I Saw It Too

It was a cipher.

Clearly, when the two of them encountered trouble, they used this method of secrecy to pass information, and the other would check for it upon sensing something was wrong.

Looking at the two slips of paper, Lynch and Natalie could imagine Lady Maya finishing the ciphered document, suddenly having an emotional breakdown, and writing out a plea for help in plain text as a form of catharsis. Yet, she had eventually regained her composure, pinned the document under the tabletop, collected all the files related to the Bester Tunnel, and left the newspaper office.

"This happened after May 11th," Lynch said with certainty. "No one at the newspaper office mentioned that Maya had a stench of rot on her. This means she snuck back in later, left the message, collected all the files on the Bester Tunnel, and had Martha deliver a set of photos on the 13th before going missing."

"Why would she take these files? Was she trying to keep them secret?"

"No, absolutely not. The documents aren't light. If she wanted to keep them secret, it would have been safer to throw them into the furnace in the steam engine room and burn them rather than risking carrying them out. So, I suspect someone else was looking for those things as well."

"If she didn't want anyone to find them, she could have burned them anyway," Officer Natalie asked, looking puzzled.

"True, so she didn't want anyone to get their hands on them, but she couldn't burn them..." Lynch tapped his palm lightly. "I see now. She must have been using them to hold the other party hostage. Damn it, what on earth happened?"

There was no answer. The two of them stared at the two documents on the desk, falling into a momentary silence.

Everything that had transpired—Maya's whereabouts, the cause of Donnie's death, the secret behind the Bester Tunnel, and the bizarre, mysterious entity that caused her disappearance and his death—likely lay hidden within these two ciphered notes.

But they could not read them.

It was incredibly frustrating. The officer gave the slip of paper a light punch and bit her lip, saying, "Encrypted documents... I've encountered them before, but I don't understand them at all. They're too complex. I'd rather just fight them head on."

"I don't really understand them either, but I've heard that ciphers are generally divided into four categories. These ones with numbers and letters are mostly book ciphers," Lynch said, referring to what he had heard online in his previous life. "If you find the codebook and know the encryption pattern, you can read the content."

"But who knows what the codebook is besides the two of them?"

Lynch narrowed his eyes, scanning the office, and mused slowly, "Let's simulate this. Under normal circumstances, I could write a message in advance and come here to place it. But if an emergency occurs where I need to leave a message for help, I wouldn't know where I'd be beforehand. I couldn't count on having a codebook on hand. The only thing certain is that I must be in the office to place the message. Therefore, keeping a copy of the codebook in the office ensures I can leave a message successfully."

"But couldn't they just carry the codebook with them?" The officer frowned. "I encountered this once before; the cultists all carried their codebooks on them."

"The two of them aren't secret police agents or cultists hiding in the shadows. They're just reporters. Agreeing on a cipher for contact is already extreme. If they also made a codebook to carry around, their identities and professions would be highly suspicious."

"That makes sense. So the codebook is likely in this room. To make it convenient for the other person to check on the spot, they probably wouldn't have taken it away."

Officer Natalie followed Lynch's lead, scanning the room, then offered a wry smile. The place was a terrible mess. "Without other clues, there's no way to guess which one is the codebook."

Lynch frowned, pacing slowly around the office, his mind repeatedly deducing how Maya might have left the message for Donnie.

Seeing this, Officer Natalie immediately fell silent, following Lynch with her hand on her sword.

The two circled the office several times. Lynch stopped by the bookcase a few times, leafing through books and papers, but eventually shook his head and moved on. However, just two steps after turning away, his eyes lit up and he turned back rapidly.

Officer Natalie instinctively held her breath, looking on with anticipation.

"What a coincidence. Heh, if it were any other situation, it would indeed be impossible to guess, but now that's not necessarily true," Lynch said, pointing to his nose. "Since the stench of rot is so easy to pick up, to the point that even the chair she sat on became tainted, wouldn't she have picked it up while using the codebook to write the cipher?"

"Hiss, you're right."

The officer's eyes gleamed as well. Both of them immediately lunged at the mountain of paper.

It was all a mess of newspapers and documents. They sniffed them roughly, but there was no obvious stench of rot. A few had a faint scent, but it was very weak, likely just from having been touched while searching for the tunnel documents.

The next step was the bookcase.

As soon as they opened the cabinet door, a wave of joy hit them.

They smelled the rot, and it was distinct.

There was no need to touch the books in the cabinet to clean up the documents; the presence of the foul stench here proved that Lynch's line of thinking was correct.

Turning into creatures of scent once again, the scene of the two of them sniffing around the bookcase was truly a sight to behold. Lynch felt fortunate that no one was around to see it, or his embarrassment would have been so great he would have had to reincarnate back to his homeland to recover.

However, the shame was rewarded. The two of them managed to find the two books with the strongest stench from the cabinet.

A Geography of Rhine City and A History of the Fifth Age of Lande, both thick volumes.

"You actually found them." The officer looked at Lynch with a complex expression, a mix of surprise and admiration, and whispered, "H-how did you think of that?"

"I'm a detective, after all."

Lynch shrugged and opened the geography book.

144B10F78V3C...

Finding the codebook made things much easier. The level of cryptography in this world was far behind his homeland's era; at the very least, it wasn't overly absurd.

Numbers? Maybe they corresponded to page numbers.

Letters? Converted to numbers, maybe they corresponded to line numbers.

Another number, was this the word count?

Then another letter, but each letter was quite early in the alphabet, resulting in small numbers. Could they be the position of the letter within the word?

People usually build ciphers around words. Surely they weren't lazy enough to spell them out letter by letter?

Muttering to himself, Lynch searched, but after checking a few, he realized something was wrong. It didn't form any words at all.

He switched to the second book and checked it the same way, but still only ended up with a pile of meaningless letters.

Lynch frowned. Was the cipher decryption wrong, or was the codebook incorrect? If his line of reasoning was wrong, he was in trouble.

His initial anticipation began to turn into anxiety, letting Lynch fully experience the feeling of apprehension. He forced himself to calm down and decrypted it once more.

Nothing changed. It still didn't form any words.

"Don't rush." The officer comforted him softly. "If neither of these is it, we'll keep looking. Perhaps there's something we missed."

"Wait, two books?"

Lynch suddenly realized the problem. Given the urgency at the time, Maya shouldn't have had the leisure to flip through other books. Why did both have the smell on them?

"I understand. Both books must be used together."

Lynch took a deep breath, opened both books, and tried again. After a flash of inspiration, he arranged the page numbers of the two books in alternating order and decrypted them using the same method, writing the letters down one by one.

There were five segments in total, all very short. The first segment made Lynch's scalp tingle.

"Anyone who sees it will die. That damn monster. Damn it, I saw it too."

I see some friends dislike little Martha. I figure a ten-year-old child who grew up in the slums with a father who died early and a mother who spoiled her—if her worldview is only twisted to this extent, it's actually not that bad.

Besides, if she were obedient and sensible from the start, there wouldn't be a story to write. It's only after she's annoying that there's the pleasure of watching her slowly grow.