There are so many gears, and each one is divided into different gear groups.
There are characters on the protrusions and grooves of each gear, and there is no telling how many combinations there are. It is terribly difficult to open the cover alone.
"That's why you're only half right."
Ferdinand said seriously.
"When it comes to this, knowledge and accumulation alone are not enough... That's why I chose you instead of looking for someone who is better than you."
"Sense of language?" Hitzfeld asked tentatively.
Ferdinand nodded in confirmation.
"Language sense, thinking, imagination! Your performance in the open class has made me more confident in this belief."
"Now, Hitzfeld, keep playing with it. Make it spell out the phrase 'not present.'"
“Once you do this, you can turn to the first page.”
Chapter 39 Two Potatoes
Hitzfeld did not do what he was told immediately.
She raised her head and asked a question that almost made Aglaia, who was carrying a teapot and teacups, drop the things.
"Why don't you cut it up with a saw?"
Aglaia's face turned green.
She winked at Hitzfeld frantically, but he remained completely indifferent.
Ferdinand fell silent.
The girl asked a very smart question.
Because if you interpret it in depth, this question can be equivalent to "What is hidden in it?" or "Do you know what is hidden in it?"
Yes.
If you don't know what's inside, or you're not sure what's inside, why not just saw it open?
Instead of spending huge amounts of energy to crack it step by step, it is obviously more efficient to saw it open, so why don't we do that?
"Hitzfeld." Ferdinand hesitated, as if considering his words, and then said, "This thing is a relic of my wife."
The relics of Ognia Folland!
Hitzfeld's heart tightened.
"I see." She immediately changed the subject, "Excuse me, Professor... Then let me try it now."
Following Ferdinand's instructions, she turned the gears with the phrase "not appearing" as the goal, trying to figure out how to piece the phrase together.
This is not easy, because after all, it is a gear, one gear inside another, and sometimes changing one thing will affect all of them.
Moreover, “not appeared” is too short… Ancient Sarai is refined, and all the gear characters on the cover are enough to form a sentence three times longer. To spell out the phrase just right, one needs to use the knowledge of “silencing”.
The so-called muting means that certain parts and paragraphs in ancient Sarai will cancel each other out under certain circumstances, resulting in a sentence of 10 runes being read as only 5 or even 3 runes.
From this we can see that deciphering this thing does require a certain degree of knowledge accumulation.
Knowledge alone is not enough.
But relying on imagination alone is useless.
Only those who meet both of these conditions are eligible to participate.
Hitzfeld worked hard for about 10 minutes, with sweat on his forehead, before he finally found the pattern for silencing the sound.
"Crack!"
As the last gear turned into place, she heard a crisp sound from inside the cover as the card slot fell into place. Then all the gears on the entire cover creaked and turned in a disordered order, spelling out another sentence:
[Welcome, wise man.]
This feels a bit explosive.
Hitzfeld's scalp and even most of his body felt numb as if he had been electrocuted.
This is not fear or any other negative emotion, but a kind of joy and pleasure.
It’s like solving a math problem. You seem to have the clue, but you keep thinking hard for an hour and finally succeed in solving it. That moment of excitement is like exploding.
Is this why he didn't do it himself, but asked me to do it first?
Hitzfeld wiped the sweat off his forehead and raised his eyes slightly to look at Ferdinand.
The blond man smiled and tapped his chin. “Well done. Now you can read the first tenth of it.”
Only one tenth?
He tried to open the cover again, and this time, Hitzfeld opened it easily.
She did not immediately turn to the hard wooden pages, but counted the loose, turnable ones.
Just three pages.
Of course, this must be considered in terms of its material. Each page is similar to a thin wooden board, and one-tenth of the content is three pages, so the whole book must be composed of thirty pages of such thin wooden boards.
Considering the decrypted content in the middle - she noticed that there was a template as thick as the cover inserted into every other page - it was no wonder that it was so thick.
“This is where we are now.”
While she was examining the pages, Ferdinand took a sip from his teacup.
"I was troubled by the first level for many years, and it was Aglaia... Because of a coincidence, she broke into my office when I was trying to spell a sentence, and after guessing what I was doing, she mentioned the 'silencing' technique to me."
“It’s not easy to master the mute, but overall it’s a very basic thing. It shouldn’t be a threshold for me, but - who made me not think of it for so long?
Aglaia was sitting on the sofa nearby, and he puffed out his chest proudly again when he heard this.
That's why she was recruited as an assistant.
Although she has not played any role so far, the decryption progress has not changed~
She has made a huge contribution to the current progress of deciphering the code, and this alone is enough for her to be proud of for a long time.
