While everyone else was eating and taking a break from training, Sun-young remained seated in her canoe with her katana on her lap and a serene expression. All this time, she had barely twitched.
Kazi didn't want to disturb in case she was too deep in meditation. He put a foot on the canoe and tested the waters. At last, Sun-young opened her eyes.
“So are we both having meditating fevers? Or is something else going on?” Kazi joked.
“Something else,” she replied.
“Fair enough. Is your stomach better?”
“Much better.”
“Don't push yourself . Meditating is still training.”
“I won't. I'll be fine.”
She said it with surprising enthusiasm. Okay, enthusiasm wasn't the correct term, but the point was that there was an uptick in her voice.
‘It's pretty obvious she fought the Templars during her recovery. Even with the System, her body needs recovering.’ Kazi put a foot on her canoe, silently asking if he could come. She gave a brief nod and he sat on the edge of it, facing her. ‘Normally, a person would go for physical exercises. Slowly rebuild their strength, but she's not doing that. She's trying to learn something about herself through meditating. She learned something from the Templars, or saw it and wants to learn.’
His hazel eyes flickered to her katana. It wasn't much of a mystery, the answer was sitting on her lap.
‘Anti-magic. Ms. Sun-young is learning to harness its power.’
There were the natural anti-magic properties of the sword but what about the aspects beyond the weapon itself? Was it possible for a player to conjure up beams of anti-magic like Ronin did? How would it coordinate with the mana system in place?
“You're too focused on nothingness and that makes you focus on your surroundings,” Kazi noted. “To be fair, I know it's hard since we're on a lake. What you should be doing though is focusing on a pattern.”
“That's my goal; to reach nothingness,” Sun-young replied. “I read books on it the other day, though to be honest, the principles are difficult to execute.”
“Ah, I get it. Anti-magic can only be harnessed through an empty mind, like an empty vessel, so to speak, likely so that it doesn't interfere with the magic inside you. ”
“Yes. It wasn’t until recently that I figured that out. The Ronin's technique is a stepping stone. I want to go beyond that.”
“I can try and teach you Third Eye Meditation,” Kazi suggested. “It's magical based but the core principles might help.”
“It's okay,” Sun-young said. “I think I know what to do.”
“Got it.”
Kazi turned his gaze over to Marta. She and William were hard at work, both attempting to find equilibrium in their respective fighting styles.
“Okay, I admit it, Marta.” William sighed and sat on his canoe. “You were right, this IS hard!”
“Mhm, mhm! Told you.”
“It makes for good training though. I bet it's like training on sand to get a better grip.”
Training. Hard work. Putting time into something small. Struggling with tasks.
The distance. All of a sudden, Kazi was able to see it again. He was so far apart from everyone else. He was reminded of home, of the whispers and the worship.
Kazi Hossain truly didn't comprehend it. To him, it all came naturally. Never once did he have to reconsider his position. His body simply responded to it as if it meant nothing.
He shook his head.
‘I should go back to calculating.’
Kazi zoned out from the world and began encoding the sky again. It was what he did in his spare time. The codes, the sequences, the numbers and letters, there had to be a meaning to them. It was a matter of trial and error rather than difficulty. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. There was nothing stimulating about it, nothing challenging.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Frequency analysis was key to decoding ciphers. Frequency did exist, though nothing came out of it.
‘It’s not a modern cipher, I can tell that much. There’s too much frequency and computers don’t make mistakes. Gods and humans do.’
The codes were on a sky between gates—or so Kazi theorized since there was no other explanation. The world was in an entirely different space-time, which for the Heavenly Tower wasn't an impossible thing. After all, when they entered the Server Room and went through the gates in there, it was akin to going through the Nether in Minecraft. A different world, a different dimension.
‘So far, regarding the creation of gates, I know this much: there is a sponsor and an architect. An individual or a group that creates the sponsors’ wish. For example, at Chichen Itza, it was Kukulcán. He pulled out because Jack was brutalizing the Kaloomte’. However, that implies two things: one, the gods aren’t totally invested in this. The whole design of the gate was to repeatedly kill and hunt down the witches. Jack killing them and me helping them must have been the last straw for Kukulcán to pull out. Two, the gods have a decent level of influence over the Heavenly Tower. Not so much that they can refuse participation, probably derived from a social aspect. Gods that don’t participate are looked down on. They also can’t make it to their liking either. That still leaves the question, how do I break the codes?’
