Conan's grammatical investigator

Chapter 1422 Code Puzzle Solution Tutorial

Half an hour later, Qin Zhibo and Conan arrived at Dr. Agasa's house.

When Qin Zhibo parked the car, opened the door and got out, Conan was still sitting in the chair without even unbuckled his seat belt.

"I see……"

"The real purpose of the Ruyuefeng Water is to cause a volcanic eruption..."

Conan rubbed his chin, his brain still pondering what Qin Zhibo had just said on the road, and he didn't realize that the car had stopped.

According to his original reasoning, Kisaragi Minemizu was seeking revenge against the people who built the twin skyscrapers because the illegal building blocked his family's view of Mount Fuji.

But after Qin Zhibo's explanation, the same case has another explanation.

"But……"

Conan wanted to continue communicating with Qin Zhibo, but found that the latter was already standing in front of Dr. Agasa's house and pressed the doorbell.

Conan then quickly unbuckled his seat belt and nimbly climbed out from over the car door.

"Hey, is there anything else you haven't told me?"

"There should be more than one case with hidden secrets, right?"

Conan stood beside Qin Zhibo and asked seriously.

However, Qin Zhibo doesn't have time to explain them one by one. He is not a storyteller, and this is not a storytelling session.

And some of them involve systems, and it is really difficult to explain the reasons and motivations.

"Let's wait for a chance in the future. The most important thing now is to get the current things done."

Faced with Qin Zhibo's answer, Conan frowned slightly. Although he felt a little reluctant, he had no choice but to accept it.

Although not all truths are worth revealing, the desire to pursue the truth in our hearts cannot be abandoned.

After a while, Dr. Agasa unlocked the electronic lock of the gate at the entrance and invited Qin Zhibo and Conan in.

"Conan? And Mr. Qin..."

"Have you already known this?"

The two looked slightly stunned and asked, "What did you know?"

Dr. Agasa hesitated for half a second, then a confident and complacent expression appeared on his face and he said solemnly.

"I declare that my latest invention, the strength-enhancing gloves, is nearly complete!"

The strength-enhancing gloves were props that Qin Zhibo had previously commissioned Dr. Agasa to customize.

"what?"

Qin Zhibo's face lit up with joy, "The Thanos Glove is finally finished!"

Thanos gloves?

Dr. Agasa looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled, put his hands behind his back and nodded.

"That's about it. We can complete the final debugging in two days..."

"Debugging?" Qin Zhibo asked.

"It's just about adjusting the output strength. The initial version may have a high voltage, which is difficult for ordinary people to control... It will eventually be adjusted to a relatively suitable range."

Qin Zhibo asked: "So what is the power that can be output at present?"

Dr. Agasa held his chin in thought for a moment, "Probably... hard to say, because I haven't tried it."

"What about Conan's footwear?"

Dr. Agasa turned his head and glanced at Conan's sneakers, and smiled, "The peak value should be slightly higher."

"But considering the different ways of exerting force with arms and feet, they might be similar. After all, I haven't tried it myself..."

Just then, Conan, who had already sat on the sofa and was looking through case files, interrupted the two.

"Can we talk business now?"

Conan is not very interested in Dr. Agasa's new invention.

He now wanted to discuss the case more.

"What's the matter?"

Dr. Agasa asked in confusion.

Conan whispered back: "It's about the organization..."

"organize!"

Dr. Agasa's expression changed, his eyes widened and he shouted.

Because everything has been calm recently, I haven't had any friction with the organization for a long time.

"Sh-!"

Conan quickly made a shushing gesture to Professor Agasa, "Don't let Huibara hear it..."

"Where is she now?"

Hearing this, Dr. Agasa turned around and glanced in the direction of the basement. "Ai stayed up late to do research last night. She must still be sleeping now..."

go to bed?

Conan looked up at the clock on the wall and drooped his eyelids helplessly.

It's almost 11 o'clock noon...

But it’s a good thing this way, as I can avoid discussing the case with her.

Conan briefly explained it to the doctor, then picked up the information on the mahjong tile with the secret code and looked at it.

"Now it seems that the best entry point is the secret code on the mahjong tiles that the murderers left next to the victims' bodies..."

As he said this, Conan glanced at Qin Zhibo's reaction.

