Chapter 221
Legend of the Sage Alchemist (III)
With the help of Long Tao's mother, I figured out a rather realistic way to age paper properly, additionally adding some tears and imperfections and even yellowing that happens over time.
His father also happened to know how to mix ingredients in a way to create ink that hasn't been used for thousands of years, to make it even more believable.
And thus, I got down to business.
Was I writing a new Shakespeare? This world's Catcher in the Rye? Maybe a new-age Paradise Lost?
Yeah.
No.
It was mostly lame dad jokes and bad puns.
Hey Dad, I'm hungry. Hey Hungry, you died 13 years ago, and I really need to move on.
Russian dolls are so full of themselves.
The past and present walk into a bar, and they immediately get tense. There's no future in their relationship.
You know, truly highly intellectually stimulating stuff that, should it ever actually be translated somehow, will leave anyone who reads it in a catatonic state.
I wrote eighteen pages of this crap, with various annotations to the side and some symbols I remembered from the Scandinavian history class I took and their old runic language, occasionally drawing a small picture of an object they wouldn't recognize (telescope, airplane), some they might (iron maiden), and some they definitely did: skulls, eyes, and swords.
Honestly, towards the end, I ran out of bad puns and dad jokes (I've never been a dad, so I got a limited amount of those), so I just started scrambling random crap with no logic or order. Like those texts in newspapers in the movies that, if you zoom in and read, leave you wondering whether a human being even wrote that.
The supposed peroration of the assumed stipulation recurs in its diligence.
... I'm actually proud of that one. Would fit right into the Hollywood production.
It didn't take me that long to do it, either--just five or six hours, as I could simply use Qi to alleviate strain on the wrist, and since I didn't care how the letters looked in particular, I speedran the entire thing. In fact, I even mixed the script, occasionally tossing in some cursive just to mess with their heads for no other reason than that I can.
Now, I had to be actually careful and not make it too realistic; this is meant to temporarily cheat one person, not make the people believe I do actually know a language none of them have ever heard of. So, in addition to using English, I also literally just scrambled some random letters here and there, changing syntax in the sentence so it's not too consistent, and making a lot of tiny errors that will basically lead everyone who inspects it on a deeper level to realize one thing: it's all bull.
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In the meantime, Gu Zhao started preparing herbs and testing ways to utilize them almost antithetically to their purpose. It didn't have to work; it just had to either do nothing or have a slight positive.
"YOU ARE A GENIUS!" he thus exclaimed as he stormed into my room just as I was finishing the script, throwing his arms around me into one of the most painful bear hugs of my life. The dude lifted me up from the ground and into the air as if I were a wooden doll and started shaking me like he was trying to make money fall out of my pockets. "YOU ARE AN ABSOLUTE GENIUS, MASTER LU! HA HA HA!"
Aaaand this genius is at the cusp of throwing his innards out, you damn bastard!
"Ah! Apologies, I got too excited!" He finally put me down as the world slowly stopped spinning.
"No, no, that's... fine." I felt a bit come up to my throat, but luckily it went right back down. "Why, uh, why do you think I'm a genius?"
"Your idea to utilize herbs differently," he said. "I discovered that at least sixteen commonly used medicines have secondary and even tertiary properties when prepared or utilized differently. For instance, camili powder, which we ordinarily use to cleanse meridians of the toxic buildup after pill usage, can also be used to accelerate the effects of the pill! However, instead of slowly spreading it on naked skin and letting it work slowly, tossing it into an extremely hot flame and inhaling the fumes absorbs it much quicker, so you can use pills, meditate, and inhale powder at the same time for the complete benefit! That alone is absolutely revolutionary and will possibly earn me the rank of a Soul-Grand Initiate, let alone all the other things!
"You... you must be an ancient, hidden Tri-Aspects Grandmaster recluse who simply decided to aid this Junior ever so slightly, no?"
"..."
Yeah.
One of those secondary utilizations has gotten this guy properly high.
"Then there is the cycadium flower," he rattled on, his excitement continuing to go up at the same rate his spittle came out. "We usually grind its petals into powder and then freeze them for a few days to trap the moisture in before mixing it with the rest of the ingredients for the normal Healing Pill that's good for surface-level wounds. However, heating the flower up and trapping the escaping moisture practically doubles its effect! You really are a genius!"
... yeah. Except I didn't really do anything? I mean, sure, I've 'recommended' the few bits--if you usually chop it up, grind it instead, or burn it, or squeeze it, just the assortment of things you can do to other things. But I didn't actually think any of them would manifest into beneficial changes.
Why?
It's simple: these weren't 'high techniques' or anything of the sort. Honestly, I'm far more shocked than probably even he is, but not for the same reason; what do you mean simply swapping the way you handle an herb doubles its effect? How come, in the thousands of years of your history, nobody did it even on accident?
No... something is off here.
"Ah! I must go back and do some more tests! Yes, with this, we will definitely be able to fool even the most talented Alchemists! Ha ha ha!" He came in like a meteor, and he left like a rocket being launched into space, leaving me pondering.
Just... how?
"Master is a genius at many things, it sounds like." Long Tao 'crawled' out of a wall, startling me. Well, he didn't appear; he was always there--he probably saw Gu Zhao storming over here like a mad bull and hid in case the dude wanted to kill me. I'd be touched if I wasn't absolutely freaked out.
"Doesn't it sound just... kind of stupid?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, basically the first thing you do with any ingredient is test the ways in which you can prepare it, no? So, you grind them, soak them, burn them, freeze them, and do all the things imaginable to them just to see what they do to it."
"Hm. True," Long Tao nodded. "But standards of alchemy exist in an ebb and flow, as my father used to say. A river may one year flood its banks, and the next it may be near drought, all depending on how much rain falls. Alchemy, too, rests upon the pagoda of knowledge--but it is also a rather rigorous and strict field. Ingredients become expensive and rare, and it is already rather difficult to progress, so few ever dare truly experiment beyond a small scope."
"No, even so," I frowned. "It's like telling a cook that he should fry potatoes instead of boiling them. It sounds so... basic." He looked at me for a moment before suddenly sitting down and taking out a sheet of paper--though, this one was empty.
I feel like I'm about to be lectured. And to think I could have avoided it if I'd just kept my mouth shut.
