"What was wrong?"
In the room, lit by a single oil lamp, the shadowy figure repeated a word few ordinary people had ever heard.
Faint firelight gathered in the folds of his clothes, drifting and scattering with the motion of his writing, diffusing through the acrid, unpleasant air.
Writing was hardly the word for it. He was more or less dragging the pen aimlessly, drawing crude circles and symbols so his mind could follow the nib and revisit each keyword, weighing every detail.
His memory faithfully recited the contents once more, as it had countless times before:
"Extraction, hydrolysis, oxidation..."
In the mental palace that seemed destined to stand forever, even the faded print and the strokes he had idly darkened were vivid in his mind.
But something was definitely missing.
At first, he thought that life had been going too smoothly lately, leaving him less tolerant of setbacks and unable to accept failure caused by uncontrollable random factors.
But after two straight days of experiments and review, he had to admit that he might really have gotten something wrong.
There was not a single step in the entire process that required strict control. He could extract for longer, make the solution more acidic, or add the oxidizer drop by drop. He couldn't find any reason the process should have failed.
Yet no matter how many times he adjusted the procedure, the results remained disappointing. On the few occasions when something resembling a precipitate appeared, there was so little of it that separating it from the impurities was nearly impossible.
He scrutinized the page from beginning to end, until he was certain there was nowhere a note could have been hidden without his noticing. That only made the gaps between the lines seem suspicious.
His intuition kept muttering in his