The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I was once currency. People paid their taxes in me.
My scientific name translates as food of the gods.
I am poison to your dog and a delight to you, over a single molecule.
I melt just below human body temperature — that is the entire trick.
Dark, milk, a bar snapped into squares.
Chocolate
Cocoa butter melts at 34 degrees, just under body heat. That single number is why it can be solid in your hand and liquid on your tongue.
Cacao was drunk, not eaten, for at least three thousand years — bitter, spiced, often frothed by pouring it between vessels, and used in Aztec ritual and tribute. Europe added sugar and milk and still could not make it smooth. That came in 1879, when Rodolphe Lindt left a mixing machine running over a weekend by mistake and found the chocolate transformed; conching is still named after the shell-shaped trough he used. The danger to dogs is theobromine, which humans clear from the blood in hours and dogs take more than a day to process.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #9 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #8. Next: mystery #10. Or try #11, #12, #13, #14, #15, #16.