Yukinoshita's Correction Method

Both of their gazes turned to Dong Yunshan.

Dong Yunshan picked up the enamel mug, blew on it gently, touched it to his lips, then raised his head under the gazes of the two high school beauties. "I like you too."

"Really?" Yui Yuigahama's eyes widened in delighted surprise.

Yukino Yukinoshita's slender brows drew together slightly, and clear displeasure showed on her face. "Why?"

"Generally speaking," Dong Yunshan said, breathing in the rising aroma from the mug, "any message from a girl that you can't understand is equivalent to 'I like you.' Since it was a reply received after a confession, naturally it means 'I like you too.'"

"When it comes to disappointing me, you never disappoint." Yukino Yukinoshita sighed. "So it really was a guess."

"It was a well-reasoned analysis," Dong Yunshan corrected her. "People don't put this much thought into someone they're not interested in. Usually it's just 'oh,' 'mm,' 'talk later,' 'hehe,' 'I'm busy,' 'I'm going to take a bath,' 'you're a good person,' 'we're not right for each other,' 'I've always thought of you as an older brother,' or 'let's start as friends first'..."

"What a wealth of experience..." Yui Yuigahama looked at him with sympathy.

"That was my friend's experience." Dong Yunshan coughed lightly. "Worthy of sympathy, but I feel like he had it coming."

Because of the steaming heat, Yukino Yukinoshita's pink lips looked even more crystalline, and her cool, clear voice drifted out. "Do you have any friends whose lives are less miserable?"

Dong Yunshan took a sip of tea. "Do you have any friends?"

"You... may make a request of me." Yukino Yukinoshita shot him a sideways look. "That way, the previous order will also be completed."

Dong Yunshan raised one eyebrow. "From the sound of it, you've already solved it?"

"Your answer was correct." Yukino Yukinoshita set down her teacup. "But without the decryption process, even a correct answer becomes wrong."

"I was too lazy to study it much at first..." Dong Yunshan set down the enamel mug. "Yuigahama, please repeat the problem one more time."

"It was my friend's friend's student council friend who confessed to a girl who was also on the student council, and then that girl, who likes classical ciphers, replied with a five-layer encrypted cipher." Yui Yuigahama showed him the email she had received. "Dot dot dot dot dash slash, dot dash dash dash dash..."

"Morse code," Yukino Yukinoshita interrupted Yui Yuigahama. "It decrypts to 4194418141634192622374."

"Morse what?" Yui Yuigahama blinked blankly.

"Morse code. It's a signal code made of on-and-off signals, expressing different English letters, numbers, and punctuation marks through different arrangements." As Dong Yunshan explained, he wrote the numbers down. "It can transmit accurate information using only dots and dashes. For example, the three short, three long, three short signals widely used in maritime disasters are SOS."

"A distress signal!" Yui Yuigahama's eyes lit up. "I know that one!"

"For numbers, they usually correspond to the alphabet," Dong Yunshan murmured. "daiddahadafcdaibfbbcgd... No, the letters are too monotonous. A reversed alphabet is the same. Double-layer positioning? If it's a rail fence cipher, two rails would be da/dd... That's not right either. Three rails, dai/dda... Doesn't look like it."

"The final answer is in English," Yui Yuigahama added further information. "The boy tried a lot of methods, but none of them worked. He had no choice but to go ask the girl, and she told him to look more closely at the emails she'd sent him. She also said one step was a substitution cipher, and the cipher table was something they used every day."

"She even gave him hints. That basically means she agreed." Dong Yunshan held out his hand to Yui Yuigahama. "Let me see."

"Here." Yui Yuigahama handed Dong Yunshan the flip phone covered in lots of shiny decorations.

Once the flip phone was in his hand, Dong Yunshan couldn't help feeling a rush of nostalgia. Although smartphones were amazing, this old-fashioned flip phone had a charm of its own.

Compared with the uniform slabs of today, the designs of these keypad phones could be called a hundred flowers in bloom.

Just look at these wonderfully textured keys, with their perfectly placed raised bumps.

Feeling the sensation beneath his fingertips, Dong Yunshan couldn't help spacing out a little.

Because today's phones had nothing interesting about them, he was too lazy even to take his out, let alone carefully fiddle with it.

Now that he had one in his hands, he suddenly felt a little nostalgic for the days when he practiced touch-typing on a phone.

After smartphones appeared, of course, all that touch-typing practice had gone to waste.

Now, a lot of people didn't even use nine-key keyboards anymore.

"Dong Yun?" Yui Yuigahama looked at him with an incomprehensible expression. "You..."

"Try to understand, Yuigahama." Yukino Yukinoshita sighed. "For him, touching a girl's belongings is an extremely rare experience."

Dong Yunshan came back to his senses. "I was thinking."

"Shouldn't you be looking at the screen then..." Yui Yuigahama said weakly. "Why were you staring at the keyboard, and... touching it like that..."

"I was..." Dong Yunshan couldn't very well say he was feeling nostalgic. "I was decrypting it. The cipher is related to the keyboard... Right!"

Dong Yunshan moved his fingers away and fixed his eyes on the physical nine-key keyboard.

