Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Chapter 2190  Puzzled

The museum, or as they called it the archive, did not have much information about the Alchemy God prior to his ascension. Especially the parts about his time within the Royal Sprout guild were not known to many and his help during the war wasn't recorded as much.

It was clear that not much was known about the Alchemy God at all.

He had seemingly come out of nowhere for many people when he became the Alchemy God. Once he became the Alchemy God, he used the name the people used to call him, Little Flower, and made a guild with it.

That was the Great Flower Guild, which was also now used as the name of the city.

Having become a god, the Alchemy God had every right to call the Medicine World his and no one would have said otherwise. But he was not a man who wanted to rule. He was not someone who even knew how to rule.

He was a free spirit that wanted to go around helping people. His time within the Great Flower guild had been extensively preserved in text, which Alex could read as he walked through the museum.

Everyone who met the man called him a kind soul when it came to dealing with people and a monster when it came to Alchemy. There was no pill he couldn't make, no recipe he didn't know. One could bring any ingredients before him and he would tell exactly what they could be used for.

Everyone wondered how the man had learned so much, what inheritance he had received but no one knew anything about it. The Alchemy God's knowledge was a mystery of its own.

Alex saw a talisman that helped a pill recipe that the Alchemy God unveiled during one of the times. It was a simple pill made with readily available ingredients, which could be used to cure a plague that nearly killed many people around many parts of the continent.

His pills helped save the world. There was another record of an Alchemy Duel between him and some other alchemy figure who had later died during the war. The duel was recorded as one where the Alchemy God had easily defeated the person without breaking a sweat.

Alex walked through, taking in every little information, but he could not find what he wanted to learn, what everyone else seemed to want to learn as well.

There was no information about how the Alchemy God became as good as he was. No information about the origin of his knowledge. Nothing about his artifacts. Nothing about the pill formation technique. Nothing about either the Supreme Elemental Accord or the Divine Elemental Accord technique.

Where had he gotten all of these?

There was not even any information about what Dao he had learned. Hell, Alex couldn't even find out if the Alchemy God had all 7 elemental spiritual roots or not. Alex wanted to learn more, but there was just nothing. He could only walk around the museum, dejected due to the lack of information. The historical events did little to gather his attention. His eyes perked up at some point when he learned the Alchemy God had disciples, but he soon learned that they were less disciples and more just people who he taught for a bit. There was no point in listening to anything, it seemed.

Even the fun little tidbits about how the Alchemy God had been an enjoyer of cryptics and puzzles didn't do much to make Alex not feel so dejected. "Here's a fun little puzzle for you all to solve," the woman said. "This is something the Alchemy God gave to one of his disciples. See if you can solve it."

People curiously watched to see what the puzzle was. When they did, they saw a pill recipe instead.

"That's a puzzle?" someone asked.

"Yes, that is indeed a puzzle. Only, that is also a pill recipe. The Alchemy God loved doing things like this."

The people tried to figure out the puzzle and so did Alex. That was the only fun bit he had in a while since learning about the lack of information. He looked at the recipe and frowned.

'How is this a puzzle?' he thought. The recipe was for a Saint pill that could help someone produce more blood for some time.

Alex could tell that the recipe was real. All the ingredients within it did exactly as it said. Then… what was the puzzle?

He could see some issues with the recipe. Firstly there were some spacing differences between words that he wasn't sure were relevant or not. Then, some ingredients were written slightly off at the start. Maybe how the letters lined up was part of the puzzle.

Alex saw issues but no answer. He tried to figure it out to the best of his ability, but he simply couldn't think of anything at all. He failed to see who the puzzle was even a puzzle. n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

"I won't keep you thinking for too long and just tell you that it is impossible," she said. "At least not until I give you the hint."

Everyone waited for the hint.

"The hint is… Little Flower."

"Little Flower?" everyone asked.

"Look. Take the word 'flower' and start assigning numbers to all the letters that show up in the order they show up. If there are more than one, ignore the latter ones. Spaces count for 0."

The woman quickly began writing on the glass, showing how in the very first word, there were 2 I and a single T, making it read as 232. She did that with a few more.

Regular spaces didn't count. Only the extra ones counted, including the ones that started at the start of a word, pushing them inward.

Soon, after going through the entire recipe, the woman ended up with a long string of numbers, each of which two numbers began naming the letter in the alphabet.

Soon, the woman had the letters written out as a string of words.

'Congratulations! You found the secret.'

"Do not worry if you fail to find it in little time. It took the disciple who got this puzzle nearly 20 years to break through it. And he only did that because he had words he could guess."

The people around him laughed time period and began moving. Alex paused for a moment, wondering why he never knew about the Alchemy God's love for such cryptic puzzles. Not that it helped knowing or anything. What was he even going to do with this knowledge? It was not like the Alchemy God had— Alex paused mid-thought as he remembered something. He closed his eyes, going back to his memories from just over a month ago when he checked the Alchemy God's Knowledge book.

He had looked through it, wondering how mundane of a book that was once the Intent had been passed along to him. However, the recipes written within the book were indeed slightly disorderly which could have been a coincidence, but Alex did not think they were.

The moved words, the extra spaces. There was everything there for it to be a puzzle.

He was stunned when he realized it. He had the Alchemy God's final puzzle with him, the same book he thought useless to him.

Did it actually have a secret as well?