After lunch, Richard went upstairs to his room.
First, he lined up the three books he had borrowed from the library along the edge of his desk.
He took out the stack of transcribed manuscripts and spread them across the center of his desk.
There were seventeen songs in the "Well Forbidden Song" collection.
Folk songs, unlike classical poetry, rely on a sense of rhythm passed down orally.
The stress and tempo of every line had been polished over and over by generations of miners.
The rhyming parts were often the most transparent, unable to hide anything.
The important parts were those that didn’t rhyme but still flowed smoothly when read.
The third song, "When the Miner’s Lamp Goes Out," was about what to do when your lamp went out: don’t run around, just squat down, pull your hat brim low, and wait for the torch team to find you.
In the second line of every stanza, there was one clearly extra syllable.
The compiler noted in a footnote that this extra, drawn-out sound was a convention among the miners.
It was possibly done deliberately to match the rhythm of echoes in the mines.
Richard copied down the characters corresponding to those "extra syllables" and arranged them in order:
"Seventh Lane—something behind the wall is listening."
Richard’s pen froze over the manuscript.
Seventh Lane. It was obviously a place name.
He then turned to the seventh song, "Don’t Respond."
This one was a nursery rhyme that taught children what to do when they heard strange sounds in the mine.
Hear it once, don’t reply. Hear it twice, still don’t reply. Hear it three times, turn and walk away. Hear it four times, squat on the spot.
The compiler made no comment, only adding a sentence at the end:
"According to local old-timers, you must never answer any ’sound coming from a place where no one is.’"
Stringing together the last character of the first line of each stanza formed a Latin phrase:
"Os mutum, ne respondeas."
On the surface, the songs were just the dialect and superstitions of miners.
But once he peeled back the extra syllables, the unrhyming filler words, and the awkwardly phrased sentences and reassembled them, something else entirely lay hidden beneath.
The text had yielded several deciphered place names. After a moment’s thought, Richard pulled out a map of Brighton’s surroundings from the bottom shelf of his bookcase.
The map was a version printed by City Hall last year, with the West Suburb drawn in the greatest detail.
After all, that area was Brighton’s lifeblood; dozens of mines and riverside textile mills were packed densely together.
He used a pencil to list the two deciphered place names in the margin of the map.
Seventh Lane, Mute Wellhead.
He continued to gnaw away at the puzzle.
The ninth song, "Old Well Unreturnable"; the eleventh, "No Shadow at the Bottom of the Well"; the fourteenth, "Black Stone Cannot Be Asked"... He broke them down one by one.
By three in the afternoon, the number of deciphered place names had increased to three.
Seventh Lane—a side tunnel in the West Suburb’s third mine.
Closed in the year 1872 of the New Calendar due to a collapse. The local government ordered the main tunnel sealed afterward.
Mute Wellhead—the earliest ventilation shaft for the second mine.
It was abandoned after less than twenty years of use due to excessive cracks in the shaft walls. A cover has been sealed over the wellhead for sixty years.
Black Stone Mine—the site of an even older open-pit mine.
Abandoned in the 1820s of the New Calendar, its surface was now covered with overgrown weeds.
He found the corresponding locations for the three place names on the map one by one, circling them with a red pencil.
One red circle landed in the northwest corner, one to the south of due west, and one in the southwest corner.
The three circles formed a slightly irregular triangle.
Richard pressed the tip of his pencil onto the geometric center of the triangle and paused.
That area on the map had no markings whatsoever.
No mines, no roads, no residences. Even the contour lines were drawn sparsely, as if the cartographer had started getting lazy upon reaching that spot.
He used his Spiritual Vision to look at the map.
The paper itself, of course, had no reaction. Paper was paper, ink was ink.
But the longer his gaze lingered on that blank space, the more finely the Light Tree Leaves in his chest trembled.
This was his inspiration warning him.
Although it wasn’t as direct as when he’d used Divination on Hecate, it was clearly telling him that there was something very wrong with that area.
Richard averted his gaze and took a couple of deep breaths, letting the leaves settle back down.
He didn’t look at the blank space again, continuing to decipher the fifteenth song, "Unanswerable Pit."
This was the shortest song in the entire collection, with only four lines.
Its tune was also the simplest, almost a monotonous repetition.
The lyrics, roughly translated, were:
"Calling and calling, with no answer;Asking and asking, met with silence;The well is deep, the deeper the quieter;The way home, the way home, but no one returns."
The compiler had written a sentence underneath: "This tune is a little ditty for encouraging drinking during West Suburb miners’ gatherings and has no real significance."
Richard’s lip twitched after reading this sentence.
’A drinking ditty with such ominous lyrics hidden in its melody?’
’This compiler probably wasn’t even trying to fool anyone. Talk about a dead giveaway.’
He strung together the first word of each line, and then the last word of each line, getting two short phrases.
Reading the two phrases together:
"Well without echo, deep path of no return."
Following right after were two conjoined words, which had been forcibly separated by a comma.
He restored the two words and wrote them in the center of the blank area on the map: The Unanswering Pit.
The moment this name appeared, his inspiration began to sound the alarm again.
The deciphering wasn’t over. The epilogue of the seventeen folk songs still held something even more densely coded.
After struggling for nearly an hour, Richard finally deciphered the entire passage and transcribed it onto the back of his manuscript.
"The three locations noted above," the author had written at the beginning, "all belong to the category of minor Blood Soaking Points in our classification."
"The collapse in Seventh Lane in 1872 buried thirty-one miners inside the tunnel. Not a single body was recovered."
"In the last twenty years before the Mute Wellhead was abandoned, over a dozen people died at the bottom of the shaft—some burned, others suffocated. No one remembers the exact sequence."

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