Because cracking codes is Qin Zhibo's strong point, no matter how complicated the code is, he can see through it at a glance.

However, this time Qin Zhibo just smiled and said nothing.

Conan immediately understood. It seemed that Qin Zhibo had already deciphered the meaning of the code and was just testing his ability to reason about codes.

In response, Conan's eyes calmed down for a moment, then he turned around and began to reason about the code.

"Judging from the points on the mahjong tiles, the murderer may have targeted seven people in total..."

"But the mahjong tile found on the first victim was a 'tube', so it could be eight people."

"There are also English letters on the back of the mahjong tiles, which may be clues related to the location where the victim's body was found. After all, the murderer always chooses other places to dump the body after killing someone, so there must be a meaning behind this."

"So we must go to these places to investigate in person..."

Conan thought of the strange man he met in the library when he was a child, who claimed to be his younger brother and gave him a series of secret codes.

The clues to those codes are related to the landmarks near certain places, and they can only be deciphered by visiting those places in person.

However, many years later, he realized that those secret codes were just a joke from his uncle.

And nowadays, these codes may also mean these meanings.

"As for the dividing line above... I'm not sure what it means yet."

After saying that, Conan put down the code paper and looked up at Qin Zhibo, meaning to ask whether his judgment was correct.

"What you said makes some sense, but you haven't seen the most crucial point..."

Qin Zhibo took the code paper and borrowed a map of the area around Tokyo from Dr. Agasa.

"If you want to decipher the meaning of this code, you really have to think about it in relation to the location where the body was found."

“However, it is not that complicated to go to these locations in person to check, because the location where the sixth victim was killed was not actually completely controlled by the murderer.”

"This man named 'Long Qi' lost control of his vehicle and crashed into a toll booth on the road because his brake fluid was completely drained, causing the brakes to fail."

"The location of death is completely irregular. He may have had an accident before the toll booth. The murderer cannot be sure of this."

"This means that the murderer only needs to keep the bodies within a rough range." "In that case, we just need to follow the murderer's thinking and mark the locations where all the victims were killed on the map..."

Qin Zhibo picked up the marker and marked six points on the map.

These six points are arranged in a long line, from Shizuoka Prefecture at the bottom to Gunma Prefecture at the top.

"This……"

Professor Agasa and Conan put their faces close to the map, frowned and thought, but after a long while, they couldn't say anything.

Conan was still thinking, but Dr. Agasa couldn't help asking: "Mr. Qin, is there any special meaning between these locations?"

Qin Zhibo smiled slightly, looked at Conan and said, "Have you forgotten what happened with the Hades case in London?"

After this reminder, Conan's eyes lit up instantly.

  Is it possible to form some shape by piecing together these dots?

Conan pointed his fingers at the ground and slid them back and forth at several points, but the result of each gesture made him shake his head.

There are so many shapes that can be put together with just these six points.

With Conan's imagination, he thought of more than a dozen possible graphic styles in a short while, but he felt that each one was a bit far-fetched.

So, Qin Zhibo continued: "At this time, we need to look at the mahjong tiles on the corpse..."

"There are two types of mahjong tiles on the body, one bamboo and seven bamboo. So we'd better treat the points on the map as two types as well."

As he spoke, Qin Zhibo marked the map location of the first corpse scene with a marker pen.

"Next, we can look at the letters on the back of the mahjong tiles. What do you think these letters are?"

Conan took the code paper, on which was clearly printed a photo of the mahjong tiles at the scene.

All the letters are A, E, A, Γ, H, and Z.

Although the police kept referring to these letters as "English letters" during the search meeting, it was obvious that one of the letters was not English.

This letter looks like an inverted L, or an F without a horizontal bar.

But it is impossible for the murderer to make a mistake here, nor is it possible for him to deliberately write the English letter L like this.

Suddenly, Conan's eyes widened, and he pulled out an ordinary alphabet from the complex ocean of knowledge in his mind.

“Those are Greek letters!”

Greek letters are also divided into uppercase and lowercase letters, and many of the uppercase letters are very similar to English letters, so they are often confused.

But this Γ is absolutely correct.

“Are those Greek letters?”

Dr. Agasa also lowered his head to take a closer look, then nodded, "It does look like..."

"However, the main application field of Greek letters nowadays is science, especially mathematics. What did the murderer want to express with these letters?"

Qin Zhibo continued to point out, "In fact, many capital letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as or very similar to Latin letters, so these capital letters are rarely used."

"But the murderer deliberately used so many capital letters that are similar to English letters, probably to confuse the meaning."

"Then let's convert these uppercase letters into lowercase letters and see if we find anything new..."

Conan's eyes moved slightly, and he immediately took a pen and wrote the lowercase versions of these capital letters on the paper.

They are α, ε, α, γ, η, ζ respectively.

Looking at these seven letters, Conan held his chin up and fell into deep thought again.

Although we have reasoned to this point, it is still difficult to associate the meaning based on these few letters alone.

Qin Zhibo then gave a further reminder, "Don't forget to separate the letters according to the different colors of the mahjong pieces..."

"Also, don't forget the general application areas of Greek letters."

After Qin Zhibo's two hints, Conan's brain suddenly lit up and he suddenly thought of something.

Could it be...

Conan quickly picked up the marker and quickly sketched out an incomplete shape between several points on the map.

"Eh?"

Dr. Agasa bent down and looked at this familiar shape, wondering: "What is this..."

Just when Conan was about to open his mouth to answer confidently, a faint voice suddenly came from the side.

"It's the Big Dipper."

Conan and Dr. Agasa turned around and found that Haibara Ai had been standing next to them.

At this time, Haibara Ai was wearing a white pajamas dress, her eyelids drooping listlessly, glancing at the map on the table.

"Gray, Graybara..." Conan was startled by the sudden appearance of Graybara Ai, "Why are you awake?"

"What? Can't I wake up?"

Huihara Ai gave Conan a scrutinizing look, "Or are you guys doing something bad behind my back?"

“How could that be?!”

"Haha~"

Conan scratched his head and smiled, but this suspicious attitude made Haibara Ai even more suspicious.

Haibara Ai glanced at the other objects on the table, saw the code paper with the mahjong tiles printed on it, raised her finger and asked lightly.

"what is that?"

"That's... a homework puzzle assigned by the teacher at school!"

As soon as Conan said this, he regretted it in his heart.

  Haibara Ai is in the same class as me, how could she not know what homework the teacher assigns her?

Besides, which teacher would give mahjong homework to elementary school students?

Haibara Ai immediately saw through Conan's lie, raised her hand to grab the code paper, and naturally saw the victim's information marked on it.

"Is this the case information?" Haibara Ai shook the piece of paper in her hand.

"Yes, yes!" Conan scratched his head and explained with a silly smile: "Uncle Qin got information about a serial murder case from the police, so he came to me to discuss it~"

"Discuss?" Huiyuan Ai glanced at Qin Zhibo, "Does he need to discuss it with you?"

This is quite hurtful.

Because the implication of this sentence is that with Qin Zhibo's ability, there is no need for him, Conan, to discuss the case.

The next second, Conan also understood the meaning and grinned.

"You care about me!"

"I don't care about you, I just came to see if there is anything to eat..."

After saying that, the nosy Haibara Ai strolled to the bar and skillfully prepared various ingredients for a simple breakfast.

Since Haibara Ai usually makes breakfast, she doesn't need Dr. Agasa's help and can do it on her own.

At this time, Dr. Agasa also lowered his head and whispered beside Conan's head: "Shinichi, is it okay not to tell Ai about this?"

"Well... this is also for her own good."

After that, Conan turned to look at Qin Zhibo and reasoned confidently: "This pattern should be the Big Dipper, right?"

"According to the Bayer star naming system, stars are named according to the constellation they belong to + the Greek alphabet."

"The five letters on the seven-barrel mahjong tiles are ε Ursa Major, Ursa Major, γ Ursa Major, η Ursa Major, and ζ Ursa Major, which are five of the Big Dipper's seven stars."

"And the letter corresponding to the first tube is the North Star, which is Ursa Minor Alpha."

"This means that the locations where all the victims were killed should form a complete Big Dipper and North Star on the map."

"There are currently six victims, and we are two short of a complete picture..."

　Thanks to Wu Yuetian for the 200 reward!

　　(End of this chapter)