Steampunk: Sixth Era Epic-Chapter 560 - Letters and Codes

Chapter 560: Chapter 560: Letters and Codes Chapter 560: Chapter 560: Letters and Codes Because tomorrow was Thursday, the fifth day of September, it was the day when the “letter” Detective Sparrow mentioned before his death was supposed to arrive. Shard had been speculating about the content of that letter on Wednesday night after sending Galina and Tifa away.

As his wild guesses spiraled out of control, he even started to think that maybe it wasn’t a letter but a parcel, which would trigger a steam bomb once opened.

Because he was thinking about too many things, he had a bizarre dream after falling asleep on Wednesday night. At the end of the dream, he even saw Mr. Sparrow Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton in the dream didn’t mention the task he had given to Shard but scolded him for keeping cats at Saint Delan Square and making a mess of his home.

“What kind of strange dream was this?”

Shard woke up suspiciously, only to find it was still only half past five.

Lying there and staring at the ceiling in the dark for ten minutes without feeling sleepy, he finally sat up from bed. With the arrival of autumn, the sunrise was becoming later, and the bedroom curtains were drawn, so it was pitch black inside.

However, perhaps startled by Shard’s movement, the cat curled up next to the pillow opened its eyes alertly, glanced at Shard, meowed a few times after recognizing him, and then fell back into a deep sleep.

Now was not the time for this cat to get up.

Since he couldn’t fall back asleep, Shard got out of bed earlier than usual, changed into some clothes he rarely wore, and went out. He didn’t go far, instead, he sat down next to the fountain with the statue of a young girl holding a water jug in the center of Saint Delan Square and began feeding the pigeons with some bread crumbs.

It seemed like these pigeons were always here.

His appearance was very suspicious, so much so that even a passing police officer gave him a second glance. But as time reached six o’clock and more people gradually appeared in Saint Delan Square, he no longer stood out as much.

Shard wanted to see for himself who would be delivering letters to Saint Delan Square.

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Starting at six-thirty, the postal carriers and milk delivery workers from the milk company arrived one after another. Letters and newspapers were delivered through the slots under the doors, while milk and sheep’s milk were placed in milk boxes on the right side of the doors.

Shard did not move, which meant that Mia, who habitually woke up at half-past six, stood at the bedroom window after seeing Shard and stared intently at him from the window sill.

Shard waited until seven o’clock and, seeing that no one else lingered at his own doorstep, scattered all the remaining bread crumbs to the pigeons.

Upon standing up, the pigeons fluttered their wings over Shard’s head. Shard walked to his front door, took out the milk box key, and unlocked it. After picking up the glass milk bottles and opening the door, he saw his subscribed newspapers on the doormat as well as two letters with stamps affixed.

“Could this type of letter be delivered through the post office? That bold, huh?”

Shard pondered suspiciously.

He made breakfast for himself and the cat before finally sitting at the dining table to open the letters.

Among the two letters, one was an official letter from the Prophet’s Society, inviting Shard to participate in the opening ceremony of the “1853 Big City Player Roder Card Tournament” tomorrow at the Prophet’s Society on Silver Cross Avenue.

Since Shard had taken someone’s money to attend as a special invitee, he would certainly be there tomorrow.

The other letter came from a gentleman named Greyer Ego. The return address listed was a street in the northern part of the city, but there was no more specific house number, which likely meant it was sent directly to a mailbox at the street corner.

“I have a strange premonition that this one is it.”

Shard thought to himself, somewhat excited:

“This has been a puzzle for more than two months, what could it be?”

Upon opening the envelope, there was only one page of folded letter paper. The back of the paper had no writing, and the front was neatly written in Draleonese with blue-black ink. But there was only a short line, without even a greeting or a signature—

[Still the same old style.]

“Really impolite, but what does this mean?”

Shard was very curious.

[Don’t you want to burn this letter?]

She asked softly in his ear.

“Burning the letter doesn’t conflict with my figuring out its contents, after all, it’s been a two-month-long puzzle.”

Shard replied, holding the letter up to the sunlight coming through the window with no reaction. Seeing Mia approach curiously, he handed the paper over to it.

It sniffed the paper, then turned and went back to its breakfast.

“Quite intriguing.”

Shard concluded that the letter was not that simple, and with nothing else to do today and his strong curiosity, he couldn’t allow himself to give up just yet.

“I just want to find out what this is, not get involved in the troubles of Detective Sparrow.”

So after breakfast, Shard took the letter to Dawn Chapel and found Priest Augustus. The priest had already received the specific departure time and planned to talk about his trip to the congregation on Saturday.

Seeing Shard arrive, he even asked for his help in considering what else he might need to bring since the climate of the Southeastern Kingdom was very different from Tobesk.

“I wanted to ask if there’s a way to make invisible writing visible.”

