The Impossible Quest

• Difficulty: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | [ 10 ]

• Reward: [ 1 ] | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

• Remaining Lives: ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ (❤️x0)

You are a knight in shining armor at the very end of your journey sitting in front of the Giveaway Castle Gate. You don't know what lies beyond the gate and frankly you don't even care. What matters is your journey and being able to finish your quest. You reach for the gate and notice that it needs a key that strongly resembles the shape of the key given to you by the Almighty Cat Wizard during your previous quest after you saved him from the Leecher Dragon.

You suddenly remember the Wizard told you the key has to be activated by a special magic word that is to be revealed upon fulfilling the old prophecy written on the map that was given to you together with the key.
Fortunately, you brought the map with you. Unfortunately, you forgot the key at the very start of your quest so you must now head back to get it before the Time Vortex engulfs the Giveaway Castle Gate on September 30th, 2018 at 23:59 as foretold by the Almighty Cat Wizard.
Since you don't have much time, you decide to follow the map to find the hidden locations across the realm that hold the magical word pieces that only the Chosen One can find, while also heading towards the place holding the key.

You open the map and read the prophecy written by the none other than C. G. Alchemist:

"The chosen warrior will get six gems of steam and extract five ounces of Gabenist by grinding four times the amount of Valvenite necessary for a regular spell. They shall use their extraordinary five basic senses as guidance to create six support profiles to hold the most durable four of the gems.
The other extraordinary two gems will be coated three times by using any of the secret alchemical four techniques until the magical quotient reaches at best two degrees on the measuring scale. The amount of Gabenist shall be sprinkled over the darkest three gems of them all and by dropping them into dark souls extract and stirring exactly one time there shall be created two imaginary shapes to hold everything in place.
Everything is then combined to form the magical key activating solution that shall be used by the chosen warrior to open the Giveaway Castle Gate and prevent the Time Vortex from engulfing it forever.
"

You shake your head in disbelief as if nothing made sense, look at the map, take out your lucky compass, get on your horse and start heading towards south-west in an attempt to find the best route towards achieving your quest goal. Good luck you mighty warrior!

Note: This puzzle was inspired by the one created by Nordhbane. Have fun! ;)

Note: All chosen warriors, upon solving the quest, are asked to leave a message on the giveaway page and they shall earn a spot on my whitelist.

Stats:

• Day   1: Unsolved.
• Day   2: Unsolved.
• Day   3: Unsolved.
• Day   4: Unsolved.
• Day   5: Unsolved.
• Day   6: Unsolved.
• Day   7: Unsolved.
• Day   8: 1 solver.
• Day   9: 0 solvers.
• Day 10: 0 solvers.
• Day 11: 0 solvers.
• Day 12: 0 solvers.
• TOTAL: 1 solver.
• FINAL: No winners.

Earn points and place higher in the hierarchy.

 
Total Available Points: 17323 points.

Each minute passing means less points. Hurry up and earn more points by solving the puzzle before others and enter the hall of fame. The faster you solve it, the more points you earn.

Hall of fame:

Honorable mentions:

• Totally unrelated to the puzzle, but D3D was able to find the long lost hideout of the Fallen Scholar of Steamgiftsdor that searched for the prophecy map across the entire realm for the past twenty years and later gave his research to the Almighty Cat Wizard who was actually able to find the map.

Solution:

Short version:

All positions:

(s)H8G6E5G4(Z)E5C6D4(O)E2C3A4B2(7)D3E1C2A1(d) => sZ7Od

Shorthand representation:

(s)G6E5G4(Z)E5C6D4(O)E2C3A4B2(7)D3E1C2(d) => sZ7Od

Long version:

• We obviously have a chessboard as the realm map.
• The chessboard is scrambled meaning the order in which you navigate the realm is very important.
• You are a knight. A knight in chess moves in an L shape.
• You are at the very end of your journey. The "very end" position on a chessboard is H8. This is the starting point and it leads to the first character of the key.
• You need to return to the very start. The "very start" on a chessboard is A1. This is the end point and it leads to the last character of the key.
• The middle three characters are found using the prophecy.
• The prophecy has two types of sentences: those with clues and those without. We're only interested in those with clues.
• The prophecy holds the clues in the form "Word Number", where the starting letter of the word before the number is the horizontal position on the chessboard and the number is the vertical position.
• The knight moves from the start of a sentence to the end of the sentence. Each end of the sentence marks the position of a letter of the key, meaning the last clue before the full stop (the dot) of the sentence marks the key letter. Why? Because the knight, during his journey obviously needs to stop when he finds the clue in order to retrieve it.
• The prophecy reveals 3 letters that are combined with the start and the end ones to generate the final key.
• To help even more, I added the south-west direction to indicate the end-to-start direction.
• I also specified you get on your horse for those knowing "the knight" in chess by the term "horse".

This was my second puzzle. Thanks for stopping by, I hope you liked it and you're welcome to try my future puzzles too.

The Map:

View attached image.