If he wanted to brute force it, then he would need a day or two for himself. With the looming Gate 10, however, he couldn’t afford to do that. Marta and William needed to get stronger. They needed him.
‘I don’t need a computer to do Caesar ciphers or Vigenère ciphers. It's simple. But this is different. There’s Arabic lettering included and—’
“You're distracted,” Sun-young stated, snapping him from his thoughts. “Is something wrong?”
He blasted her with a hundred-watt smile. “Oh, it's nothing.”
His smile almost convinced her not to follow up. In fact, in the past, she wouldn't have.
“Is it?”
So what changed? She was asking. She was showing her worry.
Kazi didn't want to lie to her, especially considering that there wasn’t a reason to. “It's complicated,” he admitted. “Do you know what cipher coding is?”
A slow shake. “No.”
Okay, that complicated things. “Do you really want to know?”
“Is it math related?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been to the Sky,” she said. “I think I can handle it.”
Ah, right, the Suneung—the Korean college exam—was notorious for its difficulty. If there was anyone that was capable of understanding cipher coding, it was Sun-young, someone that passed the exam with flying colours and made it to one of the three most prestigious universities.
"Okay, so imagine you have a secret message you want to send to a friend, but you don't want anyone else to understand it if they happen to see it. So, instead of writing the message as it is, you decide to mix up the letters or use a special code to hide what it says. Let’s use the Caesar cipher. This code involves shifting each letter of the alphabet by a certain number of places. So, if 'A' becomes 'D' because you shift it three places, your message might look like random letters to someone who doesn't know the secret shift. So, if your original message was 'HELLO,' in a Caesar cipher with a shift of three, it will become 'KHOOR.' To decode it, your friend would need to know that the letters were shifted by three places to get the original message. There are many other types of codes too, like substituting letters with symbols or using keywords to encode messages. Each one has its own way of hiding the message and requires a key or method to decode it back to the original text."
“I’m following,” Sun-young said.
“Cool. So remember my fight with William? When, you know, he was going crazy? During our fight, I fell into another dimension, similar to the one where we encountered the Wendigo. There were codes in the skies. Numbers, letters, that sort of thing. There’s no internet in this world so I have to manually put the code in my brain and encrypt it.”
“So what was the arrangement?”
“Uhh…it’s kinda long.”
“Go for it.”
“As in, it would take me seven hours to say it all.”
“Oh. Okay.” Pause, blink, and a scrunch of her eyes. “Wait, when you meant the sky…you mean the sky?” She pointed at the blue skies of this world. Kazi nodded. “You memorized all of it?”
“Photographic memory comes in handy,” Kazi said, shrugging. “It’s why I specialize in linguistics. And architecture. And hardware. And cars. And city infrastructure. And, well, a lot of things actually.”
“Including cipher coding?”
“I worked for my government once. A short contract where I did a lot of data encryption. With computers and enough experienced people, you can accomplish a lot. In my brief time there, I figured out a way to decipher RSA encryption. RSA encryption relies on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers. The trick isn't about finding the primes themselves, but it's about deriving the private key from two very large primes. They use modular arithmetic and exponentiation to encrypt and decrypt messages. The method involves picking two distinct prime numbers, multiplying them to obtain the public key, and deriving the private key from the primes' factors. The challenge lies in the sheer difficulty of factoring the product of two large primes. But, in my case, I realized that the encryption process leaves some residual patterns in the ciphertext long-term.”
Sun-young bobbed her head along. “I see.”
“So, with the help of the government computer scientists, great guys by the way, we wrote an algorithm that detected patterns in the way the encryption altered certain blocks of data. These minute alterations can lead to partial information about the primes used, enough to narrow down the potential range of factors significantly. There's still a lot of brute forcing involved but it turned RSA decrypting from impossible to possible.”
"I see." Sun-young understood. Of course she did, she was well-educated and well-versed in language arts, math, English, and law. It wasn't until he got into the nitty-gritty that his explanations started to wear her down.
Fifteen minutes later, even as he did his best to explain in simple terms, she had no idea what he was talking about and awkwardly nodded her head along. Kazi eventually eased the conversation into ending with a joke and a small laugh.