??Chapter 160: Chapter 153 Numbers Seven
Chapter 160: Chapter 153 Numbers Seven
Dr. Zhang withdrew his arm again and returned to the wooden door, looking at the numbers… “Uh… can this really be a sentence?”
Liu Yi nodded confidently, “Definitely, there’s even a ‘question mark’ right there, which clearly ans it’s asking us a question.”
“But there’s not a single Chinese character or even a letter…”
Liu Yi continued, “So what if there isn’t… Isn’t language just a bunch of aningless strokes put together to create a ans for recording and communication?”
Dr. Zhang was startled, he had had similar thoughts when he was younger, about the origin of the world, the end of the universe, and the like. But as he grew older, he shed those fleeting thoughts completely.
But on reflection, it was indeed so. Words, after all, are made up of strokes or letters to form phrases, which in turn are used to create sentences. They are aningless in themselves; what’s aningful is the “information” they convey. Like a circle on the ground, to a lover of mathematics, it might represent the number “0,” to a writer, it is the letter “O,” to a painter, it might signify the start of an “artistic piece,” and to those engaged in the study of the Tao, it might denote “the unity of all things.” In reality, though, it might just be a pit left by a monkey’s flatulence.
Following this train of thought, maybe sounds, colors, numbers, these things are also aningless; rely “symbols” created by humans for convenience. And those so-called mathematics, physics, science, might well be nothing more than various “imaginings” humans have devised to mask their ignorance.
…
…
“Uh~”
Suddenly, Dr. Zhang paused, not sure why, but the other’s words had led him to think of a bunch of bizarre things. He quickly shook his head to cast aside these impractical thoughts.
The pressing issue at hand was to figure out the series of numbers before him…
So let’s get back on track then. As previously ntioned, if this stretch of numbers is not just numbers, what could it represent? There were too many possibilities, such as strokes, letters, pinyin, or even “piano key sequences”—like using musical notes like “do, re, mi,” playing a tune on the piano, then decoding the lyrics according to the rhythm… uh… but that thod of solving puzzles is way too geeky. It might work in a conservatory but hardly in a ntal hospital; who in the world could co up with that? And then there’s “Morse code.” Probably not one in a thousand people would know that.
So, after thinking it over, Dr. Zhang found that with so many possibilities, he could scarcely find any clue. He turned his gaze back to Liu Yi and asked, “Hey~ did you co up with anything…?”
At that mont, Liu Yi had his finger deep in his nostril, digging away, while he responded, “Hmm… Initially, I thought of alphabetical order. The beginning ’12’ is fine, it stands for ‘L’ but then the ‘324’ can’t be translated. Then I thought about syllables~ but the numbers go all the way up to 9 here~ so that’s a no-go… Finally, I considered the number of strokes in Chinese characters… uh… there can’t possibly be a character with 324 strokes, you could probably draw a bunch of talismans for exorcism with that many… So… The only thing I can understand now is that last question mark…”
Dr. Zhang nodded; when the other brought up that the “numbers” represented a “sentence,” he had already thought of these, but of course, none of those deductions held up… He also tried the 3×3 grid arrangent, but apart from so wobbly lines, he ca up empty. There was also the thod commonly used in spy movies; using a book, where every number corresponds to “which page,” “which line,” “which word,” stringing them together into a complete sentence. Yet, without a single book around, where to even start comparing…
Suddenly
“No way…”
Dr. Zhang muttered quietly as if he had thought of sothing, lifting his head to glance at Liu Yi… By now, Liu Yi had finally dug out a lump of snot from his nose, trailing a slimy string, he twirled it into a small ball on his fingertip, and then… don’t panic, he didn’t eat it, afterward he just flicked it with two fingers, who knows where it ended up. “Couldn’t this guy actually have morized an entire book, could he…?” Dr. Zhang pondered.
He quickly sought confirmation of his idea from the other.
The answer he got was
“You’ve watched too many movies, what you’re talking about is ‘hyperthysia,’ which is a ‘neurological phenonon.’ I have a ‘ntal disorder!’ A ‘ntal disorder,’ understand?”
The other was waving his arms displeasedly, as though he’d suffered so unfathomable insult.
…Well then, looks like that idea was out too. So, Dr. Zhang had no choice but to rub his eyes and reluctantly clear his mind of all the guesses he’d just made, starting over from scratch.
…
He looked at the board again; the sequence of numbers still sat there quietly.
“12▍324▍5667▍72▍4868▍6▍5298?”
First of all… he excluded the “?” symbol, since in most cases, it should represent a question, and moreover, this question mark must have been deliberately left by the writer of the numbers, or else Liu Yi and Dr. Zhang really would have no way in.
Next, it was the breaks between each number. These were easy to understand; the intervals served to separate the ssage each set of numbers represented.
For instance, the 1 and 2 at the start, joined together, signify one piece of “information,” a standalone one, then the following sequence of 2, 3, 4 numbers form another ssage. Just as if the number “2” stands for a “丨” and the number “3” for a shorter “-“, and “4” for a longer “—”, then 23 would be a cross “十”, and 234 would represent the character “土”. Nearly all languages in the world are built upon this principle.
Of course, this is just an analogy. The numbers don’t have to represent strokes; they could also represent letters or sothing similar.
“Letters?”
At that mont… Dr. Zhang seed to have thought of sothing else and stared intently at a particular spot among the row of numbers.
Between two vertical dividers, there was a distinct number
…
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