Chapter 050: Disassembling the Text
Li Daming was lost in thought as he flipped through an engraved book. I asked him several times before he came to his senses and told me that he wanted to go home.
I asked where he was going.
Li Daming said, "I remembered something about this Yin text, so I'm going to go home and get it. We'll discuss it when I get it back." Then he left in a hurry.
After he left, I was lying on the sofa, flipping through the engraved books, but I couldn't understand them no matter how hard I tried. The words were not only hard to understand, but they also felt evil after I looked at them for a long time. There was an indescribable weirdness in the way the strokes were connected.
I looked at Wang Yue's notebook again. It was filled with her conjectures and essays about Yinwen. Most of them were of little value, but there was an interesting detail in it. Wang Yue found Yinwen too difficult to understand, so she tried a strange method. She let herself sleepwalk. This sleepwalking method was different from that of ordinary people. Wang Yue used some secret magic to put herself in a state of deep sleep.
She wanted to decipher the secret text through her sleepwalking state, perhaps she could make some discoveries.
The final result was that the matter became increasingly weird. After sleepwalking, Wang Yue did interpret the negative text and even wrote it down. But after she woke up and looked at what she had written while sleepwalking, she found that she couldn't understand a single word!
The characters written after sleepwalking were neither Chinese characters nor negative characters, but another inexplicable type of writing.
It was getting weirder and weirder. Wang Yue didn't know what the third text was. But she thought it was an unexpected discovery, so she kept trying to interpret it.
I remember that night when I first saw Wang Yue sleepwalking in the community. I was so scared that I broke out in a cold sweat. Now when I think back, I didn't expect there was such a strange and profound background behind it.
I turned to the back of the notebook, and the pages there recorded the words written by Wang Yue in her sleep. I couldn't help but feel cold all over. The weirdness of these words was comparable to that of inscriptions, and each stroke looked like a soul-calling order from the King of Hell. Many of the words seemed to be deformations of the Chinese characters for "corpse" and "ghost". Put together, they looked spooky and made me feel cold even in the hottest summer.
I quickly closed my notebook and closed my eyes, my head buzzing.
I don't know how long it took, but there was a knock on the door. I went to open it and saw Li Daming coming back with a backpack. I looked at him in confusion, and he walked to the sofa, unzipped the bag, and dumped out the contents, which were several large books and some notebooks.
"What is this?" I asked.
Li Daming said: "When I saw the inscription just now, I felt that I had seen this kind of writing before."
"Ah?" I was surprised: "Have you seen it?"
"Yes." Li Daming said, "In the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China, there was a child prodigy who became a great scientist. His name was Jiang Xizhang. When he was a child, he was almost chosen to be Puyi's companion, and was praised by Kang Youwei as the first child prodigy of the Republic of China. When he was ten years old, he wrote a book called "Illustrated Explanation of the Great Thousand Worlds". The content of the book is a fantasy catalog of the universe, using the traditional Chinese cosmology to discuss the world of the universe, so it is called "The Great Thousand Worlds". In this book, the young Jiang Xizhang invented a kind of cosmic language for communication between earthlings and aliens. He said that this is the common language of advanced civilizations in the universe..."
I interrupted him: "How old was Jiang Xizhang when he wrote this book?"
"Ten years old." said Li Daming.
"Written in the late Qing Dynasty?" I asked.
He nodded.
"Is it possible? A ten-year-old child in the late Qing Dynasty wrote a guide on how to communicate with aliens?" I smiled and shook my head.
Li Daming said: "Doesn't it sound extremely unreasonable? So now there is a saying that someone did it in the name of Jiang Xizhang. We won't investigate this."
"What do you mean by mentioning him?" I asked puzzledly.
"Don't you understand yet?" Li Daming said, "The cosmic writing invented by Jiang Xizhang is Yinwen!"
The roots of my hair stood up: "How, how is this possible?"
Li Daming took out a book from the books that were poured out. It was a black leather book with yellowed pages. It was very old. The words "Illustrated Explanation of the Three Thousand Worlds" were written in traditional Chinese on the cover.
"This book is out of print." Li Daming said, "My father found this book in an underground market in Henan when he was young. Or maybe it was fate. My father did it unintentionally a few years ago, and his son happened to benefit from it today."
Li Daming opened the book, turned to a page and handed it to me.
It was all in traditional Chinese characters, which was very difficult to read. I managed to read it and roughly understood what it meant. Jiang Xizhang called this type of text "Crossing the River Styx" font. What does it mean? It means crossing the River Styx to another world.
