Chapter 350 - 350: The Clock Cipher

Faith deduced that Kain was likely just testing to gather information.

It was easy to see that it was an exit, but how could the Principal release such an easy path?

To escape from this exit, one needed to use the correct answer, or rather, the correct method to be able to do so. Otherwise, as a grand-class [Space Magic] user, she could completely cause Kain to be lost in there forever.

Just as Faith thought, Kain was merely gathering information.

The moment he stepped his entire body through that small passage, the path behind Kain directly disappeared; he entered an indefinite void, so dark that it was difficult to see anything else a few meters away from his line of sight.

This space also had no walls or anything similar to restrict it; except for the ground beneath his feet, it expanded in all directions, and Kain could walk in any direction.

"What is the method to use this exit? Footsteps? Or... turns?"

Kain was still not certain. It seemed he still had to return to solve the puzzle once again.

Thus, he slowly stepped backward, and although the path had clearly disappeared the moment he arrived here, it reappeared the moment he backed up, and Kain returned to the area of the wall and the slope.

Kain stood a bit further away again, looking at the entire wall as a whole.

"If it is a cipher-type puzzle, the core must somehow be a common language that both the code maker and the codebreaker can understand. It is just that the code maker has swapped elements and processed the links, making the clear piece of information become obscure, but from a certain angle, that is still the original information, it's just that it cannot be seen from a conventional angle."

At the same time, Faith was also thinking the same thing.

"The moment I saw the wall and the symbols divided into different blocks, I immediately thought of a language-based cipher. But the characteristic of a language-based cipher is that the encoded characters must repeat because of the reusability feature of language. Especially in a long passage like this."

Regardless of whether a block on the wall represented a letter or a word, it could not bypass this rule. However, Faith had spent five minutes comparing all the symbol patterns with each other, and they were either only vaguely similar, but out of all the blocks, no two were identical.

"Must find the common rule of the code set first."

Kain stepped closer to the wall and examined it; sure enough, he found a noteworthy point.

That black bar on the wall surface was completely straight.

At this point, Kain seemed to think of something; he glanced at the slope, tapped lightly on it for a moment, and then backed away again.

"So that's how it is."

Afterward, Kain continued to stand silently for another ten minutes. Until he raised his foot to step into the exit once more; this time, he did not come back out.

He had solved the puzzle.

Although the Principal's face was hidden, Faith could completely imagine her expression turning blank.

All things considered, it had only been nearly 20 minutes from the beginning until now, yet Kain had already cracked the puzzle.

Faith sighed; it wasn't until one minute after Kain stepped into the exit that he completed the key solution to the puzzle.

First was the jet-black symbol of each block.

If it were a conventional straight line, many ciphers, symbols, or even random drawings could utilize them. However, what if one thought those things were created intentionally?

Of course, ciphers are created intentionally, but what was previously considered intentional was the meaning of the cipher, not the symbol itself. This is a fairly classic mistake, confusing the meaning given to an object through and existing only within perception, and the inherent meaning of the object itself.

Here, apart from being the outer shell of the cipher, these black rectangles also spoke of another thing by themselves. That they themselves were created intentionally, possessing their own essence rather than living dependently on something else.

In short, the black rectangle itself was already something. And those "random" blocks with the black rectangles were actually all images of something, intentionally placed by the Principal with incorrect angles and scaling.

If someone only looked at these things as part of a cipher and tried to solve it, they would be stuck to death at this gate, because there was no visual rule general enough to support a linguistic framework.

Therefore, to crack the cipher, one first had to learn to look at this wall not as a cipher, but as an object, so that it itself could whisper its secret.

Now having determined that it must be from something, but from only that many clues, it was not enough to conclude what this thing was.

18 minutes ago.

"So that's it."

A train of thought appeared in Kain's mind, quickly leading him to the required conclusion.

Even pushing further.

This is a clock.

Of course, Kain did not jump straight to the conclusion but arrived through contemplation.

He noticed that although the person who set the puzzle had intentionally adjusted the angles of the images, such as making one black rectangle cut through the corner of a block while another black rectangle was right in the middle of a block, or one black rectangle was very small and flat while another black rectangle was so large that it occupied almost the entire block. But it could not hide the truth when looking directly at the essence of these black rectangles themselves: they were part of something that was elongated.

Next, think about the angle; comparing the center axes of the black rectangles with each other, though chaotic, because there were many samples, Kain still calculated that within a 360° circle, they filled exactly 12 positions, each position exactly 30° apart.

Just like the positions of the hours on a clock.

There are not many objects with such a distribution, and even fewer in the form of a long, straight "needle"; a clock could be said to be very, very "suspicious".

Thus, the most difficult part was done; for Faith, it was quite easy to decode those chaotic blocks into the corresponding numbers matching the angles the clock hands pointed to.

Although each block had to allow for two numbers because it was uncertain which way the clock hand was turning, Faith did not care much, because having obtained the numbers meant the code to be solved had truly appeared.