old dream

Chapter 5 Deciphering the Code
Colin couldn't imagine and couldn't understand what kind of world Craigie saw after suffering from eye disease.

According to Heine, some symptoms appeared slowly.During a lecture, Craigie asked for no reason, "Who's there?"

Heine, who was still a student at the time, thought he was playing tricks again, and joked as usual about seeing certain ethereal beings, and then described their habits vividly.But that time there was no text.When the students turned their heads in confusion, Craigie casually changed the subject.

Some transformations may have started right then.

He became more and more distracted, and sometimes he couldn't see the students' faces when he got too close. He unconsciously held up something to block the light in a certain direction, and threw the book to the ground in panic.

Many people speak with certainty, and have witnessed him muttering to himself in an empty corner, and the words in his mouth are fragmented.

But Heine said that was just a fabricated rumour, and some people were happy to see that Craigie had gone mad to justify their own mediocrity.

Although those people have obtained degrees, they are still like the ignorant people before the time of the Holy King, who simply and stubbornly believe that once human beings probe too deeply into the virtual world, they will lose their rationality.

"Be content with the excuse of ignorance."

The illustrious achievements that the scholars of the alliance have cultivated for hundreds of years have long proven that reason can conquer everything.

Craigie's eye disease, however, was so bizarre that there was no precedent for it.

In this world, the interstitial lamp has not yet been invented, and ophthalmologists have no way of ascertaining the symptoms inside the patient's eyeball.All examinations failed to yield meaningful results in the end, and people can only get a glimpse of what he witnessed after the disease from Craigie's own narration.

"Those lights have turned into creeping 'colors' that eat away at me. I don't know how to describe those colors and lines, because I can't find any contrast in the words and things that exist..."

"Pricking needles", "vortex", "dense holes".He could only use these vague and unclear words to try to describe what he saw.After just a few months, Craigie became unable to go out, wrapping the room and himself tightly with black cloth.It has been said over and over again that only the light of redstone is pure and harmless, and can give things a stable shape.

He scattered a large number of red stones in his bedroom, bathed in the scarlet light all day long.I tried to paint what I saw.In the end, he accidentally burned all the manuscripts.Since then, no one has been allowed to mention the matter again.

……

……

After eating briefly, Colin packed the tableware and watched Craigie close the door, he was inexplicably relieved.

Back in his room, striking a match in the dark, Colin lit the only kerosene lamp in the house.

The room looked particularly messy, especially with the waste paper thrown across the table.

There is the only window in this room that is not covered with cloth, and you can see the night outside the window.The female moon is just in the direction of the window.

Now, there is one very important thing to do.

Remove the debris on the desktop and spread out the new paper.

Holding an ink pen in his right hand, Colin's pupils were hollow, staring at somewhere.

After a while, he started to write and recorded without any pause.

What is written on the paper is a seemingly random and disorderly letter.

This is a confidential document transmitted by Holy One Seminary, but it was recorded by Colin in some way.

Of course, memory alone cannot do this.

About six years ago he discovered that whenever he was immersed in consciousness, he could perceive the presence of some particles.

In this regard, Colin even has a feeling of familiarity and nostalgia.

For the first few years, Colin wasn't sure what they were, and after a few months of successfully wiretapping the seminary's letters, he was able to roughly determine that those particles were "abundance of life."

Think of it as a biologically derived psychic, and it is true that some occult schools use it as ritual fuel.

But Colin's situation was too weird.Because in general, people who can feel the abundance of life can also feel the spiritual essence in various other forms in the ether.

As long as they can perceive their existence, a certain connection has been established, and the deep power will flow into reality through the body, thus failing to pass the academy's detection of spiritual rejection.

However, someone like Colin who is extremely abnormal and whose connection has been artificially erased is probably not a normal situation.

But that doesn't mean he bypassed the academy's defenses.

Because even if you can use the abundance of life as fuel to cast spells, the transformation of spiritual essence will also occur, and will eventually be noticed by those "lanterns" in the newspaper room.

What's more, Colin has not been able to come into contact with any spells that can be used so far.

However, the academy seems to have fallen into some kind of misunderstanding, because "recording" is not an inconvenience that must rely on certain spells.

Although it is not sure whether all superhumans can do it.But after simple practice, he found that he could manipulate those particles very finely and stabilize their positions.

This means that specific letters can be expressed through the relative position of the two particles, and they can be arranged in an orderly manner. Although it takes a lot of effort, the text information is recorded without a physical medium.

During the whole process, Lingsu did not undergo any transformation or annihilation.

So by gradually encoding these particles, you can make yourself a human-shaped USB stick.

The mind began to feel tired, and he stopped to take a break, and then began to perceive the particles in his consciousness again.Record the other ciphertexts before they drift and blur.

Of course, Ke Lin only tracked down a few more concerned senders.

By "stealing" materials from the newspaper room in this way, the amount of text that can be obtained every day is about [-] letters.

But just obtaining these letters still did not break the defense of the seminary.

After all, these letters are all encrypted, as long as you don't know the decryption method, it will be all out of order.

However, it was probably thought that the resonance of the scribble instrument itself would not be eavesdropped, and these codes were only guarded against by the reporters who were ordinary people.At the same time, considering the convenience of encryption and decryption, most senders do not choose overly complicated passwords, and they are also negligent. They do not change the encryption method for a long time.

Single-letter or multi-letter replacement passwords, a simple example is to replace the third letter with the first letter, and replace the second letter with the fifth letter, in random order, so as to hide the meaning of the original text.

These two types are mostly used in the general correspondence between seminaries.

And Ke Lin had read about the method to overcome them in his previous life: word frequency statistics.

For alphabetic characters, the frequency of occurrence of each letter is generally determined, so that one can guess which one it replaces by the frequency of occurrence of a certain letter, and the rest is just a crossword puzzle.

As long as enough text is obtained, word frequency statistics can attack single-letter substitution methods.If you are familiar with the vowel and consonant structure of that language, the rules of word formation and some distinctive vocabulary, you only need a small amount of text to decipher the original text.

And those letters are extremely important research materials for the upper echelons of the seminary.

They are about the unearthly, about the etheric and the etheric, and about those unknowables beyond the triple veil.

(End of this chapter)