Memory inheritor

Chapter 228 Interpretation

Chapter 228 Interpretation (Part 2)

After explaining the situation, Liu Lu turned to Wei Hongsi and asked, "Mr. Wei, what's the next step?"

Wei Hongsi said, "I'm completely clueless about encrypted text information. Could you explain this to me again?"

"Okay." Liu Lu nodded. "Common forms of text encryption can be categorized into five types. The first type is glyph encryption, which usually does not change the fluency of the sentence but directly modifies the characters themselves. This can be further divided into several cases."

She opened a blank document on the computer and typed as she spoke, using different formats and numbered headings, much like a teacher's blackboard writing during a lecture.

Seeing this, Wei Hongsi couldn't help but smile. Teacher Liu not only taught, but also provided class notes.

Liu Lu continued, "The most typical example is the substitution of variant characters," such as replacing similar-looking characters, adding or deleting radicals, or regularly adding or subtracting letters in phonetic writing systems. In addition, substitution with homophones, near-homophones, or misspelled characters also falls into this category."

Wei Hongsi said, "So, Martian language, which was popular on the internet more than 20 years ago, can also be considered encrypted text?"

""

Liu Lu said, "That's right. Although it's easy for us to recognize, for foreigners with limited Chinese proficiency, it's not much different from 'Martian language'."

Wei Hongsi nodded and said, "That makes sense. So the purpose of encrypted text information can be to differentiate and filter the readers."

Liu Lu said, "Yes, what I just described is the simplest form. More complex ones are single-table substitutions, such as the Caesar cipher of ancient Rome, where each letter is replaced by a fixed offset, 'a' replaces 'd', 'b' replaces 'e', ​​and so on; there are also more complex multi-table substitutions, such as the Virginia cipher, which uses multiple substitution tables in a cycle based on keywords, making it much more difficult to crack."

"We also have similar situations in Chinese. For example, the fanqie method uses the sounds of two characters to spell out a third character; there is also the tone conversion method, which uses the four tones of level, rising, departing and entering to encrypt the text. In addition, there is the keyboard mapping method, which uses adjacent keys on the keyboard to replace the original letters, such as Q for W, W for E, and so on."

Wei Hongsi was no stranger to the fanqie method. Many ancient dictionaries used the fanqie method to annotate the pronunciation of characters. For example, "du zong qie" is the pronunciation of the character "dong" by combining the initial consonant of the character "du" with the final vowel and tone of the character "zong".

As for the modulation method, he had seen it in a martial arts novel.

Liu Lu said, "The second type is positional and word order encryption, which does not change the content of the text, but only the reading order. A relatively simple form is fixed-interval skipping, such as the rail fence cipher, where holes are regularly cut out on a piece of paper, and the text that is revealed is the encrypted information. More typical examples include acrostic, hidden-word, and hidden-text poems."

Wei Hongsi nodded and said, "Then 'separation and reunion poetry' is a more complex form."

Liu Lu said, "Yes, by systematically disassembling characters or words to form new ones, a substitution cipher is applied, making it more concealed. Mr. Wei seems quite knowledgeable in this area!"

Wei Hongsi smiled and said, "I've only seen it in books."

Acrostic poems are mostly word games, and many are fabricated by later generations, such as "Lu Junyi rebels" or "I love Qiu Xiang". However, the story of Li Dongzheng receiving a "hidden poem" from his subordinate Guo Dai to request grain is recorded in official history and is highly credible.

Liu Lu said, "The second type of text encryption can be expanded further. For example, we can use the chapter, paragraph, or sentence number as the code, or hide the code using paragraph line numbers, line breaks, white space, etc., and then convert it into text. This case is more complicated."

She paused for a moment, then continued, "The third category is character mapping, which converts text into another symbol system. Deciphering it requires a corresponding lookup table or encoding rules. A typical example is Morse code mapping, which can be represented by punctuation marks, sentence length, etc."

Liu Lu opened a screenshot containing a long passage from Chapter 10 of the novel, with all the punctuation marks circled in red.

"In this text, commas represent '·' in Morse code, periods represent '-', and other punctuation marks are treated as separators. Once written down, it can be deciphered."

