There was nothing special about the cat's appearance. Its sitting posture with its tail tucked in was quite standard. It looked like one of the many cats that would appear in online pictures when searching for the keyword "cat", common and inconspicuous.
But Song Yecheng realized its special nature in just two seconds, and suddenly turned his head to look at Jiang Que.
The moment their eyes met, after meeting Jiang Que's calm yet meaningful gaze, he immediately confirmed his suspicions.
This cat looks ordinary, but it symbolizes the one he left for Jiang Que when he left the border town more than ten years ago.
Song Yecheng couldn't help but smile knowingly, and Jiang Que also slightly curled the corners of his lips.
The two cameramen filming nearby were completely bewildered. Although their cameras captured the scene, they had no idea what the two were laughing about. They wondered incredulously: What are they doing? Is this a secret communication?
"What is this?" At this moment, Tang Yao, who was not far away, asked in confusion.
Song Yecheng turned around and saw that she seemed to be studying her password hint diagram, so he asked, "What's wrong?"
Tang Yao stared at the picture and waved at him: "Come and see."
Song Yecheng originally felt that this part was a bit of a solo session, and had no intention of snooping into other people's puzzles, but since Tang Yao didn't care, he didn't act pretentiously and just walked over.
There is also only one item in Tang Yao's picture.
It was a bar-shaped packaging bag that looked like some kind of instant product, but there was no picture of the actual product on the bag, and the only string of words looked like scribbles. Tang Yao couldn't even make out the language.
"Is this milk powder?" Tang Yao looked at Song Yecheng in confusion.
Seeing this, He Jingsheng, standing nearby, immediately lost his composure, but luckily managed to maintain his composure. "Ms. Tang, you volunteers are all independent of each other. He has no obligation to help you."
This is a reminder that they are competitors.
Hearing this, Tang Yao turned to look at him with a frown on her face, her narrowed eyes seemed to be silently accusing: Isn't it because you asked the right question?
He Jingsheng choked, coughed dryly, and said calmly, "Besides, you took this picture yourself. You can't even see it, so how could Mr. Song know?"
Tang Yao ignored him and turned to give Song Yecheng a questioning look in disbelief.
Song Yecheng was a little amused, but finally said truthfully: "This is white coffee."
He Jingsheng's face was full of outrage: "You can speak Arabic?!"
The text on the packaging bag was in Arabic, and when he set the question, he actually had a bit of a prank in mind. He deliberately picked a packaging bag with only text and no actual picture, and the language was quite unfamiliar. He never expected that Song Yecheng could even recognize it.
Song Yecheng smiled without saying anything, raised his eyebrows and gave him a look that said he was too young and too naive, which made He Jingsheng look aggrieved, but he had to pout in submission.
But Tang Yao didn't care about that. He Jingsheng's reaction was equivalent to verifying Song Yecheng's answer. It immediately gave her an idea. She opened the password lock keyboard without hesitation, quickly entered the six letters "coffee" and clicked OK.
The next second, the combination lock mercilessly poured cold water on me: "Wrong password, please re-enter."
Tang Yao: “…”
He Jingsheng: “…”
At the same time, the atmosphere in Ling An's group not far away was also quite weird.
At this moment, Ling An seemed to have turned into a thinking statue, with one hand across his chest and the other hand supporting his chin, staring at the prompt picture on the safe and blinking. Lin Yan next to him had a speechless expression of pity and anger at his misfortune, as if he had been suppressed to the point of internal injuries.
Song Yecheng took a glance from a distance. In fact, he was quite curious about what their hint map was, but since his own cabinet had not been opened yet, he did not make any more trouble and turned back to his side.
Although he already understood the meaning of the hint picture, it was not so easy to convert that meaning into a six-digit password.
Song Yecheng glanced at Jiang Que who was waiting beside him, but did not try to get any additional hints from him. He quickly turned his gaze back to the picture, his mind working rapidly -
cat.
kitten.
Yellow kitten.
These keywords went through his mind, and he automatically translated and arranged them into N six-digit password combinations, such as Kitten, Yellow, Little, and even Cat810 and 810Cat combined with the date of that year.
However, for some reason, Song Yecheng's intuition told him that none of these seemed to be the correct answers.
But apart from this, if we only rely on this one picture, there seems to be no more options.
Thinking about it, Song Yecheng did not rush to try and make mistakes, but turned around decisively and walked towards the pentagonal long table in the middle of the room.
He still remembered the last rule Jiang Que had announced: everything in this room could be used as an auxiliary tool in designing the password.
Since this rule has been mentioned, it should also be part of the decryption process, or at least should not be directly ignored.
Walking to the table, Song Yecheng first took a rough look around at all the items on the table——
The furnishings on the table look very ordinary. If we have to categorize them, they are very similar to the soft furnishings of a library or study room, because most of the items are related to reading, writing or learning, such as paper, pen holders, compasses, protractors, triangles, multilingual dictionaries and other reference books, and even global contour line thumbnails and globes.
Song Yecheng walked slowly around the table, scanning the objects one by one as he walked, just like an infrared detector detecting living things in the wild. Every time he scanned an item, he quickly analyzed in his mind the possibility that it could be related to the cat.
Paper.
Pen holder.
Compass.
None of this seems likely.
As Song Yecheng walked, he eliminated the options that were most likely wrong.
