"We moved all the bronze statues together. Every one of them had cipher-like inscriptions carved into hidden places that couldn't possibly have been there when they left the factory."
"After careful evaluation and discussion by professional cryptography experts, they concluded that this was a 'key' used to decrypt some other encrypted content, and did not itself carry much information."
Later, the Hero Association's Logistics Department offered that explanation and also compiled all the ciphertext into a document for the magical girls.
Staring at the densely packed rows of ciphertext, Su Tianqing's headache grew far worse.
That was why they were cryptography experts. If she had studied that garbled code herself, she probably would not have figured out anything after a year or two. Yet the experts could spend half an hour together and say, "This is actually a key." The gap was pretty huge.
But then another problem arose—
Hyacinth had successfully completed most of the tasks she needed to accomplish in Millennium, including the most important one: "prompting Albatross." She had successfully gotten Albatross to start transmitting information from that Mindscape to present-day Rongcheng.
Since it was possible to influence the "present" from the "past," then information could be transmitted smoothly by using something that existed in both the past and the future without changing much.
Like a football buried underground, a camera dropped somewhere, or the several bronze statue sculptures that still stood in the plaza to this day.
But no one had fully aligned with Albatross's logic. Her thinking was simply a little too wild:
What existed in both past and present Rongcheng? The bronze statues on Autumn Splendor Road.
If one of those statues went missing, how could she transmit the information in its entirety?
Hey, why not put ciphertext on all the statues, then move