Chapter 3949: A Divided Puzzle

Lin Mu slowly closed the book.

"It’s empty?" Lin Mu muttered while his expression remained thoughtful.

He had no intention of accepting that conclusion. ’There has to be something here.’

The Dual Dimensional Vacuum Compression Art had been used to hide this entire place. The jade token had clearly contained a mysterious spatial formation even if it was incomplete. The robes had survived countless years in an environment that should have destroyed ordinary materials.

Every object left here had some kind of purpose. The book could hardly be the one exception.

"There must be some trick to this." Lin Mu reopened it.

This time, he did not look for words. He began looking at the book itself. He examined how the pages had been bound together, the thickness of each sheet, the distance between the edges, the shape of the corners, the faint discoloration caused by age, the tiny wrinkles that appeared on certain pages and even the subtle differences in the grain of the material.

He examined the spine, then the cover, then the stitching and then the edges of the pages while his Spatial Perception spread over the entire object, probing every microscopic detail. But despite all that, there was nothing.

At first, Lin Mu felt that the book was genuinely mundane.

The paper seemed ordinary and so was the stitching. Even the imperfections looked like things that could naturally develop after thousands of years. That realization made Lin Mu even more suspicious.

He had encountered enough mysteries to know that something being mundane could itself be a clue.

"If someone wanted to hide something inside a book, the easiest method would be to make everything appear ordinary." Lin Mu turned another page.

He carefully examined the grain.

"Huh.". His eyes narrowed and he brought the page closer. "The grain of the paper."

He had noticed something. It was extremely easy to ignore and miss, but several imperfections in the paper seemed strangely familiar. Lin Mu turned back several pages and the same kind of imperfection appeared again.

He checked another page and it was the same again. His expression became increasingly focused and he began comparing the pages one by one.

At first, the similarities were so subtle that even an immortal would have difficulty noticing them. The paper had naturally developed countless tiny imperfections. Some were darker, some lighter. Some formed tiny lines, while others resembled small cracks.

Yet certain patterns appeared again and again. Lin Mu began counting them. The book contained ninety pages and the strange pattern repeated every fifteen pages.

’Six times in total.’ Lin Mu’s eyes sharpened. "This is clearly a clue."

There was simply too much repetition. Natural imperfections should have been random. A single repeated mark could be dismissed as coincidence and several repeated patterns could perhaps still be coincidence.

But six complete repetitions were another matter.

Lin Mu immediately called upon his memory that was far beyond most immortals at this point. He went through the pages again, this time memorizing every relevant imperfection. Xukong had remained silent while Lin Mu investigated, yet even he seemed interested now.

After a while, Xukong finally spoke. "This might be a cut and compiled puzzle style that is used in certain arrays."

Lin Mu nodded. "I thought the same."

He had encountered similar principles before. A formation could be separated into pieces and disguised individually. Once those pieces were placed in the correct arrangement, the actual formation would reveal itself.

The same principle could be used for written records. The pages could be rearranged and the imperfections could form a larger image. The problem was figuring out the correct arrangement.

Lin Mu closed his eyes and his mind became completely still. Soon ninety pages appeared inside his consciousness. Each page was reproduced exactly as he had observed it. The texture, the grain, the tiny imperfections, the stains, the folds and the corners all matched.

Even the microscopic differences in the paper were clearly preserved within his memory. For an ordinary cultivator, remembering ninety pages at such a level would already be absurd. For Lin Mu, it was simply a matter of concentration.

He began rearranging them.

At first, he placed the pages according to their numbering but nothing happened. Then he separated them according to the repeating patterns but there was still nothing of note. He tried rotating the groups, then reversing certain sections and then matching imperfections from one page to another.

Slowly, a structure began taking shape.

Lin Mu’s mind transformed the ninety individual pages into pieces of a larger whole. The pages began spreading across his mental landscape. One by one, they connected and a massive sheet appeared.

It was as though the entire book had ceased being a book and now it had become a puzzle.

Lin Mu stared at the result and the strange imperfections began glowing inside his mind. They connected before lines formed under his will, curves appeared and several tiny points linked together.

What had once seemed like random damage suddenly became a complicated pattern.

Lin Mu’s eyes widened.

"Wait, this..." He recognized it as the pattern looked familiar.

His mind immediately brought up another object: The jade token.

The pattern carved upon the back of the jade token appeared beside the massive pattern created from the pages. Lin Mu compared the two and his expression changed.

"They’re similar." The structure was unmistakable.

The jade token contained a series of spatial markings. The completed image from the book contained the same basic arrangement. There was one major difference. The jade token contained additional patterns.

It was as though the book contained only the foundation while the token held the remaining portion.

Lin Mu’s eyes brightened. "Could this really be the key?"

His earlier conjecture about the jade token suddenly gained much more weight. The token was likely not merely an identification object. It was part of a key and the book was providing the missing portion.

Lin Mu immediately began comparing every section. He mentally overlaid the pattern from the token onto the enormous sheet formed from the pages and several incomplete sections suddenly became clear.

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