Hitzfeld didn't pay attention to what he said.
Her entire attention was drawn to the contents of these three pages.
The pages were thin wooden boards into which the contents were carved.
Three pages equals six sides.
There is no written record, and the three pages of content correspond to six pictures.
The first image shows a round, potato-like object on a blank page. There are many smaller spots carved around it.
The second picture: It’s basically the same, except that this potato-like thing seems to be on fire, with many flames coming out of the surface.
Here, Hitzfeld was not quite sure that they were flames. They also looked somewhat like living creatures, similar to the tentacles of some creature.
The third picture: The position of the round potato has changed, and part of a larger potato appears in the upper left corner of the picture.
Seeing this, Hitzfeld was sure that the previous thing was not a flame... because the big potato in the upper left corner was wrapped in flames, and that jumping feeling could not be anything other than fire.
She didn’t understand the fourth picture—it was almost identical to the third, except for the extra ring on the potato.
Also, a lot of the things on the little potato that she originally thought were flames had disappeared.
The fifth picture is interesting... Its content is twice as much as any of the previous pictures: it reduces the picture size, with one picture engraved on the upper half and one on the lower half.
The content on the upper half is that the big potato sprayed a column of fire onto the small potato.
The content on the lower half is that there is another ring on the potato, which overlaps with the previous ring to form a cross on the side.
What the hell is this?
Hitzfeld frowned.
The potato spirit with fire attribute bullies ordinary potatoes and even uses rope bondage?
Turn to the last picture.
This picture also has two parts, the upper part and the lower part. The upper part shows a sprout coming out of a small potato, which pokes into the body of the flame potato, making it look like the flame potato is a cluster of tree crowns.
There are big changes in the lower half: the flame potato in the upper left corner and the sprout connecting the two potatoes are gone.
All that was left in the picture was the original small round potato, with many strange whirlpools carved around it.
Chapter 40: Collar
"Don't stare at them...don't stare at them!!"
Ferdinand gave a timely reminder.
But it's too late.
Those whirlpools seemed to have magical power. As soon as Hitzfeld turned his eyes to them, he suddenly had a feeling: her spirit, thoughts, and even everything were being swept up in them.
There was a sharp pain in my left eye.
Under the painful stimulation, Hitzfeld could clearly feel that it was connected to her brain.
Even more.
It felt as if countless root-like tentacles emerged from the back end of the eyeball. Not only did they pierce into her brain and merge with her brain, they also spread down along her spine and extended to her neck!
"Uh!"
This feeling is too clear and too obvious.
It was like a monster, an evil creature whose tentacles kept spreading and eroding her flesh.
But there is one thing.
All the tentacles piled up and got stuck at her neck. It was as if there was an invisible barrier there that the tentacles could not break through no matter how they twisted.
"Ah..." Hitzfeld let out a painful gasp and his eyes went dark, as if he had passed through a tunnel and saw a figure sitting there.
That's a girl.
No, she is a beautiful woman who possesses both youthfulness and maturity.
Hitzfeld didn't see her face, only her slender back, but she was sure that she was beautiful.
It's a gut feeling.
The woman was wearing a dress that she thought was very revealing. It was a bit like a gown in ancient Greek or Roman style, with most of her back exposed.
This back alone is enough to make people imagine, even though most of it is covered by a handful of golden hair, but still... Anyway, Hitzfeld will never accept such clothes in his life.
Gray fog filled the air.
Two huge load-bearing pillars could be vaguely seen on both sides. More than a dozen chains extended from the pillars and sank into the void around them. It was unclear where they led to.
What frightened Hitzfeld was that the chains would tremble from time to time, as if they were locking up some living creatures.
The woman's back is to her viewpoint, and in front of her is a long low table.
Next to the low table, a sword was leaning against her right hand. It looked like a cross sword, but I couldn't see more details.
There were countless candles lit densely on the low table, the high platform behind, and the ground beside. They were of different lengths, vaguely dispelling part of the gray fog, making the woman in the middle look more noble and holy.
Hitzfeld stared at the woman and saw that she was bending over the desk writing something.
She tried to concentrate, to change her perspective as she had in her dream, to see her from the front, to see what she was doing.
But no matter how she tried, it didn't work. On the contrary... her overly intense gaze seemed to alarm the woman.
She paused, stopped writing, raised her head slightly, and tilted it slightly to the left.
Like listening.
Like feeling.
“…amazing.”
she spoke.
The voice was low and a little hoarse.
Just by hearing this voice, Hitzfeld felt as if a fire was set on fire in his consciousness.
