FEB 1 Sunday.

It's a new month, and the last of the winter snow is gone as spring has started. That also comes with more rain but I don't mind that at all. Right now I'm relaxing in my main room while carving Entropy's wooden copy, it's seen some good progress over the last two weeks.

I have to be very careful with it so it will take a while to complete. I do this while thinking over another problem I have, I have two weeks vacation to use and I'm not sure where to go yet. I have a few ideas but would need to plan them out more.

I could visit another pony city or take a trip to another country nearby, but I only have two weeks to travel and it takes time to move from place to place. So I need to pick the right place to go to still have fun with my trip.

The best way to travel is by train, the train network in Equestria is extensive and can take you to most cities quickly. I was able to find a decent map of the train network and have been looking for a good place to go. I still have a month and a half until I need to decide so I'm not in a rush.

I clean up the wood shavings on the floor and move my unfinished carving, and tools into the workroom before starting work on my plants. I take out the vine I've been breeding and start the process by planting its seeds. The vine is still unnamed but I've thought of a few.

Sun Vine, Sky Vine, Star Vine. This vine still has glowing flowers and can grow much higher than the Solar Vine, so something that references its glow and ability to grow so tall. It's not hard to grow, it's a fast-growing plant so it doesn't need much magic to grow enough to make seeds.

I can go through quite a few generations every time I sit down to do this. It can grow large enough for my needs now, so I'm now focusing on its ability to absorb solar magic, but that is going to slow this down by a large amount. I don't have a way to measure their ability to do this so I have to test each one.

I've been taking three of them each the same size and leaving them by my window each day to collect light. Then I take the one that holds its light the longest and brightest, this has been slowing down my breeding of the plants by a large amount so this project will take a while to complete.

When I'm almost out of magic I collect seeds from them before decomposing the plants. I still want to breed more plants so I go make some tea to recover my magic faster, when I have my tea I sit down with my selectively bred Juniper bush.

I spend the next two hours just learning the magical flows of the Juniper berry to take away a lot of the cost from breeding it. The main reason my plant breeding has had such an increase in speed is that I've gotten better at memorizing those magical flows.

And my magic capacity is still slowly growing, but it's mostly the former. After I have a decent understanding of the Juniper bush I start breeding them. I can get through many more generations faster than the last time I bred them, so I can change them faster.

But even with the new speed it will still take a few weeks to make really big changes to the plant. To be honest I don't have much of a reason to breed the Juniper bush, but I want to see how large I can get the berries to grow, while still having the plant grow without my assistance.

Right now the berries are three times their original size and I want to see how far I can push that. I spend another hour just breeding and decomposing plant after plant while checking for the best ones. Once I'm out of magic again I move on from plant breeding.

I put everything away and take a break for a while, I sit in my main room and start reading a book. This book is about the effect that different magical plants can have on ponies, and it has a decent description of Poison Joke. This plant is odd even by this world's standards.

Because of its unpredictable effects, it's illegal to own or grow, and I can see why. The plant's effects aren't too hard to reverse but they can still be dangerous. If it changes your body to a significant degree it can cause a few bad conditions. It may not be the most dangerous plant but it's definitely up there.

I keep reading through the book for a while before standing up. I don't have anything else to work on so I just ask Entropy if she wants to go out with me, she just stays on her perch and closes her eyes again. I shrug and put on my things before leaving my apartment.

I don't have anything in mind so I just wander the streets for a while and explore the area, I also make sure to not enter secluded areas. As I walk I find a few interesting things, mostly different guild buildings and a few interesting businesses.

I find a small discount bookshop near a street corner and decided to check it out. As I enter the small building I'm met with the familiar smell of dusty paper and still air. It's not a large shop with only a few rows of bookshelves that go back deeper. I see an old mare at the desk who's reading a book.

They look up at me as I enter. "If you need anything just ask. Or you can look around." The mare says in a calm and quiet voice.

