The Lost Tomb : Sea Of Sands

Chapter 160: Decoding

Did he remember these patterns? Of course he did. He had stared at them for a long time, and broken them down many times.

Li Cu had used Su Wan's laptop before to piece together all the pictures of the scars from the corpses. He looked at them very carefully, and thought that each of the scars seemed completely different and disorganized. But based on how rough the edges of the knife wounds were, he felt that the wounds hadn't been made quickly. In other words, the wounds weren't carved at random. Someone must have deliberately formed these shapes, which meant they had a hidden meaning.

These wounds had been soaked in ice water for a long time, so Li Cu could no longer determine with the naked eye whether they had been left before or after death. But he felt that it was more likely that the wounds had been left after death, because none of them showed any signs of healing. This wouldn't happen unless the wound was formed at almost the same time as their death and dismemberment.

Li Cu searched for forensic books on the internet, and thoroughly examined the wounds, nails, ears, and many other places. He found sand particles on many of the bodies, which indicated that they had really come from the desert.

Li Cu continuously arranged and combined the pictures on the computer, analyzing all the scar lines. That was how he found that there was a problem. All the lines were ones that could exist in the strokes of Chinese characters. There were no arcs or inversions, and these lines clearly violated the standard method for writing Chinese characters. In other words, these lines were probably strange characters that conformed to the Chinese method for writing characters, or the person who carved these lines was an accomplished calligrapher.

He arranged these strange characters one by one on a piece of paper, and kept tracing along the strokes with a pen. The more he looked at them, the more he felt like they were words.

Li Cu suddenly had a strange thought: was this text encrypted? He searched the internet and found that he was right. As long as all the strokes of a character were separated and numbered, you could replace the state of the original strokes according to a code table. For example: this stroke should be horizontal, but you deliberately write it vertically so that the characters written in a certain order would be completely different from the previous characters.

Li Cu tried to deduce what they might be. Fortunately, there weren't many strokes in these particular Chinese characters. It took him seventy-two hours to finally find the code table for the first character. But breaking it down didn't work.

Not only could he not break down the sentence, he couldn't even break down the first character. No matter how he adjusted the code table, all he ended up with was another strange character.

The encryption system was much more complicated than the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet, and seemed completely irreversible.

He knew at that time that he needed a key— the code table used by the person who created the code— to unlock the meaning of these characters.

He saw the sticker on the back of the phone with the strange character, and even though it was very simple, it had to be part of the same system as the ones on the bodies.

"Let me see that number." Li Cu said to Leader.

Leader handed him the phone. "What do you have in mind?"

Li Cu looked at the unique number on the cell-phone, feeling like it was a little familiar, but he couldn't figure it out. He was a little nervous as he silently memorized it, and then began finding the corresponding meaning of the simple pattern on the back of the phone. Trying to reconstruct it in his mind wasn't easy, but he forced himself to reorganize each stroke one at a time. Finally, he managed to rearrange the strange pattern on the back of the phone into one word in his mind.

"Hey."

Li Cu's face was full of black lines [1], as he imagined Wu Xie holding the phone and raising his hand in greeting: "Hey, long time no see."

He returned the cell-phone to Leader and said, "I don't know this number, but you can check it online. Maybe you'll find clues that way."

"It's a number we know." Merchant said while surfing the internet on his phone. He pointed to Li Cu: "It's your home phone."

The others all looked at Li Cu, who grabbed the phone back and immediately showed an incredulous expression, "I don't know, I don't know anything. You've been messing with me this whole time, haven't you?"

"It's not surprising, considering our group's been watching you." Leader said, still having Merchant carefully check what was going on. When he transferred the phone's contact list, the name of the number was a very long string of strange symbols with more than sixty characters and letters. "Do you know what this means?"

Li Cu stared at the phone and shook his head, but his confusion gradually cleared up.

Wu Xie needed to make sure that they would bring the phone to Li Cu, so he used Li Cu's home phone number as a code. That way, the enemy would definitely ask him about it, and the chances of this phone appearing in front of him would increase. But ordinary people wouldn't have the patience to copy this extremely complicated and random code to paper, and would definitely show Li Cu the phone directly.

As he started to recall the previous characters in his mind, he trembled with excitement, but quickly tried to suppress it. He felt so cool. At his age, the admiration for people's physical bodies was far greater than the charm of their brains. But when he had decoded that "hey" in his mind just now, he had goosebumps all over his body.

He could almost imagine the lonely but controlling look in Wu Xie's eyes as he set it all up. In a dark cabin, he calculated the code key all alone before pasting it on the back of a cell-phone.

This was different from the times Li Cu had rushed into the penalty area on the soccer field and immediately heard the cheers of the surrounding audience. Wu Xie only attacked in the dark, as if one night, after a long time had passed, he would appear in front of Li Cu and give him a bloody throat. He wouldn't even need to see Li Cu's terrified reaction.

Li Cu also knew that Wu Xie wouldn't care how he felt when he understood this message.

But it was so cool.

This was the intellectual pleasure that came from countless details gathering like ghosts at some point in time, affecting fate in all sorts of ways.

He deconstructed the code in his mind, and soon, a simple command was slowly arranged.

He only saw the first three words, before he suddenly broke out in a cold sweat.

"Sunshine, North Star, latitude and longitude." The rest of it seemed very complicated, meaning he needed pen and paper.

He surrendered himself to it, feeling like he had become addicted. The sports stars he had once liked gradually became worthless in his mind, and he knew he wanted to become a different kind of person.

"What's wrong with you?" When Leader asked this, Li Cu gave him a wry smile and said, "My leg hurts a little."

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Note:

[1] You know, like how they do in anime.