She wrote down the corresponding symbols one by one in the document and marked the corresponding letters.

(···—) corresponds to the letter V

(·) corresponds to the letter E

(I.) Corresponding letter N

(··—) corresponds to the letter U

(···) corresponds to the letter S

Together they form "VENUS", meaning "Venus".

Wei Hongsi had some understanding of Morse code, but if Liu Lu hadn't explained it to him in person, he wouldn't have been able to discover the mystery even if he read the description of the scene a hundred times. He couldn't help but admire her greatly.

He asked, "So the author of this book used publicly available coding rules?"

"At least part of it is like that, otherwise I wouldn't have known where to start. If it were just this one place, it could be a coincidence, but there are corresponding places before it, which can corroborate each other."

As Liu Lu spoke, she opened another screenshot, which was a long passage from Chapter 3 of the novel. It also had many red boxes around it, but the circled areas were not punctuation marks, but rather the relative position of the name of a character in the book, "A Feng," in the sentence, as well as the words before and after it.

"The rules applied in this section are quite complex. It is a combination of the second and third types of cases we just mentioned, but the encoding rule used is still Morse code."

As she explained, she wrote down the corresponding symbols in the document and marked the corresponding letters.

7 = (··—·)

(··—) = U

(一·一·)=0

(··) =

(··一·)=F

(·) = E

(·一·)=R

Together they form "LUCIFER," meaning "messenger of light."

Wei Hongsi crossed his arms and said, "So that's the word."

The notes Liu Lu had shown him earlier didn't contain the corresponding words, so he assumed it was a direct translation into Chinese. He hadn't realized it had undergone another translation. However, based on the meanings of the words in the several paragraphs, her translation wasn't problematic.

Liu Lu turned to him and asked, "President Wei, does this word have any other hidden meaning?"

Wei Hongsi asked, "How much do you know about the Light Guide Association?"

"I have a general understanding."

Do you know their creed?

"You mean 'Leading humanity into the future, the true light begins here'?"

"Yes. Lucifer and the name of the Light Guide Association, 'Lumina,' share the etymology of 'Lu.'"

Liu Lu nodded and said, "I did think of that. Do you think it's a metaphor, or does it represent a symbol?"

Wei Hongsi said, "Perhaps it's a combination of both."

"Lucifer" is usually translated as "Lucifer" and is often used as a synonym for "Satan" or "fallen angel" in Western culture. However, the word comes from the Latin "lu" (light) and "ferre" (to bring), and its original meaning is "messenger of light" or "morning star".

In Eastern culture, the corresponding planet is the "Morning Star," which is Venus. However, Venus also has another name, "Evening Star," which is also a sign of the beginning of a long night, and this can somewhat correspond to the change in the meaning of Lucifer.

This can probably be seen as a symbol of the organization to which Uncle Zhang belongs, or a metaphor for the organization's own situation.

Is this organization called "Lucifer" or "Venus"?

Wei Hongsi temporarily put aside this line of thought and said, "You can continue your introduction first."

"

"Okay," Liu Lu said, facing the screen. "The fourth type is encryption using books or reference objects as keys, the most common being book codes." The ciphertext can usually be converted into a string of numbers, and both parties must possess the same version of the book to decode it. Calendars, celestial phenomena, solar terms, etc., can also be used as dynamic keys.

Wei Hongsi said, "If this book uses this method of text encryption, wouldn't it be almost impossible to crack?"

"Yes." Liu Lu nodded and continued, "The fifth type is contextual metaphor encryption. It doesn't encrypt the words, but rather the meaning it refers to. For example, it uses a certain food, activity, or behavior to refer to a specific thing, and it's difficult for someone who doesn't know the context to understand its true meaning."

"For example, the various types of death descriptions in this book should all have specific meanings, but ordinary readers only take them as plot points and have no way of knowing the truth."

After listening to her explanation, Wei Hongsi asked, "How long do you estimate it will take to decipher all the implicit information in this book?"

Liu Lu thought for a moment and said, "I can tell that the content uses text encryption. It will probably take about two days. As for the rest, it's hard to say."

Wei Hongsi said, "Then I'll trouble you to first decipher the parts that are obviously problematic."

