So, with those three plants combined with a well aged ink stick, he would produce a magical ink vastly superior to just adding a few drops of his blood to the ink. Once the ink was finished, he calculated that it would be between fifty to seventy-five percent more efficient. Meaning it would take between twenty-five to fifty percent as much time and mana to produce a new scroll of teleportation.
That was the significant difference having proper materials could make to the production process!
Junichiro looked at his freshly finished magical ink. It was perfect for his purposes! There had been some close calls during the creation process, he'd had to infuse his mana into the extracts to help keep them stable until they could be properly mixed and he'd almost ruined the Oveheed. But! He'd managed to pull through and he now had the best ink he could make with his current supplies. The only thing now holding him back from making more powerful scrolls was the quality of the paper. Parchment was great, and traditional, but it had a hard limit on how much mana it could contain. A short distance teleportation spell was at that limit.
Since he'd spent a fair bit of mana covering for his mistakes during the ink making process, he decided to begin work on the scroll tomorrow. Which left him time to check out another spot in the house that greatly interested him. The library!
After setting the stoppered bottle of ink on his calligraphy desk, he made his way into the house to get cleaned up. Making ink was not a clean process and he didn't want to cover his brand new, or possibly very old, books in ink fingerprints.
When he arrived at the library, he wasn't disappointed, now was he thrilled. It had a fair bit of room but most of the shelves were barren. Obviously Azazel wasn't going to work to fill every last shelf of the library with priceless tomes, ancient grimoires, and the dead sea scrolls. There were a few books, most of which looked similar to standard text books. On further examination, they were textbooks but instead of geography, they were on magic. There was also a collection of books on the maintenance of houses like he lived in.
In hind sight, it was rather generous of Azazel to include books on how to take care of the house. Honestly thinking about it, Junichiro really had no clue what kind of maintenance his home would need and the provided books would fix that bit of ignorance. Nice, but not nearly as nice as the books on human magic!
It only took a few minutes of reading the first volume for Junichiro to grow slightly annoyed. His memories of DxD had informed him that it took a lot of instant mental math to cast magic as a human. Laws of the reality or whatnot. It turns out there were two common methods of casting spells. Method one is the method he'd expected, that is doing math on the fly to change the variables of the world using mana to get a desired outcome. Essentially, 'I use mana to do this and I get a fireball spell' kind of magic. Inputting your mana into the world and doing the math draws the spell circle and completes the spell. Rote memorization of specific formulas makes the process faster and allows the caster to make mental shortcuts.
So what's the problem?
Well, it was less a problem and more 'why the fuck doesn't everyone use method two?' Method two was to sit down, slowly and carefully perform calculations. Use those calculations to draw a magical circle, then MEMORIZE JUST THE CIRCLE. If you memorized just the circle you could form your mana into the circle with a flick of your wrist and cast the spell at will with ease. The only real drawbacks? Slightly higher mana cost and less flexibility than on-the-fly math. That's it!
So, he could sit around doing math and drawing magic circles for any spell he could imagine, memorize just the circle as an image, and cast the spell anytime he had enough mana. Only losing out on some flexibility and having the spell cost anywhere from ten to fifty percent more mana. Though the book did mention that better, more efficient, spell circles would naturally cost less mana to use. If there was nothing else about himself that stood out, he would be known for his desire for efficiency!
Whichever method he ended up going for, he would still need to study a whole new form of math in-depth to get anywhere with it. Right then and there he made a decision. While it wouldn't get him out of having to study the material, creating a homunculus and teaching it everything it needed to know to do the math for spell creation would give him an amazing edge in the process. Now a homunculus was never going to be very good at improvisation or thinking of a better way to do something. It was more akin to a programmed robot. To give it some free will he'd have to try making an artificial spirit and that way lay madness and slavery.