Gerald was indeed a little surprised.
Not by what the stone tablet contained, but by how it recorded that information.
The way this tablet stored information was remarkably similar to the jade slips used to record cultivation techniques in cultivation worlds.
All the information had been branded into a mental imprint inside the tablet.
But unlike the magic of a Pensieve, which immersed the viewer in a scene, this imprint contained only text.
The runes that appeared on the tablet's surface were merely an outward projection. The true contents could only be read with divine sense-or, rather, mental power.
Most wizards, however, did very little research into souls or mental power.
Gerald steadied his mind and began reading and organizing the information pouring into his head.
The tablet's contents were divided into two sections.
The first appeared to be a set of spatial coordinates pointing to a location deep in the Albanian Forest.
Gerald suspected this might be the exact location of Paracelsus's secret laboratory.
The second was a set of research notes on the pronunciation rules of Parseltongue. It detailed how Paracelsus had gradually deciphered its basic pronunciation rules by dissecting snakes to study how they produced sound, analyzing the language structures of magical snake creatures, and comparing the ways different snake species communicated.
Snakes had no lips, no tongues, and none of the organs humans used to produce speech.
They hissed by directing airflow from their lungs against specific areas inside their throats, then using resonance in their mouths and nasal cavities to adjust pitch and volume.
Paracelsus had used a special potion to temporarily alter the structure of his throat, allowing it to produce the sounds snakes made.
He had even devised a training regimen that allowed a wizard who did not speak Parseltongue to produce some