“Auntie, look! There’s a strange bird over there!” Pei Mianman pointed to a spot in the center of the stone gate. “Maybe the mechanism to open the gate is right here.”
Zuan had also noticed that there was a strange bird pattern in the center of the stone gate. It was red all over and its shape resembled neither a phoenix nor a peacock.
It even looks a bit like his summoned beast "Hyakumei".
Zuan's heart skipped a beat, and he hurriedly summoned Baiming, commanding it to approach the strange bird pattern. Unfortunately, no matter how it flew around or how it cried out, the stone gate remained unresponsive.
However, as the sound waves of Bai Ming's cry spread, the red light in the eyes of the skeleton warrior kneeling by the steps not far away gradually dimmed. Unfortunately, this scene was not seen by Zuan and the other two.
"It didn't work?" Zu An frowned, feeling greatly disappointed.
He suddenly remembered the records about the Shang Dynasty in the documentary. The ancestor of the Shang people was called Qi. "The daughter of the You Song clan was named Jian Di. She swallowed the egg of the black bird and gave birth to Qi." So the Shang Dynasty regarded the black bird as a totem. Presumably, this bird was their totem, the black bird. So what exactly does the black bird represent here?
As he pondered, Pei Mianman suddenly made a new discovery: "Hey, the pattern on this bird is a bit strange. The stones around it seem to be movable, and there also seems to be some grids in the center of the bird."
Zu An was startled and quickly looked closely, only to find that there were indeed two horizontal and two vertical lines on the black bird pattern, dividing the entire black bird pattern into nine small squares.
At the same time, there was a ring of strange symbols around it. Pei Mianman tried it and found that the small squares with strange symbols could slide into the nine small squares in the middle.
“One, two, three…” Pei Mianman counted and said with delight, “There are exactly nine numbers with symbols engraved on them. It seems that we can open the door by putting these cubes in the corresponding positions.”
“Not bad, Manman, you are very observant.” Zuan came to the door and stared at the nine stones around him in a daze. He had thought too much before and ended up going astray. He was not as pure as Pei Mianman, which was why she was able to find these clues. “But what do these symbols mean? Have you seen them before?”
“No.” Pei Mianman shook her head, racking her brains for the things she had learned. “I have never seen anything like this in the literature of any race. Speaking of which, the style of these symbols is somewhat similar to the two characters on the stone tablet before.”
"Really?" Zu'an was taken aback and hurriedly examined it again. Now, reminded by her, he gradually began to understand the strange patterns.
Since it is related to oracle bone script, these nine numbers, along with these nine squares, can easily remind him of the mysterious Hetu Luoshu in Chinese history, which has a famous mnemonic rhyme: "Nine on top, one at the bottom, three on the left, seven on the right, two and four on the shoulders, six and eight on the feet, and five in the middle."
Simply put, the sum of these numbers in each row, column, and diagonal is 15.
Filling in these numbers is simple; anyone with a basic understanding of mathematics can do it. But the problem is that the surrounding squares are not the same as the numbers he is familiar with, and he can't tell which pattern corresponds to which number.
Four of the patterns are relatively easy to recognize: "one horizontal line", "two horizontal lines", "three horizontal lines", and "four horizontal lines", which should correspond to "one, two, three, four".
However, the others are harder to recognize. For example, one symbol looks like a trident with a curved tail, another looks like a roof with an "X" shape, another has an "X" in the middle with horizontal lines at the top and bottom, like a folding stool or a spring bed like in Mario, and another is "（", like a pair of parentheses with their order reversed.
The strangest symbol is another one, which is a cross.
Zuan subconsciously thought it was a "ten", but then he dismissed it, since there is no number 10 in the nine-square grid.
He was filled with regret. If he had watched more documentaries about oracle bone script back then, he might have been able to recognize these characters.
I wonder how those archaeologists back then came to understand these strange scribblings.
etc……
Suddenly, a thought flashed through his mind. He remembered that a documentary had mentioned that Chinese culture has been passed down through generations because people thousands of years later can still recognize the characters written by their ancestors thousands of years ago.
The reason we recognize each other is mainly because writing systems evolve from generation to generation.
Later writing systems mainly evolved from the Small Seal script of the Qin Dynasty, which also showed some influence from the Oracle Bone script.
If that's the case, then there must be a connection between oracle bone script and the characters used in later generations. It's one thing for the complex oracle bone script to be problematic, but now that we know these oracle bone script characters represent numbers 1-9, we should be able to find clues by slowly working backward.
He stared at the trident icon with its curved tail, turning his head constantly to observe it from various angles.
Suddenly, he realized that if he pulled the head of the trident down and laid it flat, it would be exactly the left half of the number "9", and the curved tail of the trident would be exactly the hook on the right side of the number "9".
Don't those inverted brackets look similar to the shape of an "eight"?
Hmm, if this is an 8, then what is that "人" (person) shaped thing? It also looks a lot like an 8. Could it be a 6 with two dots below it?
That leaves only five and seven. The cross symbol doesn't seem to fit the number five at all.
So, is the symbol for a spring mattress five?
He tried to twist the "X" in the middle of the two horizontal lines of the spring mattress in his mind, and it seemed that it could really turn into the shape of a "five".
So "ten" becomes seven, the difference being that one has an extra hook.
Zuan checked his reasoning again and found that although it was somewhat logical, it was not without flaws. For example, if the four horizontal lines did not represent the number four, many of his subsequent deductions would be wrong. He was even unsure whether he had gotten the number eight and the number six right.
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