The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I dissolve completely before I become myself.
I taste things with my feet.
One of my kind flies four thousand kilometres to a forest it has never seen.
I used to be a caterpillar.
Bright wings, flowers, a chrysalis.
Butterfly
Inside the chrysalis it becomes soup — and yet a moth taught to avoid a smell as a caterpillar still avoids it afterwards. Something in there survives.
Inside the chrysalis the caterpillar releases enzymes and digests most of itself. What survives are the imaginal discs, small clusters of cells that have been waiting since the egg, each destined to become a wing, a leg, an eye. Memory survives too: caterpillars trained to avoid a smell still avoid it as adults, which means something structural persists through the soup. Much of the colour is not pigment at all but microscopic ridges that interfere with light, which is why a blue morpho stays brilliant while a pressed specimen's browns fade within a decade.
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 #16 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #15. Next: mystery #17. Or try #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10.