Chapter 351 - 351: Decoding

So, what did these chaotic numbers represent to form a cipher and convey information?

Perhaps fools would think they were step counts or something similar when associating them with the Principal's [Space Magic], but Faith didn't care about that.

To him, it had to be text, with each digit being a letter.

Recall the fundamental principle of ciphers that Faith mentioned at the beginning, that "the characteristic of language-based ciphers is that the encoded characters must repeat because of the reusability feature of language." Here, that was exactly what was happening.

The digits were not digits; they were letters. In other words, this entire mess of number sequences was a text.

And although it wasn't separated but clumped into a single block, making it impossible to identify which word was which, Faith could still use another method identical to the general definition mentioned above; he could even use this very fact to deduce the rule.

The letter "E" is the most commonly repeated letter in text samples because it is present in many common words. So, if he assigned the letter "E" to the number that appeared with the highest frequency, Faith would have a simple conversion.

Number 4 or number 10 was E.

But what if 4 or 10 was E? After all, the quantity of numbers was less than the quantity of letters; this was completely just guessing.

Actually, it wasn't.

Fully utilizing the solution from the previous part, that this cipher was a clock.

Let's talk about the existence and significance of a clock; although there are only 12 positions corresponding to 12 hours on a clock face, the positions on a clock can simultaneously represent many different times as an inherent function. Here, too, fitting in 26 letters was not a problem.

As for the part about clearly determining the rule, it was the reason Faith searched for E to see which number it fit, and both numbers 4 and 10 appeared.

But 10 was not suitable; only 4 was. That is, with 4 being E, following the sequential rule of time and corresponding to the sequential rule of the alphabet, 3 would be D, 2 would be C, 1 would be B, and finally, 12 would be A. Starting the time of a day and the beginning of the alphabet, it fit perfectly.

"That's interesting too, but it only goes this far."

Thinking he had finished solving the cipher, Faith looked with some satisfaction at Kain, who was still standing still, glancing back and forth at the wall. It seemed that fellow was also solving up to this step; they were evenly matched.

Now only the rather troublesome task of solving for the answer remained, and because each block had two numbers to consider, and each number had two or three letters behind it, it would take some effort to decipher something meaningful.

But when Faith had only just started decoding a little, his expression tightened.

Because what was deciphered made no sense at all.

He pondered and then tried another code set, but the results were not promising.

Although, in theory, Faith only needed to solve more to get it, his intuition told him he was going in the wrong direction.

"What am I missing?"

Clock, digits, then letters—the entire logic chain was connected. Faith did not believe he had solved it wrong, nor did he believe a puzzle like this could have an unrelated answer falling from the sky.

While Faith was thinking, Kain stepped into the exit.

In his mind, he recalled the process of the puzzle: Kain entered the space, Kain observed the cipher, Kain...

Stomped his feet?

Faith's breath skipped a beat; he understood.

Meanwhile, Kain had successfully passed the stage, without returning to the puzzle area.

...

If the first encoding was to trap those who only focused on decoding instead of looking at the true nature of things, then the second encoding was to trap those who thought they had seen through the answer.

They would be busy decoding, and the massive amount of data and options would hold their attention. They would not notice the things left behind, reflected under the light.

It was the shadow.

The clock, the numbers, and the digits were not wrong.

But the data on "why this is a clock?" had been discarded far away.

The real question had to be, what kind of clock is this?

If it was from the perspective of treating characters as objects, then Kain could completely continue to treat the entire wall, or even this space, as a single entity, and let it whisper its secret.

The entire place, the wall set directly above an inclined slope—this inclined slope looked like an unimportant background, but when viewed from a different angle, it was not.

That angle was treating the inclined surface of the slope as a flat plane. At this point, the wall would turn to lean upward.

A clock intentionally set to lean upward, then intentionally hidden by turning the flat ground into an inclined slope—turning the clock face from slanted to straight—only a sundial could satisfy the condition.

A sundial is a time-measuring device that operates based on the position of the sun. The basic operating principle of this clock is observing the change in the position of the shadow cast when the sun shines on a needle set vertically in the middle of the clock face, with the clock face set to lean upward.

But isn't a sundial also just a clock? Even if one really deduced that this was a sundial, one still couldn't solve the cipher.

However, this was the trap.

Sundials are no different from regular clocks; they are just clocks after all. However, the earliest version of the sundial, i.e., the version where the clock face is set at an incline, has "two different clocks." One face pointing upwards, the original, and one face pointing downwards to catch sunlight from a different angle.

This downward-facing clock is completely opposite to the upward-facing clock, like a reflection in a mirror. The reason some people would deduce correctly but fail to solve the correct answer is because the thing they are decoding is the top clock, while the thing they truly need to decode is the bottom clock. Stubbornly trying to decode the top clock is like going into a dead end.

The proof had actually been shown from the beginning, in the blocks on the wall.

If one only paid attention to the black hour hand of each block, the codebreaker would not notice the other areas in that block, even though they were not black, the light-reception level did not differ much from the black hand.

That is why "they themselves were created intentionally, possessing their own essence rather than living dependently on something else" was not only talking about the black needle, but also about the dark patches symbolizing that this clock face was not receiving light, and the clock face that was not receiving direct light was precisely the downward-facing side of the sundial.

At this point, the cipher was completely broken.

...

After passing the wisdom challenge, Kain was not immediately teleported to any other area or location but just kept walking in the murky space.

As for the reason, it was not too hard for him to guess.

In truth, that puzzle was something that had been adjusted for difficulty, or more accurately, it was not meant for students who were still very young, lacking experience, and depth of thought.

It's just that for Kain, the Principal had to separate him and give him this puzzle to avoid the situation where all of his teammates just stood there yawning and still passed.

Kain could even imagine that perhaps the Principal hoped her difficult puzzle would stall Kain long enough until Mera's group could solve their own puzzle.

Solving ciphers is a challenge that requires strong associative thinking and abstract reasoning, because nothing that appears on the cipher solution represents its true nature. And to confuse Kain, the Principal also added several more layers of encryption on top of the original puzzle, making the process of solving it feel like a tangled mess for those only accustomed to looking at problems in a straight line.

For example, the first challenge in Kain's puzzle: turning those nonsensical shapes into numbers.

The process of decoding has already been discussed and doesn't need repeating; let's talk about the more fundamental aspects, which, in Kain's case, are three key elements.