For the next two days, Richard first sorted the entire stack of documents by thickness.
He opened the Double Overwrite text from the top of the stack, read two pages, then closed it again.
Directly trying to decipher something beyond his current level of Scholarship would be extremely inefficient.
To crack an encryption, you first had to figure out who wrote it, who they studied under, and which school of thought it belonged to.
Encryption systems, much like a person’s handwriting or a composer’s style, had their own ’schools.’
The Alexandrian School was just one of them.
It originated from the Alchemy Documents of the Ptolemaic Era and focused on layers of wrapping, concealing notes within other notes. The two comparison charts Mr. Hutton had given him followed this very approach.
But Imperial University had more than just the Alexandrian School.
Every High-level Academy with a Classics Department cultivated its own "academic style."
Richard flipped through the "Expanded Comparison Chart for Late-Period Variants of the Alexandrian School" his aunt had sent, and the more he looked at it, the more it seemed like a dialect.
The academic style of Imperial University’s Classics Department preferred to break keywords down and embed them in the Latin subjunctive mood, hiding information through changes in mood.
A certain academy in the North, founded on theology, had an academic style that habitually stitched cyphers into Bible Chapter numbers.
A few other, more obscure schools simply used Alchemy symbols as a substitution table. To the uninitiated, it looked like a formula, but an expert could read an entire Curse Spell structure from the sulfur, mercury, and salt.
His aunt had included a small, handwritten note in the package, placed on top of the expanded comparison chart.
There were only three lines of text on the note:
"Identify the academic style first, then crack the text."
"The trick to identifying the style: see which word it’s most reluctant to break apart."
"The more convoluted the deconstruction, the more important the hidden information."
Richard tucked the note into his notebook.
He spent an entire evening comparing the copies of Latin annotations for Church rites and facsimiles of Gaelic Ancient Script that his aunt had sent.
He specifically looked for the parts that the encryptors had repeatedly convoluted—places where a single word could have been used, but was intentionally broken into three parts.
The most aggressively convoluted part was often the "birthmark" of a particular school.
By the evening of the second day, he had started to get the hang of it.
The Imperial University style, whenever it encountered the word "Curtain," would never write it directly. It would always be broken down into "thin place" plus a verb in the subjunctive mood.
As for the layer of annotations by medieval monks on the Whitcomb Boundary Stone, whenever "Seal" was encountered, it was replaced with "Saint’s Guardian," and whenever "Technique" was encountered, it was replaced with "Sacred Rites."
This was something Edmund had talked about at Whitcomb. Richard had taken notes back then, and now they were proving useful.
After figuring out the schools of thought, he looked back at the Entry Level exercise. The symbols that were originally a jumbled mess, he could now at least tell which layer was the "skin" and which was the "pulp."
Richard leaned against his desk and pulled up the panel for a look.
[Scholarship] Lv. 2, 95% progress.
He hadn’t deciphered any text in the past two days, yet just by studying the encryption schools, the progress bar had climbed several notches.
He closed the panel and stretched.
Evelyn’s voice came from downstairs.
"Brother! I made caramel pudding!"
"How many?"
"Six."
"You only made six all afternoon?"
"Are you coming down or not!"
Richard smiled, got up, and went downstairs.
When the pudding was served, Evelyn had deliberately drizzled an extra spoonful of caramel on the one in the very middle.
"This one’s yours."
"How come mine gets an extra spoonful?"
"Because for the past two days, you’ve shut yourself in your room as soon as you get home, like some old scholar. Your eyebrows have been practically knitted together."
The young girl stuffed the spoon into his hand. "Eat something sweet. It’ll unknit your brow."
Richard took a spoonful.
The pudding melted on his tongue. The bitterness of the caramel came first, followed by the sweetness of the custard, which tempered it.
"It’s delicious."
"Of course it is." Evelyn put her hands on her hips.
Their Mother, who was slicing bread nearby, didn’t say a word, but added half a piece of pudding to Richard’s bowl.
......
On Saturday morning, Richard went to Number 24 Helfier Road as usual.
His lessons with the Dawn family were completely different from last year.
Tom sat at the desk, a Latin verb conjugation chart spread out before him.
There was no slingshot on the desk, nor was the pirate map with its eight islands taped to the wall.
"Amo, amas, amat," Tom recited, stumbling but not getting stuck. "Amamus, amatis, amant."
"Now the past tense."
"Amabam... amabas... amabat."
Richard didn’t interrupt, waiting for him to finish reciting all six persons of the first conjugation before drawing a checkmark next to the completed section.
"Where’s your slingshot?"
"Put it away." Tom glanced at his desk drawer.
"And the map?"
"Put that away too." Tom scratched his head. "I don’t need to look at it to remember the declensions anymore."
"Today, memorize this word—corpus."
Richard thought for a moment, then wrote two derivative meanings below the word ’corpus’:
"Legion (soldiers gathered together)"
"Collection (texts gathered together)"
Tom looked at the two lines of text and suddenly raised his head.
"Sir, why didn’t you explain it like this sooner?"
"Because you couldn’t sit still back then."
Richard tapped the tip of his nose with the pencil. "Now that you can sit still, we can talk about other things."
Tom let out a "heh" and didn’t argue.
For the rest of the lesson, Richard told a story.
He told the story of *Coriolanus*, a tragedy of Ancient Rome written by Shakespeare.
He was a Roman general who was granted the honorary name "Coriolanus," meaning "the man who conquered Corioli."
Later, he was exiled from the city of Rome, so he defected to an enemy nation and personally led their army to the gates of Rome.
His mother knelt outside the city gates and begged him to withdraw his troops.
"Did he withdraw?" Tom asked.
"He did."
"And then what?"
"Then the people of the enemy nation killed him as a traitor."
"He listened to his mother, and he died because of it?"

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