As he walked, his eyes fell on the globe and he paused for a moment. An idea suddenly popped up in his mind.
Six-digit password.
If it is pure number, it can be longitude and latitude.
Could it be the same small town from back then?
Song Yecheng raised his hand to touch the surface of the globe and gently turned it half a circle, but he soon discovered with disappointment that with the scale of this globe, it was impossible to accurately locate such an inconspicuous town, because there was only a longitude and latitude line every 30 degrees, and the width covered by these 30 degrees was less than two finger joints. Not to mention the town-level administrative regions, even the provincial capitals would probably be difficult to accurately calculate the longitude and latitude.
What's more, replacing "cat" with "town" is actually a bit of a substitution of concepts. He felt that Jiang Que was unlikely to design such a far-fetched answer, otherwise he could just change the password hint image to something more related to the town.
Thinking of this, Song Yecheng stopped bothering with the globe and took another step forward, looking at the remaining items as he walked.
Triangle ruler.
Protractor.
Contour thumbnails.
…
He also filtered these out.
When he saw the Arabic dictionary, he didn't rush to continue. Instead, he raised his head and said, "Tang Yao? Here is an Arabic dictionary."
"Oh, here I come!" Tang Yao responded and immediately walked over here.
Song Yecheng didn't know whether this dictionary would be useful or not, but at least it was somewhat related to Tang Yao's picture. However, after the reminder, he didn't worry about it anymore and continued to screen the rest of the things.
Starting from that dictionary, the following is a long list of dictionaries in various languages——
English, French, German, Spanish.
Chinese Cihai, idiom dictionary.
Four Corners Dictionary, Xinhua Dictionary.
…
Song Yecheng's eyes swept through them one by one, almost without stopping for long. However, when he finished scanning the last book, he suddenly paused.
The next second, his gaze slowly moved back and fixed on the last red "Xinhua Dictionary".
This should be the most common, inconspicuous and easily overlooked book among all reference books, but it was this book that suddenly made Song Yecheng's mind move.
Because it is the 10th edition.
It is marked in the most conspicuous place on the cover.
As early as nine years ago in 2011, this dictionary had been updated to the 11th edition.
This means that the version currently in common use and sold in bookstores is already the 11th edition. Therefore, when the program crew purchased props, if they did not deliberately search for old editions, they should have bought the latest 11th edition, rather than the 10th edition which was first published sixteen years ago, dating back to 2004.
And that's not the only reason Song Yecheng noticed it.
Coincidentally, he also happened to have a dictionary of the same edition, which was still placed in his study, on the floor-standing table where Jiang Que used to type every night.
The most important thing is that if this dictionary is combined with the keyword "password", Song Yecheng will almost immediately think of a possibility -
That should be it.
Song Yecheng didn't hesitate any longer and directly reached out to pick up the dictionary.
Two minutes later.
Song Yecheng snapped the dictionary shut, turned around, and strode back to the safe with an unstoppable aura. Under Jiang Que's gaze, he raised his hand without hesitation and entered a string of numbers.
1, 9, 7, 3, 2, 5.
Sure.
The next second, there was a long "beep" sound, the green indicator light of the safe flashed suddenly, and the drawer popped open with a "click!"
The entire archive room was silent for a moment.
The next moment, Ling An and Tang Yao, who had followed the sound, exclaimed in unison: "What's going on?!"
The safe was opened so quickly that even the camera could hardly capture the process. The director who was filming the safe even looked at the time on his wrist in surprise and found that it had been less than ten minutes since he entered the door.
Ling An and the other three quickly gathered around. After getting a closer look at the prompt image, they immediately asked in confusion, "What's the password?"
"197325." Song Yecheng replied.
"Why?" The four were completely confused.
Song Yecheng handed over the dictionary in his hand and said briefly: "Page 197 and page 325."
Tang Yao took the dictionary, and the four of them began to look through it one after another. At the same time, Song Yecheng turned his gaze to the side and looked at Jiang Que. He saw an undisguised joy on his face, and his eyes seemed to say: I knew you could solve it.
"Huang-Mao, yellow cat?!"
The four people who finally turned to the corresponding page were both enlightened and incredulous.
"Um."
Song Yecheng responded, but did not go out of his way to correct their misunderstanding.
It is true that the first character is “黄”, but the second character is not actually “猫”, but “毛” which is right next to it on the same page.
Yellow hair.
That was the name he gave to the little kitten back then, and it was the starting point of his naming habit that he has been using ever since.
It was precisely because of this that Jiang Que couldn't help but be stunned when he saw him casually write the name "Baimao" in the pet shop.
"But how did you come up with the dictionary page numbers?" He Jingsheng asked in disbelief. "Isn't that too jumpy?"
It is understandable to think of "yellow cat" based on the prompt picture, but it is too strange to associate it with the dictionary based on this word alone.
Song Yecheng chuckled and looked at Jiang Que again: "Because I also used a dictionary to set a password."
When he noticed the dictionary just now, his mind suddenly flashed through what Jiang Que said in the car that night -
"It's not me who sets the question, it's you."
——Yourself.
This hint was like a lit fuse, sizzling and sparking, and instantly enlightened him, reminding him of the home password he had set himself, which also came from this edition of the dictionary -
301086.
Pages 301 and 86 of this dictionary.
The two words corresponding to the two pages are——
Bell, ding.
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