Chapter 221 – Legend of the Sage Alchemist (III)

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!”