Rick slowly flipped through numerous pages to get to his desired section. The introduction stated the book was intended for the witch's apprentice, but the "Dedicated To:" line was left blank and Rick's heart sunk wondering what tragedy befell the person who dedicated so much time and effort to ensure her life's work carried on.
Reading through a few spells on the way he picked up that the instructions were thorough and clear. The spells were different than he first imagined, mostly effecting the caster in strange ways. The animal spells gave insight into birdsongs, or visions of what its like to be a squirrel frolicking in the trees. Potentially useful for spying but no comment on actually controlling where it frolics.
The gender spells promised to slightly mentally feminize or maculate the target for an hour, Anthropomorphizing would make an animal act slightly human, and the minor modifications were an interesting delve into potion and balm making but alluded to needing continued use for weeks if not months for effects to be seen...
Magical abilities such as cloud reading, people gleaning, or other divination oriented things, seemed downright boring. That is until Rick got to the end of the book. In the end he found more expository wishing the apprentice well in their business and adding her most prized knowledge, a section dedicated to modifying the spells by replacing ingredients or altering their preparation. Ways to alter duration of use needed, how long it lasts, transfer the mind for a time instead of getting glimpses...
Flipping back and forth the cloud reading spell could become cloud control, and if the notes are to be believed, manipulating the clouds to the images represented for cloud reading would become weather control. The anthropomorphizing of a creature could be turned to make a human more animal or a permanent familiar, and taken to the extreme the potions can accomplish nearly anything from permanent to to a trippy 10 minutes...
The power, the variety, the creative freedom, it occurred to Rick that the true power of the book was encoded, and by some miracle he had uncovered it. He had to try something, but what, and on who or what? He took out a notebook and settled on a test and began transcribing a recipe with all the substitutions to get the desired effect... next was to make the old timey ingredients translated to today's names, and then some of his spending money was lost on Amazon but a few days later he had what he needed.