Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

For most of the remaining tour through the archive, Alex's mind was lost on the one singular thought of whether or not the Alchemy God had left more secrets behind than just the book.

He couldn't tell just yet. He had sent the book over to Whisker, who was currently helping him look through it. Through his bond with Whisker, Alex did receive all the visuals, and from what he could see, there were a lot of sections around the book where this could fit.

Some sections were purposefully worded into weird sentences, most likely to fit the final answer. There was something here. He needed to find what it was.

He asked Whisker to start decoding the book, asking him to use 'Little Flower' as the code to crack the puzzle. Whisker began cracking just the first page for now and replied the code was wrong. The answer he got was incoherent from every angle.

'So Little Flower is not the code,' Alex thought. He asked Whisker to try a different code. This time, Zhu Xiaohua, his real name. Whisker did as told and once again came back with another incoherent answer. That was the wrong code as well.

Alex frowned. "Great Flower then? Try that and Great Flower Guild. See if either works."

They were wrong as well.

"Alchemy, then? Or Alchemy God? Or maybe God's Domain?" Alex asked. Whisker got to try all of the different codes in the puzzle.

Alex was lost in his own mind when he was brought out of it by a question someone presented to the guides.

The guide showed a solemn face and shook her head. "The Alchemy God had no children. In fact, he did not have any family at all. It is even believed that aside from this very guild he spent his time making pills in, he did not have any other friends at all."

"He was a man who gave all of himself to the world. Perhaps a flaw of his was that he never gave any time for himself. Not to start a family, not even to find himself someone to spend the rest of his life with."

It was a sad little fact about the Alchemy God that made Alex reflect upon his own life. He had a family that loved him so very much, but he too didn't have someone to spend the rest of his life with.

Why was that? Why was that despite having met so many women in his life, he had never thought of them as anything more than just friends or acquaintances? Was he really that smitten with the single memory of the beautiful face he saw in the Undying God's past that he could not find beauty in anyone else?

No, that was not the case. He had found someone beautiful after that too. There was the girl with white hair who he believed to be someone with the Moon Goddess' physique. He had felt a connection to her and thus had some feelings for her at the time. Aside from that, just 2 decades back, he had felt something similar for the Winter God back in the Eclipsing Heaven as well, although there was something weird with the feeling he had felt that day.

'I'm sure I'll find someone, someday,' Alex thought, choosing to ignore the topic for the time period. He had other things to take care of, other things to worry about. He needed to make sure his family was safe and sound, hopefully in the Sky God's Palace before he even thought about finding someone for himself.

The rest of the tour didn't have anything meaningful for Alex, so once it was over he quickly walked out and made his way back to the courtyard where they were staying.

After greeting his master and Grimsight, he immediately went to his room where he brought out the book left behind by the Alchemy God and attempted to decipher it on his own.

Whisker had already tested various words, but they didn't work. Alex tested some more words, most ones that he only learned from the Alchemy God's Intent himself and those didn't work either.

He was soon frustrated.

"What can it be then? How am I supposed to decipher it without figuring out the code?" he thought.

This was an issue. Finding out there was a puzzle alone didn't help him. He needed a way to break it. And without any relevant hints as to what could break the puzzle, he was no better than when he didn't know there was a puzzle.

In fact, he was better when he didn't know there was a puzzle. He at least didn't have another thing he had to worry about in the back of his head.

'No, I should be able to do it,' Alex thought. 'The Alchemy God couldn't have left a puzzle with the code. Surely he doesn't want me to go through every word in existence to find the truth.'

Alex couldn't easily discard the fact that the Alchemy God may be intending for him to go through every word or combination of words. In that case, he had to get ready.

In order for Alex to figure out what the code could be, he needed to eliminate what the code could not be. Because they were transposing letters to numbers and then transposing the numbers back to letters, he needed all numbers in order to represent letters.

Which meant at the very minimum, he needed 10 letters. Of which, one of them had to be a 0. If he was to believe the woman then only a blank space between words could be counted as 0.

Meaning the code had to have at least 9 unique letters and a space. So anything with fewer words than that could not even be considered.

He wondered if there could be more than that many words. He decided to include them as well. After some time, he came up with a detailed outline of what the code had to be. After that, it was just a matter of trying the codes one after another. That was going to be a long and arduous task no doubt.

Alex wondered where else he could learn more about the Alchemy God. He thought for a bit and closed his eyes to remember the memories he had received from the man.

The memory of the small hut with something glowing inside. The memory of the stone door in a forest. The image of a book with a flower on the cover. Another book with a scroll on the cover.

The memory of a female corpse with a broken scythe next to it.

Alex tried focusing harder, revisiting the very first memory he got, one he could not parse. The Alchemy God was somewhere, doing something. The memory was too blurry for him to gain anything from it. Perhaps if he could dig in some more, he could get some answers. He… needed those answers. He needed to get everything the Alchemy God had to offer. He needed the entire inheritance.

Alex wondered. Should he get the entire inheritance right now?

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