cartoon cat, she might have a pocket full of wonderful gadgets, then hurriedly looked around to make sure no one was watching her. All she saw was the carriage, slowly advancing in the distance. It had gone ahead of her, thankfully.
“Stop joking around, Sara. Anyway, I can make my barrier like a shield and stretch it out to scrape the moss off the rock.”
Later, she realized it would have made more sense to picture a small spade or a scraper instead of a shield, but she couldn’t help thinking of what she was more familiar with recently.
“Just scrape it off... There, it fell!”
She picked up a handful of strange moss that was frilled like a mushroom.
“Let’s see... I’ll put some of the sap on my wrist. No stinging. I’ll take a little nibble. Basically flavorless, no bad smell, bitterness, or sharp taste. I’m surprised people thought to eat this. Now I’ll spit it out and gargle.”
If people routinely ate it around these parts, she shouldn’t have anything to worry about, but she figured it couldn’t hurt to be cautious with something she’d never seen before.
On their break for lunch, Sara ground up the moss and boiled it like she would healing herbs to make potions. Some potions had other ingredients or steps you had to do in a certain order, but generally you just carefully ground up plants, boiled them while infusing the liquid with mana, and strained the fluid into a bottle at the end.
“If only I had an ‘appraisal’ spell or something, but that would be too convenient if it existed, wouldn’t it?” Sara murmured, holding up the bottle to the light. She’d just made what was inside, but right now it was just a bottle of moss juice with unknown effects. The moss had originally been purple, but the liquid was a light red.
“‘Mana will empower you in whatever way you imagine. Keep your mana level in mind and don’t push yourself as you picture the magic you want to cast,’ right?”
Kuntz quoted the opening line of her magic textbook. He’d come to understand the significance of those words as well after figuring out his shield magic.
“I’m not sure how appraisal magic would work, but can’t you picture it?”
Sara looked to Haruto and Ann.
“Appraisal magic would be like if you could look at some grass and tell immediately that it was a healing herb or a poison herb. What I’d need is magic that could tell me if this is medicinal or not, but... Hmm...”
Her barrier reflected magic, but that was because the substance known as mana existed, and she could imagine moving and changing it to do so. What about appraisals, though?
“What would I do to find out the name and effects of things I don’t know anything about?”
There was nothing Sara could do with her own imagination. What about the other two, then?
“What about you, Haruto?”
“Don’t think so. All I’ve been able to do is make magic that already exists bigger and more complicated.”
“Ann?”
“I don’t know enough magic to do much of anything with it yet.”
When it really came down to it, using magic “in whatever way you imagine” was pretty difficult.
“When you think about it that way, appraisal really is the best of the isekai big three, and the hardest to manage.”
This was what Haruto had to say on the matter.
“The ‘isekai big three’?” Kuntz asked.
“Understanding the language, an inventory space—no, a storage pouch—and appraisal,” Haruto explained, aligning the terminology to this world.
Storage pouches seemed pretty hard to make too, but apparently they worked by filling a pouch with so much mana that it created a separate magical space inside the bag. Sara didn’t really get how it worked, but she knew how they felt to use, so if someone told her to make one, she might be able to figure it out. She had no idea where to start with appraisal, though.
“Basically, we’d have to use magic to come up with information we don’t know, but I don’t know how we’d do that. How would you access that kind of info?”
Allen and Kuntz just looked confused at Haruto’s explanation, but in any case, he didn’t know how to do it either.
“To figure out how medicinal plants work, the only thing I can think of is trying them out on injured creatures.”
She couldn’t think of a way to test medicines that didn’t involve animal or human experimentation. You’d just have to eat something and see if it worked as medicine, or look for plants of the same type as the ones you knew worked. It would be a long, tedious process.
“I’ll just attach the plant and some notes to this bottle and ask Chris about it the next time I see him.”
Sara bundled up some moss in a piece of paper and put it in a bag with the bottle, stowing that in her pouch.
“If we’re going to the capital, can’t you just ask someone there?” Ann asked curiously.
True, the capital was the largest city in the country, but she felt like Chris was still the best person to ask about potions. Her trust in him, in that area at least, ran deep.
“Is there a library or something?”
“That’s it!”
Sara hadn’t read many books since coming to this world. She didn’t know what the printing technology was like, but there were at least enough books that commoners could buy things like her guide to medicinal plants, even if it wasn’t cheap, and Bradley could own enough volumes to fill a few bookshelves.
“The Apothecary’s Guild has to have a reference room or something. I’ll see if I can look in there.”
She’d graduated from being a beginner apothecary long ago, but there was still plenty she could learn. She was even more excited to reach the capital now.
Ann and Haruto were still running restlessly up and down the road, but they finally reached the mountain path to the west.
“There’s room for one carriage to pass through, just like that road to the south.”
It was a pass through the mountains, so even having a maintained road was a luxury. There were spots here and there where you could pull over so that carriages could pass by one another as well, just like on the southern road.
Ann and Haruto, who’d gone ahead, were waiting in front of the mountain path with grave looks on their faces.
“Can you guys come here and look at this?”
They stopped the carriages and came over to see what Ann and Haruto were looking at.
Since there were people in this world who could use earth magic, even mountain roads were made of hardened earth. This road, however, had collapsed in places, and there were clear footprints from cotton sheep left behind.
“The cotton sheep took the mountain road, eh?”
Elm crouched down and observed the ground, poking something with a stick.
“This dung is relatively recent. I’m guessing they’re crossing the mountains. Or maybe they’ve already crossed.”
The cotton sheep in Gardenia were supposed to have come across the mountains from the west originally.