"It's the keyboard. The rail fence cipher was right, but the order was wrong." Dong Yunshan drew several marks through the numbers on the paper. "41, 94, 41, 81, 41, 63, 41, 92, 62, 23, 74."

Yui Yuigahama looked at the grouped numbers. "And then?"

"The ones digit is never greater than 4, and only 94 and 74 contain a 4." Dong Yunshan held the phone up in front of Yui Yuigahama. "The meaning of 'look more closely at the emails she sent' is: look more closely at the phone."

"The phone?" Yui Yuigahama stared at it for quite a while. "There's nothing... The keyboard?"

"That's right. Among the keys on a nine-key keyboard, only 7 and 9 represent four letters." Dong Yunshan picked up the pen. "41 is the first of the three letters represented by key 4, 94 is the fourth letter of key 9... and so on. The answer to the second layer of decryption is GZGTGOGXNCS."

P.S. Thanks to [The God on the Left], [Blazing Woven Rain], and [Apocalyptic Iron Fist? Makoto Niijima] for the tips!

Thanks to [Blazing Woven Rain] for the golden treasure chest!

Yesterday I was still wondering whether we could reach ten thousand collections, and today it suddenly shot straight toward fifteen thousand.

When I received the treasure chest, I was incredibly excited; after calming down, I felt deeply honored and anxious.

I don't want to let down everyone's support and expectations, but I'm also well aware that my ability is limited.

All I can do is give it my all!

"I still don't get it..." Yui Yuigahama's cheeks puffed out slightly. "What do we do next?"

"The girl probably thought the third layer of encryption was a little too hard too, so she deliberately gave a hint." Dong Yunshan already had a concrete idea. "She said the cipher table was something they used every day."

"Hmm..." Yui Yuigahama thought for a moment. "Textbooks?"

"That's something everyone uses every day." Dong Yunshan pointed out the key detail. "This 'they' specifically refers to the two of them. We need to look at what those two have in common."

"What they have in common... They're both students. Oh, right, they're both on the student council too." Yui Yuigahama frowned in thought. "Is there anything in the student council that could be used as a cipher table?"

"A computer keyboard," Yukino Yukinoshita said. "The student council needs to handle all kinds of documents, so they need to use computers, while other students rarely get the chance to use computers at school."

"To improve typing speed, the letters on a keyboard are arranged in the order QWERT..." Dong Yunshan wrote the keyboard's letter layout on the paper. "Following that order, match the decoded password to the keys on the keyboard one by one. If ABCDE equals QWERT, then GZGTGOGXNCS becomes OTOEOIOUYVL—and at this point, the answer is already obvious."

"I LOVE YOU TOO!" Yui Yuigahama quickly finished rearranging the letters. "The confession succeeded!"

"A girl's adorable little scheme." Dong Yunshan felt like even his livor mortis had faded. "Even though she had feelings for the boy too, she didn't respond directly. Instead, she designed a five-layer encrypted cipher and made the boy find the answer himself."

"Every layer the boy decoded brought him one step closer to the girl's heart, and if he ran into trouble, the girl would give him hints." When it came to this topic, Yui Yuigahama understood it all too well. "I like you too, but I can't say it out loud. Still, as long as you're willing, I'll take your hand and show you the feelings I've hidden deep in my heart—so romantic!"

"So simply guessing the answer isn't enough," Yukino Yukinoshita said. "We need the specific decoding process."

"Oh, right, it's five layers of encryption." Yui Yuigahama looked again at the jumbled letters. "There are still two layers left?"

"Since we already know the answer, we can work backward." Dong Yunshan marked the numbers. "Mark them in reverse according to the order of I LOVE YOU TOO. There are four Os, so ignore them for now, and we get..."

O/T/O/E/O/I/O/U/Y/V/L

O/9/O/5/O/1/O/8/6/4/

"Looking from back to front, after 2/4/6/8, naturally comes 10, then 1/3/5/7/9/11." Dong Yunshan split the letters into two parts. "Two sequences, odd and even numbers, divided into two rows..."

O/T/O/E/O/I

O/U/Y/V/L

"Reading from top to bottom, left to right, it becomes OOTUOYEVOLI." Dong Yunshan put down his pen. "That's the fourth encryption. As for the fifth layer..."

"Just reverse it!" Yui Yuigahama picked up her phone. "I'm going to tell my friend's friend's student council friend right now!"

"Here." Dong Yunshan tore off the paper and handed it to Yui Yuigahama, making it easier for her to communicate with her friend.

"What a shame." Yukino Yukinoshita tilted her head slightly. "It seems you couldn't complete the order this time."

"What?" Dong Yunshan's interest was piqued. "You couldn't think of an interesting order all this time, so you wanted me to make a request?"

"At the moment, I truly can't think of a suitable order that would trouble someone like you." Yukino Yukinoshita made no attempt to hide it. "But you likewise can't think of a suitable request, can you?"

"Actually, I already have an idea." Dong Yunshan tapped his temple lightly. "A request within reasonable bounds that I can't complete, and you can't complete either. It's just that the timing isn't quite right."

