For the past few days, Rorschach had been recuperating on Pastoral Avenue, mooching off Kano's brunches at the Tower of the Star Torch every day.
A soft-fried egg covered the bacon, the bacon lay atop crisp bread, and the bread had been brushed through butter in a hot pan. Now, beneath it all were baby lettuce leaves and white sauce.
With one cut, Rorschach split the multilayered meal in two. Bright yolk flowed downward, merging with the sauce and ensuring that every layer was coated in the rich flavors of lecithin and cholesterol. He tried to lift every layer on the plate with his knife and fork, but failed, so he started by eating the tender fried egg and glistening bacon on top.
"Didn't you say it was normal for publication to take half a year, Master?" Rorschach was astonished to learn that his first paper, "An Examination of Thermo-mechanical Conversion and the Efficiency Limits of Heat Engines," was about to be published.
In ancient times, when Mages acquired knowledge, they naturally kept it all hidden away. Nowadays, Mages only kept some of it hidden. Valuable knowledge was locked up in Magic Towers according to lineages and factions, while certain knowledge related to fundamental theories was brought out for books and treatises. Since the rise of printing, more and more works had been privately printed into volumes. Those reviewed by the Mage Guild could even be included in the Guild's collection and potentially distributed across the entire continent.
Before Rorschach went to the Sub-plane, Kano had said that if an Archmage submitted his paper for review, then with Kano putting his old reputation on the line, the chances of getting it published were not small. But Rorschach had not expected it to happen so quickly. It had been less than