Liu Lu smiled and said, "It's not hard work at all. Do I really not have to participate in company work?"

Wei Hongsi knew her concerns. After all, she was ostensibly an intern at Zhiwei, and it would be somewhat suspicious if she did nothing. So he said, "It's okay, I can arrange for you to do some errands around the company."

Liu Lu knew this was to make her stand out among her colleagues. It was perfectly normal for a newcomer to do this, so she nodded and said, "Okay."

Wei Hongsi asked, "Did you make any other discoveries?"

"There's another part of the interpretation that I find rather unique," Liu Lu said, opening a screenshot of a passage from Chapter 6 of the book.

Wei Hongsi had just flipped through the book and still had a pretty good impression of it. He saw that it was a description of an indoor scene, and Liu Lu had underlined several specific objects in red.

The first place is a grid-like bookshelf, which is completely empty except for some books on the third shelf of the second row;

The second issue is that the wooden board behind the shelf in the upper left corner of the bookshelf has fallen off, revealing the mottled wall behind it;

The third place is where a cat came from the doorway and jumped into the bottom right shelf of the bookshelf, seemingly making it its den;

The fourth one is the "福" (Fu, meaning good fortune) character pasted on the door; the left half has fallen off, and only the right half is still stuck on.

The fifth spot is a small hole directly below the door; that's how the cat crawled in.

"What does this mean?" Wei Hongsi asked.

Liu Lu said, "It's obvious that the pigpen code was used here. The five places I marked correspond to five letters: F, A, ...

I, T, and H together spell Faith.

"The pigsty code?" This was the first time Wei Hongsi had ever heard of it, and it had once again touched on his blind spot.

Liu Lu said, "It is also called Freemasonry cipher or grid cipher, and it is a very simple substitution cipher."

She drew four diagrams on the document, and Wei Hongsi understood them after a brief explanation.

Liu Lu said, "This is the most obvious encrypted text in the book, and it's the only one in the entire book. I noticed it on my first read, and it felt like the author was intentionally giving me a hint."

Wei Hongsi agreed, "That's true."

This description of the interior scene is somewhat disorganized in terms of structure, but the author uses a cat to draw the eye, making it less jarring. However, anyone familiar with the pigpen code will easily spot the clues.

Liu Lu said, "But there are probably two valid interpretations of this word, one positive and one negative."

Wei Hongsi nodded slowly.

The implied message is "faith," but the corresponding scene description appears dilapidated and outdated, which can also be interpreted as the old "faith" having collapsed. No wonder Liu Lu said that this content is rather special.

He pondered for a moment and said, "Perhaps the author intended to express an ambiguous meaning, for people with different perspectives to see, and those who see it will interpret it according to their own understanding."

Liu Lu couldn't help but look at Wei Hongsi: "You mean, the author is using this method to obscure their true stance?"

"I think that's possible," Wei Hongsi nodded. "The implicit information about 'the Messenger of Light' and 'Venus' isn't necessarily what the author wants to convey; it's more like an identity statement."

Liu Lu pondered for a moment and said, "But this is a privately printed, informal publication. Is it necessary to express it in such a subtle way? I was puzzled before about the author's intention in writing it this way. With the current way of information transmission, it seems completely unnecessary."

Wei Hongsi said, "Perhaps the author's situation is rather special; she needs to use someone else to deliver the information. It's also possible that the book was originally intended for publication, but the plans were changed for some reason."

He glanced at the time on Liu Lu's monitor; it was already past 9:30 PM. He then asked, "Where are you staying now?"

Liu Lu said, "The apartment arranged by the company is right across from yours."

Wei Hongsi asked in surprise, "It's all arranged so quickly?"

Liu Lu said, "Actually, it was arranged a few days ago. I also have a colleague who lives next door to you."

Wei Hongsi thought to himself, "Well, so you guys were prepared all along." He said, "If you have time tonight, I'll talk to you again when we get back. It's time to get off work now."

Liu Lu said, "Okay."

Wei Hongsi returned to his desk, sent a message to Xia Shiyu, and prepared to go back to his dormitory after get off work. He then packed his things, turned off his computer, picked up his chest bag, and walked out. Liu Lu also picked up her bag and followed behind him.