"Thank you, I'll just look around for now." She goes back to her book and I start looking through a few books. The shop goes further back than it looks. As I walk further back the books get more dusty the further I go, and when I reach the back of the shop I need to take out my light to see the books well enough to read them.

A lot of the books I saw near the front were popular and well-known books, but back here I see many that are less common. I find a few journals and even someponies old tax documents, I keep looking through the shelves trying to find anything of interest.

I spend an hour just looking through dusty shelves for anything that might be useful, but in the end, I only find three books that I want. The first is about plants that grow well in the cold and a few methods to tend and farm them. The second is about insects and their uses in various industries and products.

It's not the most useful but the book is written in Griffin so I thought it would at least be interesting. The third book is the most interesting out of them all. It's about runes, it's a small collection of recorded runes from over two hundred years ago, it's hard to find any collection of runes let alone one this old.

But I can also see why nopony ever read through it thoroughly, the first two-thirds is a journal that is about a pony's mundane life. Only after you get past that will you find badly written notes about different runes, it's also degraded to a good degree at this point.

Most would just think the book is damaged and even if they did read it I think they would stop after a few pages of badly written, rambling, boring text. But I work with old books all day long, I know the difference between a book damaged from use and a book damaged by age.

That is what drew my attention to this book, it is very old. And while the writing is bad, what it contains is useful and accurate information on several runes. Several of these runes I recognize and their runic context is correct and accurate, so it's likely that the runes I don't recognize are also correct.

And this book has several runes I don't recognize at all, and a few seem really useful to me. I take all three books and carefully move them to the front desk. I approach the front desk and place the books down, "How much for these?"

The old mare looks over them for a moment. "Thirty bits for these two, the last one barely looks usable so I'll sell it for five bits." That's about right for discount books, I pass her the bits and carefully put the books away before stepping out into the street.

When I arrive home I take everything off of me and carefully move the damaged book into my workroom. This book is in bad shape and it's best if I copy it quickly before I lose any knowledge it may contain. I can't risk taking apart the book's binding in its condition so I have to copy the pages one by one.

I focus on the runes first and start copying them over, the writing is not good and this part of the book is more damaged. I even find a few pages suffering from slight water damage, somehow, after I copy every rune I start on the other text.

At this point, it's been drilled into my brain to preserve books, even if it's just a journal from a long-dead pony. This book isn't large so after a few hours I'm done with the book, I don't have a binder so I just make a copy of the parts about runes and tie the full version together before placing it to the side.

I wrap the original book in some cloth and place it on a shelf, I'll probably give it to the library. I take the copied pages and start looking through the runes in detail. There are several that I recognize, but some of them are odd. A rune for blue light, it's specified to be blue in the runic context.

One rune shows some promise. A rune for silence, I haven't found a rune for this before and I can think of several uses for it. A rune for life, this rune has some odd context and the notes on it are unclear on its uses. But even if it does work I don't think it will work well as it is not very well made.

Runes are only as good as the context and the knowledge used in making it. The next rune is for the sun, and it's borderline useless, there are other runes for this and this one is so weak it is also useless to me. I keep looking through the pages and add the runes to my collection as I go.

Once I'm done I want to try one of these runes. I take one of my two remaining small sapphires and start working on it. I enchant it to hold magic and start on my idea. I take the rune for silence I found and start forming it into a spell matrix, what I'm making is not complex so after only one hour I'm done.

I place the sapphire on the floor and activate the enchantments. A small invisible zone forms three feet around the gem. I pick up a piece of Steel wood and throw it into the zone and watch as it hits the floor without making a sound. I test several things to see how well it works.

I even move my head into the field, it's odd to have all ambient sound just stop. Absolute silence is something few get to experience, I wouldn't recommend it. I was able to overpower the enchantment with a loud enough sound, I slammed two pieces of metal together.

Even then the sound was much quieter than it should have been. Once I've had my fun I put the gem away and go back to the main room to read the other two books I found.

Author's Note

Thanks for reading. :D