Chapter 271: The Elements
Translator:Transn
Editor:Meh
When Kyle Sichi finished his experiments and went back home, his wife had already prepared a dinner for him. She served him toasted wheat cake, mushroom soup and a glass of white liquor.
Both white liquor and these large white mushrooms were available on the Convenience Market. The signboard outside the mushroom shop read "you can hardly find anything more delicious than our mushrooms", and he had to agree with it after tasting the mushroom with rich flavor. Only one slice of it had led him to the endless aftertaste.
Meanwhile, this delicacy was amazingly expensive. A mushroom which was about the same size as his palm cost a silver royal. Kyle would have never bought such expensive food, if he had not been so well-paid here in the town. He found that with enough money, one could enjoy a far more comfortable life here than those ordinary nobles did. Besides good food, people of the town could buy many other nice things, such as scented soap and mirror.
Having witnessed so many eye-opening things in the town, Kyle now firmly believed that Roland was a fathomless man.
After the dinner, his wife handed him a letter.
"Where's it from?"
"A guard sent it here in the afternoon before you came back. According to him, it's from Redwater City," Kyle's wife said while tidying up the dishes.
"Is it?" Kyle immediately went into his study and used a little knife to open the seal. He took out the letter inside.
And the first line of it read "Dear mentor".
"It's from Chavez." Kyle could not help but smile. He sat at his desk and read it word by word.
It turned out that since Kyle had left the Alchemic Workshop of Redwater City, another alchemist Capola had become the new chief. Capola was a narrow-minded person. He had got the firing process and formula of crystal glass left by Kyle and had falsely claimed to have worked out it together with Kyle in front of the lord. He had also seemed to wittingly push Chavez out during alchemical experiments.
Chavez sobbed out all his grievance in the letter. He had borrowed Capola's students when he had been working on the double-stone acid-making method, but had not told Capola the results in advance. He guessed that it might be the cause for his isolation in the workshop. The other alchemists now also seemed to avoid him, which annoyed him a lot.
Kyle, however, understood what those people thought. They had believed Chavez, the youngest alchemist in the workshop, had stood out only because of luck and the fact that he was former chief alchemist's student. Kyle sniffed at this view. Chavez was the one who could find double-stone acid-making method from saltpeter and green alum, which were common things in the workshop. Without sharp observation, good memory, bold conjecture or careful experiments, he could hardly make an important discovery in ordinary things. Kyle believed that this young man was even more talented than himself.
In the last part of the letter, Chavez added two alchemical equations which he said were his recent discoveries that he wanted to share with his mentor. Kyle recognized these neutralization reaction equations at once. Now he could write a dozen of equations like those based on the rule that an acid could react with a base to form a salt.
He put down the letter with a sigh and then looked at the book "Elementary Chemistry" on his desk, which he had known by heart.
It was this "ancient book" from His Highness that had totally changed him. If he had never read it, he would have been like Chavez, seeking and treasuring superficial achievements that he happened to meet in the chaotic world of alchemy.
He picked up the book and turned to the last page of it.
He saw a table divided into over 100 little squares.
This table would always give him goosebumps and fill him with a kind of awe which was hard to describe in words.
Each square was marked with a number written in the up left corner of it, but most of the 118 squares were empty, except for the first two rows. Some squares were filled with symbols, such as No.26 Fe and No.29 Cu.
This table was called "periodic table of elements".
Once, with a jumping pulse, Kyle had held the book with trembling hands and asked Roland about those empty squares. Roland had answered that this table had been stuffed with symbols but he had forgotten most of them.
If Roland had not been a prince, Kyle would have slammed the book into his face.
The book claimed that all the elements in the world were included in this table. Kyle thought if there were a canon of alchemy, this chapter must have been the most glorious part of it. He was awed every time when he wondered who had mastered such a great rule and made this table. "Those people in the past knew so much, making today's alchemists look like a joke. We're like kids building ridiculous, improbable sand castles on the beach without knowing the glorious past of alchemy built by our predecessors at all."
In a sudden, Kyle thought of Roland's promise. If he could draw Chavez and some other students over to fill all the positions in the three new labs, he would get his dream book "Intermediate Chemistry".
At this thought, he immediately took out a piece of blank paper to compose a reply to Chavez.
Kyle had not told the truth when the prince had asked him about the mass production of two kinds of acids during the meeting. He just had not wanted to waste his time on explaining something so complex and lengthy in the meeting. More importantly, he had not been sure whether his plan was feasible, as it had been the first time for him to design a process based on the principles written in "Elementary Chemistry."
Compared with his previous alchemical experiments, his new design sounded so unrealistic, like some crazy talk. He wanted to use an unheard method to extract an element from seemingly irrelevant raw materials.
Kyle somehow felt that this method would work!
He had conducted hundreds of displacement experiments to validate the correctness of the book's recordings.
As His Highness had told him that all the mass production methods adapted in plants could be simulated and tested in the lab, now in order to confirm his design, he needed to complete the theoretical and experimental studies in the lab first.
Kyle quickly finished writing the letter. Instead of comforting Chavez, he explicitly told his best student that he had learned in the town that alchemy was knowable, measurable and accessible. He believed that a clever, keen alchemist like Chavez would never want to miss such a chance to get to know the truth of alchemy.
He folded the letter, put it into an envelope and then sealed the envelope with wax. Tomorrow, he would hand it to a merchant who was willing to deliver it to Chavez.
After that, Kyle looked at "periodic table of elements" again.
If the table could only remain incomplete, he would lose all his interest in life. Fortunately, His Highness Roland had told him something else. Those words had made him thrilled at that time and now still reverberated in his ear.
"Don't give me that look. The elements on the table are arranged following a certain rule. You can fill out the blanks by yourself."
"A rule? You mean the unknown elements can be derived out, like alchemical equations?"
"Exactly, even though you've never seen those elements, you can still know their appearances and characteristics based on the rule."
"What… is that rule?"
"You want to know? It's in the book 'Intermediate Chemistry'."