"You’re holding a country together by military force or by personally talking everyone into following you, not because an otherwise stable country voted for who they thought would do the best job of governing and picked you."

"Ah. Yeah, definitely closer to the first thing than the second thing. The deal is that I did something kind of objectively stupid that left me with enormous amounts of magical power and then I killed my father and took his empire and extended it to the rest of the continent, and that was all thousands of years ago so by now people are just kind of growing up knowing that I've basically always ruled the world."

"Power doesn’t really come in degrees like that where I’m from and so far I think we’re lucky that way. Congratulations on your conquest, though."

"I was pretty young and stupid at the time but I like to think I've grown up a lot since then."

"Sounds likely! Is however you’ve lived that long for sale?"

"I can make other people immortal but I've got no idea what you'd pay me for it."

"I could make your belongings unbreakable or make you immune to extreme temperatures or some kinds of injuries or other people’s magic but we should check that I can actually do that. I could pay in cash. I could tell stories. I don’t know, what do you want most?"

"I want to make my empire more prosperous. But I don't know how to do that."

"I might! Which if any of germ theory, printing presses, electricity, computers and vaccines are unfamiliar?"

"...the printing press is pretty new but we have it, I want to hear more about the rest."

"Bar can sell you books on all of them, just so you know, but - so, some contagious diseases are caused by creatures so small you can't even see them, like how it's hard to see mites but much smaller, just kind of eating you from the inside, and they can be gotten off of surfaces by washing with soap and they can usually be killed by extreme heat, so for example by boiling water before you drink it. Vaccines can teach your body to recognize them in advance, which - so, you know how some creatures only get some diseases once in their lives? Vaccines let you skip straight to the part where you don't get them again. Complete with the thing where if there's anything really wrong with your immune system you'll still get them. They're like a nonmagical and slightly worse version of a disease ward. Computers are objects that can remember information and do math and do small nonmagical illusions of images and sounds, which in practice means you can do things like write a letter and have it sent almost as fast as if you were using paired artifacts, or ask it to multiply a bunch of numbers, or even have a public discussion forum where it's possible to remove instances of people showing up just to annoy everyone by reciting the entire alphabet. And if you don't already know about those, it's likely you don't know much about nonmagical automation, either - that's a thing where people use steam or electricity to make their tools move on their own. I would definitely recommend getting some books - and reading them here and copying them out by hand because they won't be in your language if you take them home."