#7. Trees

Is 3 love?

can i answer a previous days riddle?
# 6-Purity?

Correct! Here is your prize!

Correct! Here is your prize.

I'm unsure which 6 you are referring to. However, none of the answers of the riddles are purity, I'm afraid.

Riddles for January 19th, 2016
Please remember to be fair and don't cheat!


Today is a special day! Until the next round of riddles appear, you have a chance to answer a very special question that rewards you with a very special Ryori. The rules for this one are a bit different. While with other ones you may answer from any of the days, this, once its round is over, you may not answer it again until the next time is comes up. That means that the next round of riddles is the end of the answering session. Also, with this riddle, you need to come up with a good explanation for why you answered with that particular answer. Since this is such a deep riddle, which does not have a single correct answer, you will need to back up your answer with a good reason. I will be looking for a specific answer and its possible that nobody wins the prize. If more then one person answers it correctly, I will pick the one with the best explanation.

Along with this, you may also answer any of the previous days' riddles. Remember, you may answer as many riddles as you want, buy you may only answer each riddle once a day.

Without further ado, here is the Ancient Riddle!


This riddle has become unavailable.

Thanks a bunch!

I hate to get a bit negative in the face of your generosity, but I have to object to the use of this one.

This is a very old and fake "riddle" that isn't really one at all. It's just a series of superficially "deep" poetic-sounding conditions that can't all be fulfilled, metaphorically or otherwise, allowing its author to pretend it's a good / smart riddle because, not being possible to solve, nobody can solve it.

Basically, select about 5~7 completely random single-sentence riddles, pretend they're all one big riddle, and voila! You get this one.

So naturally, being marketed as a riddle, everyone wants to push their own answers to it. But because it's a troll riddle that can't be answered, they have to use typical riddle-esque BS logic because -- by the riddle's design -- all their answers fall apart.

This creates a debate over "the answer" that can never see closure because there is no answer.

This guarantees that the riddle remains in the public conscience "until it's solved", which will never happen.

So yeah, it's not a riddle so much as an instance of talented social engineering, known today as trolling.

You know what I changed my mind. That is my answer. The answer is Trolling (or Bullying) and here is how it fulfills all the criteria:

- "House" is always metaphorical in a riddle. Usually, it refers to a person's entire domain, self, and surroundings. This creates a reflexive loop -- everywhere is your house, so if you find no ____ in your house, you won't find it anywhere, trolling or otherwise.

- "Trolling" includes bullying and general mistreatment of others. This is a vital part of modern society that everyone has gone through and no one can avoid (live without.) It is this and other hardships that allow people to become (morally / emotionally) stronger people, and if they do so, then that means they "used" trolling to do it, even if they were the victim.

- The poor are often looked down upon by the world and treated worse than the rich, who everyone wants to be friends with to get a piece of the pie. Children and teens very frequently bully one another, insisting that cruel acts are "games" or "pranks".

- It's mostly dumb twelve-year-olds who think trolling (on the Internet) is cool. When we get old enough we usually know better and just ignore it.

- The bowels of the Earth can include any sufficiently boring place nobody cares about. When trolls are ignored, they are effectively sitting around somewhere on Earth being lonely. The required personality to be a troll implies towards poor life conditions or a poor home environment.

- The Philosopher's Stone is defined as violating pretty much every law of the natural order with mystical powers from transmutation to eternal life, i.e. trolling nature. Noble metals are defined as metals that snub and resist certain expected chemical reactions such as rusting -- they are pretty much troll metals.



(The most common answer, and probably the one you wanted, is "love", but that answer does not fulfill all of the criteria even given the copout nature of love's very wide definition, particularly the relation to the Philosopher's Stone / noble metals.)

Actually, your wrong. This riddle is not a string of random lines and it is not a troll. It comes from the Emerald Tablet, which is an ancient Latin text that was said to have written upon it all the secrets of the alchemical works. It was studied by alchemists as a sort of 'bible' so to speak. The reason that there is no answer to this riddle is because there is no one answer to the emerald tablet: people spent their entire lives studying it and practicing alchemy in an attempt what they called the philosopher's stone, which has successfully been created twice, one complete and one incomplete. The completed stone was said to be created by Nicholas Flamel (yes, he was a real person) who disappeared shortly afterwards with his wife and then was seen 300 years after his recorded death. The incomplete stone was created in the 20th century by an alchemist who consumed the dust of the stone and fell sick and died because of its potency.

As to your 'troll' speech, I have to say that I find the entire thing rather insulting. As one who studies alchemy myself, I do read the emerald tablet and have come up with my own answer to its mysteries, which is a question this riddle, while not a direct translation, puts into simpler, easier to understand terms that doesn't require such studies. This is, not in any way, any kind of troll or form of bullying, merely my interest as to what the reaction will be to this poem, which hides over a millennium of study and research behind its words.

And no, neither of the answers you have given are the one I'm looking for. So, I'm sorry, that is incorrect.