Track 157 | 10,000 EMERALD POOLS BY BØRNS

Since it was a Monday, the first day of the week, Hyerin had a lot of work to do at Ye Olde, and that she had to postpone her meeting with Rara.

That meant she was going to tackle what Baekhyun had to tell her. What could have he decoded from Jaehyun’s mantra? She was about to find out as Baekhyun arrived at the Park household after his classes, while Rara was looking after the twins in the living room. Both of the twins were inside the crib, behaving. Bomi was awake, as usual; she sat up playing with her toys while Rin was dozing off.

He propped himself next to Rara and grinned at her triumphantly. “How’s it going, loser?”

Rara rolled her eyes at him. “Okay, okay. What have you got for me, Baek?”

Baekhyun raised his index finger, smiling as he fished out the black book from his backpack. He opened it and there it revealed the handwritten mantra and a page torn off from a notebook. It seems that he went full-on detective mode over the mantra.

“Okay, you noticed the unusual capitalization of letters, right?” Baekhyun said, presenting the page where the mantra was written. “If you take out all the capital letters—only those that were unnecessarily capitalized though, I left out those that were correctly capitalized—and bundle them together, it’s basically incomprehensible. It’s this combination.” Baekhyun pointed to the top of the other paper where he wrote his ‘solutions’. Rara’s eyes ran over a combination of letters that seemed like a toddler keyboard smashing—AEEBAAIBDEEAFDCHHEAAEBICGEEIA.

“It’s nothing special, right?” Rara nodded slowly, staring at the letters. She did this once, decades ago, but when she saw that there wasn’t a single word in that combination that could mean anything significant, she gave up. “But if you look closely, you’ll notice that the only letters present in this combination are from letters A to I.”

“That’s right.” Rara agreed, looking at the letters intently. “So?”

“The letters A to I are composed of the 1st up to the 9th letters in the alphabet.” Baekhyun pointed out. “That means—”

Rara whipped her head to look at Baekhyun upon realizing that: “—they are represented by single digit numbers.”

“Yes.” Baekhyun confirmed. “So I assumed that since there aren’t any letters here represented by double digits, I don’t think Jaehyun ahjussi wanted you to compute anything.” He said. “He wanted this code as is.”

Below the long collection of letters, Rara saw Baekhyun had also written the equivalent numbers. It said 1552119245516321529375591.

“But it still doesn’t make sense.” Rara muttered.

“I know.” Baekhyun said. Then he pointed to mantra. “However, if you pay attention to the arrangement of the mantra and the uppercase letters, you can segregate the long combination of letters into eleven.” Seeing that Rara wasn’t following, Baekhyun grabbed a pencil from his pocket and started scribbling. “I separated the mantra by lines or pauses.” He said, putting slashed for every line.

FlAmes coated in orangE arE of elementary level / But settle with eAsy / And you wIll Be no match for a Duel.

BluE symbolizEs tranquility / peAceFul yet DestruCtive in ability.

Closer to Hell is fire in Hues of purple / No wound inflicted by this powEr is curAble.

eAsy to seE / But diffICult to muster / GovErn yourself / thEn summonIng blAck inferno will not be a bother.

“If you put it that way, you can also separate the code like this.” He then pointed to the same bundle of letters below, only that they were separated by dashes.

“It doesn’t look like a combination to unlock a safe, a pin number or password to an account since it’s way too long.” Baekhyun explained. “But since he had this made in this book, this could have something to do—”

“—the pages.” Rara whispered, clearly absorbed by what they were doing. How could I have let this slip for years? She thought.

“Correct.” Baekhyun said. “This book is about two thousand pages or so, and seeing that the largest number there is 1924, this could really be page numbers.” He continued. “Let’s go over it together, shall we?”

Rara nodded, giving a go signal to Baekhyun as he turned to page 155.

“She.”

Page 21. 

“Can.”

“Transfer, page 1924.”