The study of Master Elias was less an office and more a testament to a lifelong, losing war against organization. Books were not on shelves so much as they were geological formations, rising in precarious, dusty towers from the floor. Scraps of parchment containing half-finished thoughts and cryptic notes were pinned to the walls, the curtains, and even to other, larger books. The air smelled of old paper, cold tea, and the frantic, electric energy of a mind that never, ever stopped working. Rina stood frozen in the doorway, her expression one of pure, horrified shock. As a servant trained in the meticulous upkeep of a noble house, this room was a physical assault on her senses. Ray could practically see her Survival Instincts screaming at her to flee, or worse, to attempt to clean it.

“Don’t even think about it,”

He whispered up to her. Master Elias, a man who looked like he had been caught in a small explosion in an ink factory, gestured them in with a wild, enthusiastic wave.

“Come in, come in, don’t just stand there gawking!”

“The secrets of the past wait for no one!”

He scurried over to a large, round table that was the only surface not entirely buried in clutter. On it were several pieces of dark, cracked stone tablets, each covered in the strange, elegant script Ray had seen on the commission notice.

“Behold!”

Elias declared, his eyes blazing with a fanatical light.

“The Enigmas of the Sunken City of Aeridor, found them myself last summer. The linguistic community says they’re indecipherable.”

“The historians say they’re a hoax, fools!”

“The lot of them, they lack vision!”

Ray stepped closer, his own Eccentric Scholar persona thrumming with a joyous, kindred energy. This was not a madman; this was a fellow academic trapped in a world of limited minds.

“You said it was a substitution cipher,”

Elias said, his voice dropping, his sharp eyes pinning Ray to the spot.

“A bold claim for a boy who has yet to attend his first formal rhetoric class”.

“The floor is yours, prove it.”

This was his audition. With a deep breath, Ray initiated Partial Immersion with the Eccentric Scholar. The world of dust and clutter faded into the background, replaced by the beautiful, clean, and logical world of pure data. He looked at the tablets, and the Scholar’s skills came online.

[SKILL ACTIVATED: PATTERN RECOGNITION & DEDUCTIVE REASONING (Eccentric Scholar)]

“I will require fresh parchment and charcoal,”

Ray said, his voice taking on a crisp, academic tone that was startlingly at odds with his eleven-year-old frame. Elias, delighted by the boy’s seriousness, immediately produced the requested items. Ray sat down at the table and began to work. To Rina, it looked as though he were simply copying the strange symbols from the tablets onto the parchment. But inside his mind, a furious process of analysis was underway.

“The script is composed of 27 unique symbols,”

The Scholar noted.

“A prime number. Interesting, but likely irrelevant.”

“Let’s begin with frequency analysis, in the Eldorian Common tongue, the vowels ‘E’ and ‘A’ are the most common letters.”

“We must identify the most frequently recurring symbols in these fragments.”

He began to make tally marks, his charcoal flying across the page. The symbol that looked like a jagged lightning bolt appeared far more than any other. The one that resembled a half-moon was a close second.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Hypothesis:

Lightning Bolt = E

Half-moon = A.”

The Scholar began to substitute the symbols with his hypothetical letters. A string of gibberish became slightly less gibberish.

“(… E A E … A E … E A …)”

“Now, search for common two-letter and three-letter word patterns,”

The Scholar continued.

“The most common three-letter word is ‘the’, in our substitution, does the pattern ‘T-H-E’ appear?”

“We need to find a three-symbol cluster ending in our ‘E’ symbol.”

He found one immediately. A symbol like a small triangle, a hook, and the lightning bolt.

[△ 훅 ϟ]

“Hypothesis:

Triangle = T.

“Hook = H.”

He applied the new substitution across all the fragments. Suddenly, words began to emerge from the chaos, like faces appearing in the clouds.

(T H E … A E … T H E E …)

It was working. He felt a surge of pure, intellectual euphoria. This was the greatest puzzle he had ever faced.

While Ray was lost in his world of ciphers, a different, quieter drama was unfolding behind him. Rina, unable to stand the oppressive chaos of the room any longer, had found a small stack of discarded, tea-stained parchments on the floor. Believing them to be rubbish, she quietly picked them up and headed towards the fireplace to use them as kindling.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”

Elias shrieked, leaping from his chair as if he’d been electrocuted. He snatched the parchments from her hand, clutching them to his chest.

