Many people waste their life in search of miracles from alchemy. These individuals lose all their possessions for nothing rather than gaining anything useful.
There was a man from Batala. He lived hand-to-mouth. He built a house with a single layer of the brick wall, and the inside of the house was made with mud walls.
One day he met a mendicant man who remained busy reciting chants on beads. He looked to be a pious man. The simple man developed a relationship with this man and kept his company due to his sacred appearance.
One day the holy man genuinely asked, ‘Why have you built your house like this, and why did you not build the whole house with solid bricks?’
The man replied, ‘I am a poor man and have no money.’
The holy man said, ‘Why to worry about the money?’ and then kept quiet. The man thought about this double meaning response and inquired, ‘Do you know alchemy?’
The holy man replied, ‘My teacher knew alchemy.’ After insistence from the simple man, the holy man reluctantly said that he also knew alchemy, ‘I do not tell this secret to anybody, I am only telling you this secret because of your insistence.’
The mendicant man persuaded him to collect jewellery from his house, while he himself went to the wilderness for a while and engaged in meditation.
The holy man somehow stole the jewellery by pretending to put it in a cooking pot and filled the cooking pot with pieces of bricks and stones and left the scene for further meditation. When leaving, he said to the simple man, ‘Cover the cooking pot with firewood, light the fire and do not remove the pot from the fire lest the contents are uncooked, and do not touch the pot till I return.’
The simple man followed the instructions and placed the cooking pot on a big fire. Smoke from the fire spread all around, and neighbours gathered and entered his home to find out what was going on. He told people that gold was being minted using alchemy.
The people explained to him that the holy man had looted him. When the simple man removed the lid of the pot, there were pieces of bricks and stones in the pot.
After that, the simple man visited Gurdaspur for some reason; he came to know that the same holy man had swindled somebody else as well. The fire was still burning. The simple man told this person in Gurdaspur that he also had been robbed. Similar pieces of bricks and stones were also found in his cooking pot.
(Malfuzat, Vol. 10, p. 163–164)