Chapter 223 – Legend of the Sage Alchemist (V)

Chapter 223

Legend of the Sage Alchemist (V)

“This is the ancient text where you found the solution?” Zhu Zhen asked cautiously, her voice dripping with doubt.

She saw ‘ancient texts’ countless times in her life, and 99 out of 100 times, they turned out to be fakes. It was usually charlatans trying to cheat her out of wealth, so she’d gotten quite good at spotting when things simply didn’t add up.

As such, as soon as Gu Zhao told her how he learned how to cure her daughter, all her hope diminished; she was certain that this young, ordinary-looking man was merely another cheat that had somehow managed to glaze Gu Zhao’s eyes and convince him that this was real.

Though, she had to admit, as far as fakes went… this one wasn’t bad. The paper was clearly old–at least a few tens of thousands of years, per her estimates; it was natural age, too, not the roughly faked one she was familiar with. There were consistent ink smudges, the natural wear and tear, and even some vanishing of the script.

Speaking of which… she’d never seen it before.

No, she’d never seen anything like it before–even in the few ancient texts that were real, the script was still vaguely legible even if she herself could not truly read it. This one, however? It was as though it came from another world entirely.

But it was consistent.

And that scared her.

Even if she wasn’t a literary master herself, she’d lived for centuries and been part of the high society just as long. She was well versed in scripts and texts, and as such could discern with practically absolute certainty: this script… was real. It was far too consistent in far too many ways–individual letters, spacing between the words, order of the words, punctuation…

In fact, she could immediately even recognize a few things, namely pronouns; they were short words, often at the start of a sentence, and very often after another word, which she supposed was a word of action, like in the common tongue.

The longer she stared at the aged papers, the more her doubt began to wane. Was it truly possible? Were the heavens truly so oddly inclined as to send this man from seemingly nowhere just as her daughter was running out of time, with a precise method to save her?

… no.

“Have you not read it?” she asked Gu Zhao, though her eyes kept a close eye on the man sitting between them.

“How can I read it?” Gu Zhao replied with a strange smile. “Here,” he put down a small pill in front of her. “Try it.”

She immediately recognized it–it was the Spirit Blossom Sect’s most popular item, a simple Qi Replenishing pill. She picked it up and inspected it for a moment, noting that there wasn’t anything off about it before swallowing it.

As soon as it dissipated in her dantian… she knew.

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“How is this possible?!” she exclaimed, feeling the storm of Qi blast through her meridians. The potency of this pill was no less than five times that of any other one she’d had before.

“The ancient text doesn’t just contain a method to save your daughter,” Gu Zhao elaborated. “It’s more of an all-purpose alchemy textbook, per my friend here. It doesn’t contain specific recipes, but what it has are lost methods in how to handle ingredients. It’s no secret how we prepare our Qi Pills, first basting ginseng grass with fox oil, and then the rest. However, the ancient text proposed three ways of handling ginseng grass, and after testing them, I learned that all three are more efficient than basting with fox oil. The one you just had is actually the weakest–I chopped the grass into fine pieces and boiled it in spirit water for three hours before proceeding with the other parts of the pill process.