“Woman, are you mad?!”

“That’s my half-finished thesis on the migratory patterns of the Shadow Weasel!

“It’s priceless!”

Rina froze, utterly mortified.

“I… I’m so sorry, Master Elias!”

“I thought it was trash!”

“Trash?!”

Elias sputtered, his face turning a dangerous shade of red.

“It is the foundation of my life’s work, get away from my piles!”

“There is an order to this chaos, a beautiful, intricate order only I can comprehend!”

He began to frantically check his other piles of “trash,” muttering to himself about the dangers of “unauthorized tidiness.” Ray never even looked up. The Eccentric Scholar persona had deemed the loud, emotional outburst as irrelevant, a distracting data-stream to be filtered out. He was on the verge of a breakthrough. He had identified enough letters to recognize a key, recurring word.

“Argentum,”

The Scholar realized. The ancient word for silver. He quickly deduced the remaining letters. [A R G E N T U M]. He now had a solid key of eight letters. He applied them to the first, smallest fragment of stone. The message, once a string of alien symbols, resolved itself into clear, understandable words. He had it. He stood up, his work complete. The entire process had taken less than an hour.

“Master Elias,”

He said, his voice pulling the still-muttering scholar from his organizational crisis. Elias turned, his eyes still wild.

“What is it, boy?”

“Have you given up?”

“No, Master,”

Ray said calmly. He held up the piece of parchment containing his translation.

“I have finished the first fragment.”

Elias snatched the parchment from his hand, his eyes scanning it with disbelief. On the page, Ray had written out the full cipher key, and beneath it, the clear, translated text.

“It is… a shipping manifest,”

Ray explained.

“From the port of Aeridor, dated to the last year of the Second Kingdom.”

“It details a shipment of ‘Seventy-seven crates of Sunstone pottery’ and ‘Two hundred barrels of salted Silverfin tuna,’ bound for a northern garrison.”

The old scholar’s hands began to shake. He looked from Ray’s neat, logical translation back to the stone fragment, then back to the parchment again. His eyes filled with tears. For decades, he had stared at these stones, seeing only an unsolvable riddle. This boy, this impossible child, had walked in and, in less than an hour, had made the stones speak. They weren’t a hoax. They were real.

“You did it,”

Elias whispered, his voice trembling with an emotion so profound it was painful to witness.

“You actually did it.”

He looked at Ray, no longer with skepticism, but with the fervent, zealous devotion of a disciple finding his prophet.

“The commission was for one hundred Marks per fragment,”

He said, his voice thick with unshed tears.

“This… this is worth ten times that.”

He fumbled with the Scholar’s Medallion on his own chain, his fingers clumsy with excitement, and initiated the transfer. A moment later, a welcome notification chimed in Ray’s mind.

[ACADEMIC MARKS TRANSFERRED: +100]

[SKILLED APPLICATION DETECTED]

[EVENT: CRYPTIC LANGUAGE DECIPHERING]

[PERFORMANCE EVALUATION: INSPIRED]

[Host successfully applied advanced principles of cryptography and pattern recognition from a past-life role to solve a problem considered impossible by current world experts. This represents a masterful cross-contextual application of skill. Largest Mastery Gain.]

[MASTERY GAIN: Pattern Recognition +20%, Deductive Reasoning +15%]

[INSPIRED RESULT: Your deep immersion in the language of pure logic has unlocked the Eccentric Scholar skill: ‘Cryptic Acuity’. You now possess an intuitive ability to identify underlying patterns in codes, puzzles, and seemingly chaotic systems.]

Ray felt a wave of triumphant relief. They had money. They could eat. He could afford his classes. He had solved the problem. But as he looked at Master Elias’s tear-streaked, ecstatic face, he realized he had just created a new one.

“You must help me with the others!”

Elias declared, grabbing Ray by the shoulders, his eyes wild with discovery.

“You will be my research assistant, we will unlock every secret of Aeridor together!”

“We will publish, we will change the course of history, you and I!”

Ray looked at the old scholar’s fanatical grip and realized his simple quest for lunch money had just entangled him with a powerful, brilliant, and dangerously obsessive new patron.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep