Clown Game
Chapter 160 - 160 153 Numbers Seven

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 means 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 meaningless strokes put together to create a means 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 meaningless in themselves; what’s meaningful 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 meaningless; merely “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 mentioned, 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 method of solving puzzles is way too geeky. It might work in a conservatory but hardly in a mental hospital; who in the world could come 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 come up with anything…?”

At that moment, 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 arrangement, but apart from some wobbly lines, he came up empty. There was also the method 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 something, 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 memorized 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 ‘hyperthymesia,’ which is a ‘neurological phenomenon.’ I have a ‘mental disorder!’ A ‘mental disorder,’ understand?”

The other was waving his arms displeasedly, as though he’d suffered some 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 message 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 message. 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 something similar.

“Letters?”

At that moment… Dr. Zhang seemed to have thought of something else and stared intently at a particular spot among the row of numbers.

Between two vertical dividers, there was a distinct number

…