Shard wagged the letter in his hand:

“It may have been written with special ink, but I don’t know exactly what kind.”

If it were just as Shard had speculated, then Detective Sparrow should have destroyed the potion that made the ink visible long ago. A dying spy had no reason to leave behind anything that could potentially expose their identity.

“A Circle Sorcerer’s letter? Text hidden with Arcane Technique?”

Priest Augustus asked.

“No, just an ordinary person’s letter, I guess it’s special ink.”

“An ordinary person, that would be easy to handle.”

The Priest didn’t even take Shard to his Potion Workshop, but in his own room in the church, he found a small glass vial covered in dust. Inside the bottle was a black liquid that looked unusually thick:

“Try this, a Reveal Elixir, generally used for detecting objects that can be touched, but cannot be observed by the naked eye or other methods. This potion of mine has expired, but it’s still very useful for ink. It doesn’t reveal through chemical reaction, it conceptually makes ‘existent but invisible’ things visible.”

Invisible ink was still ink, and there had to be traces of ink on the paper.

Such a simply formulated magic potion required a specific ritual to be effective, and using it to decrypt a message was like using a Steam Bomb to kill a mosquito.

Priest Augustus didn’t bring the ritual materials into the church, so he let Shard take the reveal elixir home to deal with it.

Shard immediately offered to pay for the potion, but the Old Cleric waved his hand and let him leave directly:

“If it weren’t expired, it might be worth something, but this potion has expired. Take it as doing me a favor by throwing out the trash. I always meant to throw it out, but I was always too lazy to get it from under the bed.”

After saying goodbye to the Priest, Shard first went to Old John’s Pawnshop and spent 3 shillings and 9 pence on the ritual materials. As the price was cheap, Shard didn’t even haggle, much to the disappointment of Old Man John who had been looking forward to hearing him say “wand”:

“Sometimes I feel that doing business with you is more enjoyable than the joy of earning those few coins in your pocket.”

After he returned home, Shard arranged a simple ritual on the blank letter, then placed the letter from that morning on it. After pouring on the potion given by Priest Augustus, there was no reaction on the letter.

“Hmm… did I guess wrong?”

Shard at his desk thought for a moment, took down the letter with the small writing, and placed the envelope on top. After pouring the potion from Priest Augustus again, a dense array of numbers appeared on the inside of the envelope.

“Very good.”

An excited smile appeared on his face, but the connected numbers made no sense at all.

“Sheet music? Doesn’t look like it… Cipher, Detective Sparrow’s cipher…”

Shard turned to look at the bookshelf, taking down the detective’s relics “The Queen and Her Lovers”, “The Silver Knight”, and “Western Front Memorabilia”.

These three novels were the only few left from Detective Sparrow’s lifetime, with many signs of being flipped through. Shard had once speculated that they were a spy’s codebooks, and now he finally had the chance to verify it.

“But why didn’t he destroy these three books before he died?”

As he flipped through the books, he thought suspiciously, then realized that, compared to the strange ink, these three novels were quite ordinary. Anyone suspecting his identity would notice missing books from the study sooner or later, even if he destroyed them; those not suspecting him would not care about these three books sitting on the shelf.

“But how do I match those numbers with these three books…”

Looking at the things on the desk surface, Shard fell into deep thought.

The numbers revealed on the envelope were not entirely sequential; there was a clear gap after every few digits. And taking the digits before and after the gap as one set, each set comprised eight numbers.

“All three books have three-digit page numbers and similar binding specifications. Judging from the number of digits on the envelope, it’s not possible that each set of numbers corresponds to one letter, it should correspond to words, and the number of rows and columns of words per page are all two digits. That means you only need 3+2+2=7 digits to point to a word on a certain page, row, and column. But now there are eight digits in each set, what is the extra one pointing to…”

Mia jumped from the floor onto Shard’s lap, then from his lap onto the desk surface. Seeing the three books on the desk, she immediately stretched out her paws, then was picked up by Shard.

“Could it be that the code points to the book? The codebook is not comprised of one book, but of several?”

He compared all the numbers on the envelope again and noticed that the last digit of every set was either “1”, “2”, or “3”, with no other numbers appearing.

“Then it’s quite simple, the last digit of each set indicates the book.”

A smile appeared on Shard’s face.

But this led to a new problem, even if this conjecture was correct, he didn’t know what numerical order the three novels corresponded to.

“But that’s okay, I can try one by one. First, translate the first ten sets of numbers; if they form a coherent and meaningful sentence, it means my idea is correct.”

[Three digits correspond to three books, you will have to guess many times.]

The voice echoed in his ear.

“No problem, just six possible permutations.”

Shard thought to himself, taking his notebook and beginning to record the numbers corresponding to the words. Ten sets of numbers, ten words, and although there were six potential permutations, in reality, he only needed to look up each set of numbers three times.