I Saw It Too

It was a cipher.

Obviously, whenever either of them ran into trouble, they used this secure method to exchange messages. If the other person noticed something amiss, they would come check.

Looking at the two slips of paper, Lynch and Natalie could picture what had happened. After finishing the encrypted message, Ms. Maya had suffered a sudden breakdown, scribbling her desperate cry for help in plain text as an emotional release. Yet she had regained her composure afterward, pinned the paper beneath the desk board, gathered all the materials related to the Bester Tunnel, and left the newspaper agency.

“This happened after May 11th,” Lynch stated with certainty. “No one at the agency mentioned Maya smelling like putrid rot. That means she slipped back in afterward, left the message, collected all the files regarding the Bester Tunnel, and on the 13th, had Martha deliver the photos before vanishing without a trace.”

“Why did she take those documents? Did she want to keep them secret?”

“No, definitely not. Paper isn't particularly light. If she just wanted to keep the secrets safe, rather than risking hauling them away, tossing them into the steam engine room and burning them to ash would have been far safer. That's why I think someone else is looking for those things too.”

“If she didn't want anyone to find them, she could have burned them just the same,” Officer Natalie asked in confusion.

“Right. She couldn't let them fall into someone else's hands, yet she couldn't burn them either...” Lynch smacked his fist into his open palm. “I get it. She's probably using them as leverage. Hiss, she must have gone into hiding voluntarily, using those documents as a lifeline to stay alive. Damn it, what on earth actually happened?”

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

Everything that had occurred—Maya's whereabouts, Donnie's cause of death, the secrets behind the Bester Tunnel, and the eerie mysteries that had caused her disappearance and Donnie's death—was very likely hidden within these two encrypted notes.

Yet they couldn't decipher them.

It was thoroughly infuriating. The lady officer lightly pounded a fist on the note, biting her lip. “Encrypted documents... I've dealt with them before, but I don't understand them at all. It's too complex. I'd rather fight on the front lines.”

“Actually, I don't understand them much either, but I've heard that ciphers are generally divided into four categories. Ones with numbers and letters like this are mostly book ciphers.” Lynch was, of course, referring to things he had read on the internet in his previous life. “If we find the codebook and figure out the encryption pattern, we can read the contents.”

“As for what the codebook is, I'm afraid only the two of them knew.”

Lynch narrowed his eyes, sweeping his gaze across the office as he muttered slowly in thought, “Let's run through the scenario. In normal circumstances, I could write the message in advance and come plant it. But in an emergency where I desperately need to leave a plea for help, there's no telling where I might be beforehand. I couldn't count on having the codebook on hand. The only certainty is that when leaving the message, I had to be in this office. Therefore, keeping a copy of the codebook in the office ensures I can always write the message successfully.”

“Couldn't they carry the codebook with them?” The lady officer frowned. “I ran into this once before; cultists always carry their codebooks with them.”

“Neither of them is a special operative for a secret police agency, nor are they cultists living in the shadows. They're just reporters. Having an agreed-upon cipher for communication is already extreme enough. If they carried a dedicated codebook everywhere, their actual identities and professions would be highly suspect.”

“Makes sense. So the codebook is very likely in this room. And to make it easy for the other person to decode on the spot, they wouldn't take it with them either.”

Officer Natalie mimicked Lynch by surveying the room, then gave a self-deprecating smile. The mess here was truly terrifying. “Without any other clues, there's no way we can guess which one is the codebook, right?”

Lynch frowned deeply, pacing slowly around the office, his mind repeatedly reconstructing how Maya had left the message for Donnie.

Seeing this, Officer Natalie promptly kept quiet, gripping her sword and shadowing Lynch without a word.

The two circled the office several times. Lynch paused by the bookcase a few times, casually leafing through the books and papers inside, but ultimately shook his head and walked away. Yet just after taking two steps, his eyes lit up, and he swiftly spun back.

Officer Natalie held her breath instinctively, looking at him with anticipation.

“What a coincidence, haha. Under normal circumstances, it would indeed be impossible to guess, but right now might be a different story.” Lynch pointed to his nose. “Since that putrid stench is so easy to pick up—even transferring to the chair she sat on—would it have rubbed off on the codebook while she wrote the cipher with it?”

“Hiss, you're right!”

The lady officer's eyes sparkled too. Both immediately pounced on the mountain of paper.

They were all cluttered newspapers and documents. After a quick sniff, there was no noticeable stench of rot. A few sheets did carry a faint trace, but it was very light, likely just from when she rummaged through them searching for the tunnel files.

Next was the bookcase.

The moment they opened the bookcase doors, a wave of joy surged in their hearts.

They smelled it—and it was quite distinct.

There was no reason to touch the books in the bookcase just to clear out documents. The presence of the putrid odor here proved Lynch was on the right track.

And so, turning into sniffing hounds once again, the scene of the two crouching by the bookcase and flaring their nostrils was quite a sight. Lynch felt immensely fortunate that no one was around to see it; otherwise, his embarrassment would probably only be cured by transmigrating back to his hometown.

Still, the shame yielded results. The pair actually found the two books with the heaviest stench in the cabinet.

Geography of Rhine City and History of the Fifth Age of Lande—two thick tomes.

“You actually found them.” The lady officer looked at Lynch with a complex gaze, a mixture of astonishment and admiration in her eyes. Biting her lip, she whispered, “H-How did you come up with that?”

“I'm a detective, after all.”

Lynch shrugged and flipped open the Geography of Rhine City.

144B10F78V3C...

Finding the codebook made things much easier. The cryptography of this world was far behind his past life's era, so at least it wouldn't be absurdly convoluted.

Numbers? Perhaps corresponding to page numbers.

Letters? Converting them to numbers, perhaps line numbers.

Another number—which word in the line?

Then another letter, but each letter was early in the alphabet, which translated to a smaller number—could it be the letter position within that word?

Normally people construct whole words in ciphers; surely they weren't lazy enough to just spell it out letter by letter, right?

Muttering to himself, Lynch looked up the references. But after checking a few, he realized something was wrong—they didn't form any words at all.

He switched to the second book and searched using the same method, but what he got was still just a jumble of meaningless letters.

Lynch furrowed his brow. Was his cipher breakdown wrong, or had they found the wrong codebook? If the core reasoning was flawed, they were in trouble.

The anticipation in his heart gave way to unease, giving Lynch a full taste of suspense and anxiety. Forcing himself to calm down, he attempted the deciphering again.

Nothing changed; it still failed to form words.

“Don't rush,” the lady officer consoled softly instead. “If neither of these is it, we can search again. Maybe we missed something.”

“Wait... two books?”

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

“I get it. Both books are supposed to be used together!”

Lynch took a deep breath, opened both books side by side, and tried several more times. Then, in a flash of inspiration, he interleaved the page numbers of the two books page by page, applying the same method to decipher and jotting down the letters one by one on paper.

There were five paragraphs in total, all very short. The first paragraph alone made Lynch's scalp tingle.

“Anyone who sees it will die. That damned monster... Damn it, I saw it too.”