"Oh?" Yukino Yukinoshita asked curiously, "How so?"

"The first school year is nearing its end, and finals are coming up. It's better not to take up study time—let's talk about it during spring break."

"Very well." Yukino Yukinoshita nodded. "I was originally worried that you would go back to normal over spring break and render all my correction efforts useless—what's wrong?"

Halfway through speaking, Yukino Yukinoshita noticed the odd look on Yui Yuigahama's face.

"No..." Yui Yuigahama avoided her gaze. "Nothing."

Yukino Yukinoshita narrowed her eyes slightly. "Final exams?"

Yui Yuigahama's eyes widened in surprise. "How did you guess it that quickly?"

"Because you made it way too obvious." Dong Yunshan sighed. "You still haven't previewed the material?"

"It's review! No matter what, it's not so bad that I'd still be at the preview stage." Yui Yuigahama's lips pulled into a pout, and she muttered quietly, "Actually, when you think about it, studying doesn't really mean much. It's not like you use it once you enter society..."

"Okay." Dong Yunshan understood. "So you've skipped straight to the giving-up-on-yourself stage."

"I am not giving up on myself!" Yui Yuigahama protested agitatedly. "Studying is totally meaningless! High school life is already short enough, so isn't spending time on studying a huge waste? You only get one life, you know!"

"The period when you can study efficiently is also only this brief stretch of time. Studying seriously is one of the rare decisions among countless life choices that you won't regret... Why am I saying this?" Dong Yunshan shook his head. "Forget it, forget it. Pretend I didn't say anything."

Yui Yuigahama was stunned. "Why does it feel like I've been abandoned?"

Dong Yunshan had simply suddenly remembered that when he was around Yui Yuigahama's age, adults had said the same sort of thing to him too.

Back then, he hadn't been able to listen either.

"Studying is not meaningless." Yukino Yukinoshita sighed and pressed a hand to her forehead. "The so-called act of studying should be something whose meaning you find for yourself. Precisely because of that, each person's reason for studying may be different, but that doesn't mean you need to completely deny the act of studying itself."

"Yukinon is really smart, so it's not a problem for you..." Yui Yuigahama lowered her head. "But I'm not suited to studying, and the people I know don't study either..."

Yukino Yukinoshita's gaze immediately sharpened.

"I... I'll study properly! Studying is my own business, so how could I just drift along with the crowd?" Noticing the change in Yukino Yukinoshita's expression, Yui Yuigahama immediately started making amends. "Whether I'm suited to it or not is something I can only know after trying hard. I'll do my best!"

Look how badly she scared the poor girl...

Dong Yunshan cast Yui Yuigahama a sympathetic look.

"R-right!" Yui Yuigahama noticed Dong Yunshan's gaze. "Dong Yun, let's work hard together!"

Dong Yunshan felt that Yui Yuigahama had kind of brought this on herself.

He was actually trying to shift the flames of war onto him.

It was no wonder. Sobu High School did not post students' grades publicly; it only sent each student their personal scores and rankings.

Aside from Yukino Yukinoshita, who was known for being first in the grade, most people had to ask around to learn how others had done.

Dong Yunshan had barely attended class all year. Before, he had the excuse of being injured and hospitalized, but since he had not been hurt much lately, Shizuka Hiratsuka had dragged him back to school.

After returning to school, he attended classes as usual, but he did not put any effort into socializing. No one asked him about his grades, and he certainly was not in the habit of going around telling people.

Naturally, Yui Yuigahama had no idea what his grades were like.

By normal logic, a student like Dong Yunshan, who was constantly away from school and only attended classes intermittently, should have had grades too awful to look at.

In reality, though...

"My grades are actually pretty decent," Dong Yunshan said, admiring Yui Yuigahama's dazed expression. "I've always stayed in the upper-middle range."

"Traitor!" Yui Yuigahama accused loudly. "Then doesn't that mean I'm the only one playing the idiot role?"

"That isn't the case, Yuigahama," Yukino Yukinoshita denied firmly.

"Y-Yukinon!" Yui Yuigahama brightened all over.

Yukino Yukinoshita explained seriously, "You're already an idiot. You aren't playing one."

The words were already harsh enough on their own, and with Yukino Yukinoshita's earnest expression added in, they felt even harsher.

"Waaah~~~!" Yui Yuigahama let out a pitiful fake cry and beat at Yukino Yukinoshita's chest with her little pink fists.

With an impatient look, Yukino Yukinoshita leaned back slightly and let Yui Yuigahama's soft little fists fall on her like rain pattering on plantain leaves. She sighed helplessly. "What I mean is, only an idiot would measure a person's worth by test scores and rankings. There are also people who do very well on exams, yet are complete disasters when it comes to being decent human beings."

"I couldn't agree more," Dong Yunshan added in approval. "If someone's character is no good, the more knowledge they have, the more trouble they become."

At that point, Dong Yunshan subconsciously looked toward Yukino Yukinoshita, only to meet Yukino Yukinoshita's gaze as she looked over at him.

The same question surfaced in both their minds at the same time: What are you looking at me for?

That question did not need to be spoken aloud. It already had its answer.