The walk back to his lakeside courtyard was a quiet one, Lin Yun's mind preoccupied with the day's strange events. The sheer scale of the world, the system's new knowledge skills, the mysterious Elder Fang, and the cryptic book in his hands—it was a lot to process.
Yu Tao'er greeted him at the gate, her usual bright smile tempered with relief. "Young Master, you're back! I was starting to get worried. Did you have a good day at the class?"
"It was fine, Tao'er," Lin Yun replied, offering her a small, genuine smile. "I have some reading to do. Please don't disturb me unless it's important."
"Of course, Young Master," she said, bowing her head. She watched him retreat into his bedroom, a familiar worry creasing her brow. He had been acting so differently since the accident.
Once inside his room, Lin Yun first checked his system's daily missions. The list had refreshed, but it was underwhelming. A few F and E-rank tasks involving basic meditation and gathering common herbs, offering meager EXP rewards.
Nothing urgent. He could easily complete them later tonight. His focus was elsewhere.
He sat at his simple wooden desk, the fading afternoon light casting long shadows across the room. With reverent care, he placed the ancient tome, "The Origin of Alchemy," before him. The cracked leather felt fragile under his fingertips, the scent of centuries-old paper and dust filling his nostrils.
He opened it slowly, afraid the binding might give way. The early pages were as expected—a historical account, almost mythological in tone.
It spoke of a legendary figure known only as the Alchemy God, surnamed Dan, revered as the primordial ancestor who first grasped the Dao of alchemy, transforming chaos into order and creating the first pill to defy the heavens themselves.
It was fascinating foundational lore, the kind of thing that gave context to the entire art. But it was just that—history. There were no secret techniques, no hidden recipes. Lin Yun read page after page, his initial excitement beginning to wane. Had Elder Fang simply been pointing him towards a good history book?
"Hmm?"
It was as he was turning a particularly brittle page that his eyes, sharpened by both his cultivation and his programmer's attention to detail, caught something.
In the bottom right corner of the page, almost invisible against the yellowed paper and the faded ink of the text, was a tiny, intricate symbol.
At first, he thought it was just a smudge of dirt or a flaw in the paper, a common occurrence in such an old volume. But as he turned more pages, he found another. And another. Each symbol was in the same location, on every single page, but each one was slightly different. They weren't part of the printed text; they were hand-drawn, so faint they were nearly part of the paper's texture itself.
His heart began to beat a little faster. This was no accident.
Leaning closer, he examined the symbols. They were geometric, composed of lines, arcs, and dots, resembling a primitive, abstract language or perhaps a complex diagram broken into pieces. They meant nothing to him individually.
Driven by a surge of curiosity, he pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and a charcoal pencil. He began the painstaking work of carefully transcribing each symbol from the book's corners onto his paper.
He worked slowly, methodically, his hand steady. The process was meditative, requiring immense focus to accurately capture the faint, often incomplete lines.
Hours slipped by. The room grew dark, and he lit an oil lamp, its flickering flame casting dancing shadows that made the strange symbols on his paper seem to writhe. Yu Tao'er brought a silent dinner to his door, but he barely registered it.
Finally, he had transcribed every symbol from the book's hundred-plus pages. He laid the large sheet of paper on his desk, covered in dozens of these bizarre, unconnected markings. He stared at them, his brow furrowed in concentration.
Then, he saw it.
It wasn't a code to be deciphered. It was a puzzle. A jigsaw puzzle.
"What is this?"
His programmer's mind, adept at recognizing patterns and spatial relationships, immediately began to see how the edges of the symbols could potentially interlock.
A curved line on one symbol perfectly matched a negative space on another. A cluster of dots on a third piece aligned with lines from two others. They weren't meant to be read; they were meant to be assembled.
He didn't immediately start trying to solve it. He leaned back in his chair, the weight of this discovery settling upon him.
This was no ordinary library book. This was a deliberately hidden secret, concealed in plain sight within a boring historical text in the most accessible section of the library.
Anyone looking for powerful techniques would have ignored it. Only someone truly studying the fundamentals, as Elder Fang had noted, might stumble upon it.
And Elder Fang had pointed him directly to it.
Why?
The question echoed in the silent room. What was the motive of the mysterious librarian? Was it a test? A game? Did he see something in Lin Yun that made him worthy of this puzzle? Or was he simply a bored immortal, amusing himself by watching mortals struggle?
And then there was Bai Chenfeng. The flicker of surprise in his eyes hadn't been about the book itself, Lin Yun now realized. It had been about him holding it. Did Bai Chenfeng know about the secret? Had he, or someone else, been trying to solve it?
Lin Yun looked from the ancient book to the sheet of paper covered in cryptic pieces. He had stumbled into another layer of mystery, far deeper than the petty squabbles of young masters. This felt significant. This felt like a quest line from his game, one that promised a substantial reward for those clever enough to see it through.
"Interesting… Let's see what it is." Lin Yun smiled faintly.
He grabbed a bowl of rice and began to eat his food that was already cold while looking at the symbols on the paper. His mind started to decrypt the puzzle…