Close the door, draw the curtains, crack open the window.
Richard flipped his notebook to the section he had marked and spread the comparison chart and etymology handbook beside it.
The Gargoyle crouched on the corner of the desk, serving as a paperweight.
There was no rush to collect material from the remaining candidate books. He could take his time.
Just this first one had already given him so much information that he needed to set aside time to digest it.
At first, the process for deciphering the embedded encryption was more complicated than any of the previous ones.
First, he had to pick the ciphertext words out of the main text one by one.
This step alone required an exceptionally precise grasp of Latin grammar.
Only by fully understanding the grammatical logic of the text could he tell which words belonged there and which had been inserted as ciphertext.
Then he had to arrange the selected ciphertext words in page order to form complete sentences.
Those sentences had themselves undergone another layer of substitution encryption.
It was like adding a step of "finding a needle in a haystack" to the usual process of deciphering a code.
Richard sighed inwardly.
Whoever had designed this encryption had probably meant to ensure that only someone with a certain level of Latin and the skills to decipher codes could read the contents.
Neither skill alone would be enough.
He bent over his notebook, pen in his right hand, while his left index finger traced the characters one by one.
The boost from Scholarship made breaking down roots almost instantaneous, and he analyzed Latin syntax far faster than a normal person.
About half an hour later, he had picked out all the ciphertext words on the first page and arranged them on a sheet