He stopped at the final entry in that sequence of commands.
Not because he could not understand its contents—the decoding process had already allowed him to fully analyze its encoding logic and functional purpose. He stopped because the spacing between that entry and the others in the sequence was uneven. The preceding entries were arranged at roughly uniform intervals, yet there was a gap between the final entry and the one before it that was about three times the usual spacing. That gap looked unnatural within the overall layout of the command sequence, as though space had been reserved during its creation for something that should have existed but had not been filled in at the time. Its numbered position in the sequence happened to correspond exactly to the missing position he had previously identified from the residual fragment data left by Shibai.
He remained at that gap for some time, using his perception to conduct a complete scan of the gap itself at a finer resolution. The scan showed that the space was not truly blank—at its exceedingly thin underlying layer was a piece of annotation code written with extremely low visibility. Its embedding method differed from that of the other entries in the command sequence. Rather than being directly placed within the sequence through ordinary syntactic structure, it existed as a segment of blank space reserved at a certain point in the sequence, with a related code embedded at the bottom of that blank space in reverse. The contents of that related code had to be read backward. Once read, it produced a retrieval index pointing toward an independently stored data block, and the format of that index matched the packaging format used in the final aggregate of content Shibai had sent before dissipating.
After confirming the existence