Chapter 6 Indecipherable

Six-thirty in the evening. The sky had taken on a thin orange-red halo — impossible to tell whether it was air pollution, the first neon signs bleeding into the dusk, or the last fire clouds refusing to fade. Every time Ma En saw a sky like this, a dreamy, dislocated feeling would settle over him, as if the world around him were slipping into a moment that didn't quite belong to the ordinary. In the past, the feeling had been nothing more than that — a feeling. City life after dark was different from the daytime, but still within normal bounds.

This evening was different. Beneath the familiar illusion, Ma En felt something tighten — a nervous, heart-quickening anticipation.

His curiosity about the book had finally beaten his fear of it.

He boarded a bus, put in his headphones, let deep melodies fill the space behind his eyes. The people and scenery around him seemed to lose their color, their features dissolving, flattening into pale cards. Gradually he felt as though he were the only person left in his own world. Experience had taught him this was the ideal state. He might have run into a few acquaintances along the way. He might have exchanged a few words with them. He couldn't remember what was said.

That happened often enough, and it was never anything important — greetings, small talk, the kind of conversation that evaporated as soon as it ended. He more or less knew what he was doing. He stopped at a noodle shop for dinner. The urgency in his chest kept growing, as though a dim, wordless voice were calling him home.

Back in his apartment, door locked behind him, Ma En snapped fully awake. He had no idea whether his dazed state on the way home had seemed strange to anyone else, but to him it was routine. Even with that urging voice growing louder inside him, he moved through his evening without hurry — coat off, briefcase arranged where he could grab it on his way out, the big black umbrella hung back on its rack, a quick wash in the bathroom. Only then did he go to his study and pull the book from the shelf.

Something struck him as remarkable: the sensation he'd felt the first time he held this book — he couldn't feel it at all now. As though the book were just a book. But the bookshop owner's death had added a new layer of strangeness to it. Between ordinary and extraordinary, an emotion he couldn't set aside churned inside him.

He spent a full minute studying the cover again. The textures of paper, string, and staples passed under his fingers — rough and smooth, warm and cold. He brought it to his nose. A faint smell drifted from the pages, but he was certain it wasn't mildew, wasn't ink, wasn't any scent he'd ever encountered from a book, wasn't any smell he recognized at all.

Very faint. Very strange. Part fragrance, part fishiness. The impression it gave wasn't vegetal. It was animal.

How had he judged the book's age before? It looked like a handwritten copy from the turn of the century, but the scene that had materialized in his head — the cultivator, his history — obviously placed it far earlier. And neither guess matched the book's true age, did it? When he thought about it honestly, he knew nothing about this book.

He steadied himself and opened it again. This time, he was sure he saw the contents — not the dazed half-seeing from the bookshop, where he'd felt as though he'd read the whole thing yet retained nothing, just a swelling pressure in his skull. He saw the contents clearly. He just couldn't understand them. Not because the material was too abstruse, but because the writing was something he'd never encountered before.

The characters looked ancient at a glance — part pictographic, part cuneiform, part tadpole-like, winding and curling across the page. Their structures offered no clue to their meaning. They felt like arbitrary shapes. And if that were true, it ruled out pictographic writing entirely.

Ma En had put serious effort into ancient scripts over the years, as part of his pursuit of the bizarre. But what lay before him bore no resemblance to anything he knew. The degree of difference exceeded the gap between Asian and European ancient writing systems. This looked more like the product of something entirely outside known human history.

Trouble. He couldn't help thinking it. Deciphering an unknown script was extraordinarily difficult. He knew several methods, and none of them applied here. He wasn't a professional — he knew theory, not practice. He flipped through the book carefully, page by page, front to back, and confirmed that every page was written in this unknown script.

Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records. He could call it that, but the name had surfaced from his own imagination. The book itself had no name. No name at all.

His earlier guesses about the book's age couldn't be confirmed through the writing. The strange script did seem to follow some kind of grammatical ordering, but when he examined each individual character, he found that no two were alike. If nothing repeated, how could he perceive an order? Ma En had never seen a book in which every single character was unique.

After several careful passes, he did feel that each character carried dense layers of meaning, like ancient Eastern writing. It was possible the same character had multiple pronunciations that distinguished its usage. It was possible that different characters, pronounced differently, could still convey similar meanings. But the richer a script's potential meaning, the harder it was to crack.

He set down the book he'd been calling Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records and dug out every reference he owned on ancient writing, searching for a workable method — anything that might give him a starting point. Without a way in, there could be no progress. And from everything he had, he found nothing. Every example, every technique, demanded repeating characters. Clear reference points. Background context.

This book had none of it. No background. No repetition. No pronunciation guide. Nothing to compare against. The order he sensed in the text couldn't be traced in the details — as though the pattern existed only in his head.

"How can a book like this exist?" Even as a prank, the creator would have needed to be brilliant. Eliminating all correlation from strokes, structure, and form wasn't trivial. Even if a group of people from wildly different cultures each invented a character independently, then pooled them together, the result would still show connections — the shared biology of the human species, the commonality of origin that preceded culture itself.

Writing produced by humans that showed no similarity anywhere was, theoretically, almost impossible. Especially writing that appeared to use shapes as carriers of meaning.

And yet Ma En genuinely could not find a single point of similarity between any two characters, or between these characters and any known script. The implication sat there, blunt and unavoidable: this wasn't human writing. It was the script of something fundamentally, comprehensively different from humanity.

The deeper he studied, the stranger the writing became. Associations multiplied in his mind, each one useless for the actual work of decipherment.

He kept at it until late that night, exhausted to the bone, without a shred of progress. He needed help. But from whom? The library, maybe — the city library had decent holdings. He considered the internet, but it hadn't become widespread in this city yet. And no one would casually upload rare ancient-script research in any useful detail. Although — if it were someone's passing theory, an uncertain flash of insight, that might end up online first. Maybe, somewhere in the world, someone else had seen a book like this and dismissed it as a joke. Would a joke like that get posted?

It didn't matter. He was out of options. He had to broaden the search somehow.

With that thought, Ma En pushed his notes aside, left the desk, and decided to sleep until morning. The preliminary study had drained him completely, and he still had to work the next day.

The night passed without incident. He woke at his usual time but felt only half-recovered. The second day, the third, the fourth — the pattern held: work during the day, research at night, nothing gained, energy never fully restored. Colleagues noticed his pallor and asked if something was wrong at home. He told them he'd been reading too many books. This was the truth. Just not the whole truth.

A few people, naturally, suspected he was spending his nighttime energy on adult pursuits and ribbed him about it in private. Ma En ignored them. He'd never cared about that kind of talk.

A full week passed. On the last evening before the weekend, Ma En finally gave up on the research that had produced exactly nothing and returned the book to the shelf. As he did, he noticed something: a label on the spine reading Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records. His own handwriting, apparently. He had no memory of putting it there.

Tomorrow. The library. The city library's collection was substantial. If that turned up nothing, he'd try the internet. If that failed, he'd have to reach out to a few expert contacts — he didn't know many people, but he wasn't entirely without connections in this area. The problem was the book's nature. He didn't want more people knowing it existed.

The bookshop owner's sudden death was too neatly timed for coincidence. So far, aside from the indecipherable book itself, nothing had actually exceeded the bounds of common sense. But if something genuinely did — then exposing others to deep contact with this book would be putting them in danger.

Throughout the entire week, Ma En hadn't felt anything abnormal. But he couldn't forget the dazed, eerie experiences that had accompanied the book from the beginning. Since making contact with it, things had happened to him that had never happened before. Even if each individual incident could be explained away rationally, logically — none of it sat right. None of it let him rest.