"That's a different story!" Richard felt relieved, gradually returning his face to its former sand-lime brick expression. "I'd thought any curious schoolboy could make himself a Philosopher's Stone. But it turns out the book is encrypted in such a way that even a lame mare with a whole staff of wizards wouldn't be able to get there."
"And yet, Richie, why do you need this information?" Hermione asked curiously. "Do you really want to create a philosopher's stone?"
"That would be nice, but there's little hope. Hermione, I'm trying to get all the useful information I can about the wizarding world's most valuable achievements. I'm very grateful for your help. I'm desperately short of time for anything myself."
Hermione looked very pleased. She liked receiving praise.
"I brought copies of every book on the Philosopher's Stone and alchemy that wasn't enchanted. That's over a hundred volumes."
"Thoroughly!" Richard said respectfully. "Let's settle down in the sun, and you can hand me all the books."
- Richie, do you think it's possible to decipher Mutus Liber?
- Logic suggests that this is real.
Richard picked up a small book of engravings and began to examine the pictures carefully. Hermione also looked at the pages of Flamel's work.
Engraving number one depicts two angels on a ladder to heaven, with a man lying before them. The moon and stars are in the upper corners, and the entire page is entwined with a rose stem with thorns and leaves, with the flowers themselves in the lower corners. "Mutus liber in quo tamen" is the inscription on the first page.
"Richie, do you understand anything?" Hermione's gaze, fixed on the boy, was filled with hope.
"Hmm..." Richie, out of a habit he'd picked up from his father, thoughtfully ran the back of his hand across his chin. "It's important to remember that alchemy is the science of transformation and refinement... Therefore, the book describes not only the stages of creating the Philosopher's Stone, but also the stages of an alchemist's self-improvement."
"Yes, wizarding researchers wrote about something like that," Hermione said.
The boy continued leafing through the book.
"Note, Hermione," said Richard, leafing through all the engravings, "the pages of this small book illustrate symbolic actions of an alchemist, while at the same time revealing the technology of alchemical procedures. We see here drying, evaporation and distillation, heating over an open fire and a kind of thermostatting, decantation and filtration, calcination and dissolution, the use of scales, a blowpipe, and so on."
"I also noticed that many of the symbols show the work of a chemist," Hermione said proudly. "Perhaps these are all successive stages in the production of the Philosopher's Stone?"
"Quite possible," agreed young Rich. "But surely, beyond that, we'd also need to reproduce and fill in all those nuances, of which the book is full and which we couldn't decipher. Notice the engraving in which the alchemist sleeps with his head on a stone, and in it is visible a cavity from which a stream flows down to his feet. The moon is in its last quarter at that moment. So, this could mean, for example, that the wizard must somehow be in close contact with the stone for three weeks."
"Or maybe not," Granger noted. "Perhaps a certain procedure needs to be started during the fourth quarter of the moon."
"Perhaps," Richard agreed. "Notice the stairway to heaven and the two angels blowing the church horns. One is larger, the other smaller. I believe the angels are a symbolic representation of success. There are two of them, which means there are two ways to create the Philosopher's Stone: the quick way and the long way. And judging by the emphasis on the large angel, this book describes the long way to the Great Work, while the short way remains a secret-that is, in the mind of Nicholas Flamel."
"And I thought they were just angels," Hermione frowned. "How could you see anything like that in them?"
"Hermione, every drawing in this book has a meaning; it's a code where every detail matters. In any case, our brains aren't strong enough to decipher it yet."
"Ours, the human ones," Richard thought to himself. "And an AI specifically designed for decryption might be able to crack the code embedded in these engravings. All we'd have to do is load the AI with a vast knowledge base on everything under the sun, especially magic."
"Richie, I'm confused by the different depictions of the Philosopher's Stone," Hermione said. "In Mutus Liber, it's a boulder, but in the book written by the medieval alchemist Jacques Tolle, who spoke with Flamel and saw his stone, it's depicted as a small, blood-red pebble with sharp edges."
"It's probably just a chip off the main Philosopher's Stone," Richard remarked. "It makes perfect sense and fits in with my theory."
"Which one?" Hermione asked with remarkable curiosity.
- Nicolas Flamel has many such fragments of the philosopher's stones, but he tries to present everything to the public as if there were only one stone.