Chapter 726: Chapter 726: The Password of Tomorrow’s Inn
Zhu Shu hurried upstairs, quickly returning to the Room 304 where Lu Yuwen was staying.
Both Su Man and Bai Youwei were present.
“How did it go? Did he notice?” Su Man asked anxiously.
Zhu Shu cautiously closed the door, then turned to Su Man and Bai Youwei and nodded affirmatively:
“I took a quick glance and saw some torn paper on the table, it must have been torn by him.”
Bai Youwei said, “It seems that he does indeed understand Chinese characters. Since he understands Chinese, it makes sense that he could also encode messages in Chinese.”
“Should we inform the Detective?” Su Man glanced at Bai Youwei, then at Zhu Shu, “Should we tell the Detective so he can arrest him?”
“How can he arrest him without any evidence?” Bai Youwei shook her head lightly, “He can easily deny it and fabricate any excuse to get himself off the hook. In any case, our current predicament is that despite almost certainly knowing who the mastermind is, we can’t sentence him with no tangible evidence. We must find more evidence.”
Frustrated, Su Man ran her fingers through her hair, “Ah! How do we find any… Those guys are too cunning, we can’t catch them at all!”
Zhu Shu raised her troubled brows, whispering, “Our task is to help the detective find the five murderers. Even if we arrest him now, it’s no use. As long as there’s a single one who escapes, all our previous efforts will be wasted…”
“Exactly,” Bai Youwei agreed, “We need to catch all five to win. Whether we fail to find one or fall short by one, the result is the same.”
She pulled out the half piece of paper from her pocket, lined it up along with the information she’d written on a separate piece of paper, and laid them out on the table.
“If we can decipher the true meaning of these characters, we might find a chance to counter-attack.”
“Easier said than done…” Su Man sighed while looking at those characters, “I can’t understand them at all…”
The words on the half piece of paper read:
The characters Bai Youwei copied from the wall read:
[囡·四囝囤囤·图回困围·固团围回·图囝圈团]
Bai Youwei circled the second half and analyzed calmly:
“The text on the wall, and the words on the half piece of paper, match perfectly.
I think that Lu Yuwen interrupted the opponent’s message transmission, making them realize their original method wasn’t safe enough. So they changed their strategy, deliberately posting the coded message where everyone could see.
Doing so, the message is successfully passed on, without worrying about it being seen through, and it even stirs a series of tension… The more tensed humans are, the more they tend to make mistakes.”
Staring at the characters, Zhu Shu furrowed her brows, “If it’s a cipher with a key, no matter how much we analyse it, we won’t find the answer.”
Su Man asked her: “What’s a key?”
“It’s something that can decipher the code, usually it’s a book.” Zhu Shu explained, “Suppose each of these characters stands for a page number. Then you just need to turn to that page in the key to find the corresponding character.”
Su Man’s face turned grave, “… If we don’t have the key, doesn’t that mean we’ve certainly lost?”
“Don’t worry, it won’t be that complicated,” Bai Youwei reassured them, “Bringing a key into the game is a liability, easy to be discovered. I think the cipher of these characters should have a simpler solution.”
Zhu Shu sighed, “I’ve tried dissecting the characters, homophones, reversing the order, but nothing works. I can’t decipher any useful information no matter how I try.”
Bai Youwei gave it some thought and said thoughtfully, “Even though it’s in Chinese, the code was written by a foreigner… We might be over-complicating things.”