He matched the numbers to the words in the books according to his idea, but none of the six possible book-and-number combinations he ultimately listed formed a meaningful sentence.
"Hmm, I guessed wrong. Was my whole line of thought wrong, or was this more complicated than I imagined?"
Thinking that this had nothing to do with him, he decided to try once more and burn the letter if it still did not work. Shade examined the characteristics of those numbers again, and when he saw the last digit in each group, another thought occurred to him:
"Could the last digit correspond not only to a book number, but also to an offset? Does the number one mean that after finding the corresponding word, I jump to the next word?"
There was no basis for this idea, but trying it would not cost any Gold Pounds. So he tried another twelve possibilities: moving forward one, two, or three words, and moving backward one, two, or three words.
Though the densely written page was still full of meaningless sentences, Shade noticed something:
"Gleanings from the Western Front corresponds to 1, The Queen and Her Lovers corresponds to 2, and The Silver Knight corresponds to 3. If I find the word and move backward by the corresponding number, the result still isn't understandable, but after skipping the words corresponding to '2,' it seems to make some sense. Could it be..."
Shade's eyes widened slightly.
"Numbers 1 and 3 mean moving backward, while number 2 means moving forward?"
Shade seemed to feel a rush of heat rise from his back, then realized it was the tail of the cat perched on his shoulder brushing against him.
His excitement made him eager to translate it again. This time, he only needed to look up the