Marseille (France), 1412

The silence of the monastery was broken only by the scratching of the pen as the elderly monk moved it across the parchment. The rays of the setting sun filtered through the arched windows, casting long shadows on the thick walls and the wooden desk where the monk worked tirelessly. Brother Matteo, with his thick white beard and hands now marked by the wrinkles of time, focused on the arduous task in front of him.
His expression, concentrated and absorbed, reflected the inner tension of someone faced with an enigma as great as his faith.
The strange book, an extraordinary artifact left in his care by a young traveler, lay open on his desk. It had been made with a dark and incomprehensible technique to the elderly scribe, its pages reflecting wonderful colors when directly exposed to light and filled with text in a language unknown to him.
For months now, the elderly monk had been meticulously and dedicatedly copying the book. Every day, for endless hours, his slender fingers moved the pen with precision, tracing characters that seemed to dance in the fading light. Time was an invisible enemy; he had to hurry, the rightful owner could return at any moment.
In his long life dedicated to the transcription of sacred scriptures and ancient texts, he had never encountered a manuscript so complex and elusive, and that thankless task had proven much more difficult than expected.
At the start of the work, the monk had attempted to translate the unknown language, but after many unsuccessful attempts, he had abandoned any hope and had taken refuge in a mere copying job, like an illiterate attempting to copy a sacred text.
The characters were completely unfamiliar to him, and he limited himself to copying only the strokes without being able to know if what was transcribed truly corresponded to the original text. The only positive aspect was that the work done so far contained no corrections of any kind, since it was impossible to know if there was an error, it was also impossible to correct it.
But what intrigued him most about the book were the drawings that adorned its pages, which, although very thin, had the consistency of stone. Unfortunately, even in this case, it would not have been possible for him to reproduce such perfect drawings, but at least on this occasion, albeit not completely, he was aware of what they represented. They were made with splendid colors and turned out to be surprisingly vivid to the touch, almost as if they had been carved with the technique of bas-relief. This detail was even more extraordinary considering the thickness of the pages, comparable to that of parchment. The drawings mostly depicted plants and roots, although completely unknown to the monk. Others seemed to evoke the stars and depicted diagrams of astrology and astronomy, but even in this case, it was quite difficult for him to understand what they actually represented. There were also many depictions of completely nude women, often immersed up to their waist in strange tubs filled with a dark, strange liquid, and finally, the rest of the drawings represented figures vaguely similar to bubbles, flower petals, and ampoules.
Every page seemed to hide secrets that only a select few could understand, and he, a humble monk, felt at times overwhelmed by the mystery that those pages concealed.
What had driven Brother Matteo to engage in such arduous work was the feeling of having in his hands a sort of magical, alchemical book, which, once deciphered, could reveal a secret capable of curing all known diseases. At least that was his hope. He just needed the time necessary to unravel it, and the only way was to have a copy before the owner came back to claim it.