To be honest, I absolutely do not believe that this was written by a ten-year-old child, especially in the late Qing Dynasty. After reading it carefully, the whole theoretical system is quite complete, and the setting is imaginative but logical. How could it be written by a child? To be honest, I can't make it up.
I looked carefully at the contents of the book and compared them with the engraving, and they were surprisingly similar.
Li Daming sat down and pointed at the book. He said, "Look, he annotated each character. The basic elements of this kind of characters are 'up, down, left, right, gold, wood, water, fire, earth...', which are the basic perceptions of the world. The structure of Yinwen is more complicated, but the basic elements have not changed. It is still these things."
My heart was pounding, and my throat was moving, as if I had glimpsed the door to a new world: "Damin, you are really amazing."
Li Daming laughed, "Nowadays, we all focus on online learning. How can we be so closed-minded as before and not share good things? Just like before, if I didn't get angry, you couldn't tell me this."
"Hey, I have my reasons too." I explained, "Wang Yue repeatedly told me that the Yinwen is of great importance. Once it is released, I'm afraid it will be coveted by many people, causing unnecessary trouble."
"Tell me what you are afraid of." Li Daming said, "Come, come, let me decipher the secret text."
"It would be even better if you could crack it." I sighed, "Then you wouldn't have to go to the trouble of looking for Liu Yang."
"No, no." Li Daming said, "There is only the lower volume of Yin text here. We don't The worst thing about this kind of thing is to have only a partial understanding. We still have to find Liu Yang, and we still have to do our work."
Li Daming and I took papers and boxes and started to study the texts on the engraved books. It was the first time I realized that there was such a difficult yet interesting job in the world.
Each character can be separated, and each part is an independent element. The difficulty lies in how to understand them when they are put together. For example, there is a Yin character with an upper and lower structure. After breaking it apart and comparing it with the character table in "Da Qian Shi Jie", we can know that it is composed of "上" and "水". But how to understand them when they are put together is too difficult.
When “上” and “水” are put together, we can understand it as rain, and it seems to be good to understand it as cloud. If we use our imagination a little more, it seems to be reasonable to say it as a transport plane. The transport plane transports water to support the disaster area .
So, even if we find the pattern, when we really try to figure it out, it feels so confusing and hard to determine.
We studied until late at night. Li Daming threw down his pen, rubbed his eyes and said, "I know what is written in the first volume of Yinwen."
What am I asking.
Li Daming said: "The first volume must have recorded the composition principles of Yinwen. We can now interpret the individual components of the characters, but we lack a rule to connect them. The first volume must be about this!"
"You mean, if there is no upper volume, the Yinwen is still a heavenly book?" I said.
Li Daming yawned: "I can't hold on any longer. I need to sleep for a while. I have to go to work tomorrow." He went to the bedroom to rest.
I was not sleepy at all. I smoked a cigarette and flipped through the Yinwen books, comparing them with Jiang Xizhang's book. Where did this kind of writing come from? Was it invented by Jiang Xizhang, or did he learn about it in some way?
What is the meaning of this text?
After thinking for a while, my hair stood on end, and I suddenly felt that I should tell Wang Yue about this. I walked into the bedroom, sat in front of Wang Yue, and entered the bardo realm through the spiritual bracelet.
Wang Yue was still sitting in front of the high wall covered with negative writings, in a daze, and her movements seemed to have not changed since I left.
I walked over and whispered her name behind her. Wang Yue turned around suddenly and said in surprise: "Lin Cong, you came to see me."
"Aren't you bored here?" I asked in confusion. "You've been researching here. What have you come up with?"
"Eh." Wang Yue said, "You've been gone for less than a minute, and you're back again. I don't feel bored yet."
I was shocked, and then I realized that the time here was completely different from the real time outside. A whole day had passed since I last came in, but for Wang Yue it was only one minute.
I told her everything that happened that day. When Wang Yue heard that Li Daming had found the source and origin of the Yin text, she was so shocked that her eyes widened and the expression on her face did not fade for a long time.
"Everything is stuck in the upper volume of the Yinwen now." I said, "As long as we find the upper volume, we will quickly crack the secret."
Wang Yue shook her head and said with a wry smile, “We have to wake Liu Yang up first, but that’s not that easy.”
"By the way, Lin Cong , I want to entrust you with something," she said.
"Go ahead."
Wang Yue said, "I'm afraid I'll be stuck in this difficult situation for a long time. If I can't get out, my body will gradually change. It's definitely not okay to leave it like this, so I want to ask you to make a phone call." She gave a phone number: "After the call is connected, you can find someone called Jie Ling and tell him about my situation. He knows how to deal with it. He will use the best method to preserve my body. Don't worry about the rest."
