Chapter 19： puzzle

"Look! Treasure chest!" Hermione's eyes twinkled, a kind of emotion that she had never felt before and that she couldn't articulate quietly slipped into her heart. This novel feeling made her hair stand on end with excitement. Maybe this is an adventure? She thought to herself, and she gradually understood why the children in "Tom Sawyer" are adventurous, even Betsy Thatcher, who came from a wealthy background.

Hermione ran in front of the treasure chest and suddenly remembered something, she stopped.

"This is the treasure you found based on the clues you found, and it is also the puzzle you completed... So, this is a treasure that belongs to you only." She gritted her teeth and suppressed the curiosity in her heart.

Looking at Hermione who was trying to hide the curious look on her face but couldn't hide it at all, Tom felt super fun.

"Okay, then don't look at it!"

"Oh." Hermione's face collapsed.

"I lied to you."

"Eh?"

"Don't make trouble, this is the treasure we found together, let's open it together." Tom put his hand on the lid of the treasure chest and motioned for Hermione to put her hand up quickly.

Hermione smiled cheerfully and held out her hand.

"1, 2, 3!"

Tom opened the treasure chest, and the smiles of the two of them froze.

There is actually a combination lock under the lid of the treasure chest! The only consolation though is that there is a scroll next to the lock, so it's not all in vain.

Although there was a suspicion of being tricked, Hermione didn't look disappointed at all. On the contrary, she was quite happy, and she was inspired by the puzzles one after another.

"Let's take a look at the contents of the scroll first, maybe there will be hints inside." Hermione looked at the lock and found that it was a four-digit combination lock. She understood that the next task was to find the password for the treasure chest.

Tom opened the scroll, but he couldn't understand the text in it at all. Although it was all English letters, he couldn't understand it when it was arranged.

"It's Latin!" Hermione exclaimed, covering her mouth.

"Latin?" Tom was confused, and soon he realized another question: "You actually know Latin?"

Hermione smiled embarrassedly, "My family thinks that I might use Latin in some academic journals, nouns, etc., so my father found me a Latin teacher when I was a child. "

"Boss, please!" Tom handed the scroll over, Hermione heard the compliment, her cheeks flushed, she took the scroll with her head down, and then looked at it, translating it into English softly as she read.

There was not much content in the scroll, and she read it quickly.

"This is Vulgar Latin, which appeared in the Middle Ages..."

Latin, the official language and standard language of the Roman Empire, is similar to the "elegant language" of the Chinese Spring and Autumn Period. Latin is divided into Classical Latin, which prevailed from the 1st century BC to the 2nd century AD, and Vulgar Latin, which appeared in the Middle Ages. The word Latin is now understood by default as "Classical Latin", and modern Latin textbooks almost exclusively teach Classical Latin. But obviously, the teachers Mr. Granger invited are very responsible, and Miss Granger is also very good at learning, and she has dabbled in both languages.

From the text on the scroll, Hermione judged that the scroll was left by someone in the Middle Ages. The content inside is also very simple and straightforward: find a magical creature, paste this scroll on it, and you can get a certain characteristic of this magical creature.

Hermione rolled the scroll and gave it back to Tom.

"This is yours." She said seriously.

"Okay." Tom put down the scroll, and after thinking about it, he taped the scroll to Hermione's back.

Hermione: ?

"I want to see if I can get your wisdom..." Tom blinked. Hermione gave him a roll of eyes: to be able to do this kind of thing, you might really need to make up your mind.

Tom also seriously considered which magical creature to sign a "sacred contract" with, but he couldn't figure it out. Maybe sign a contract with Fire Dragon? In this way, you can either gain strong magic resistance, fire resistance, and if you are lucky, you may also gain flying ability or fire-breathing ability. Unicorns can also be, they may have strong resistance to black magic after signing the contract, but if they get the ability to judge whether a girl is pure or not, it will be too grassy...

"Okay, let's think about the password." Hermione pulled Tom's thoughts back to reality, "I remember that there were handles in those puddles before, which may have something to do with the password."

Tom thought she was right. The two walked around the house and found that only four of the five puddles had handles, which verified their speculation from the side.

So they drained the puddle, picked a puddle, grabbed the handle on it, yanked it, and a trapdoor was lifted. The space under the trapdoor is not large, just a small one-foot-square secret compartment, the bottom of the secret compartment is covered with a layer of fine sand, and a writing brush is placed in the middle.

After the trapdoor was opened, the writing brush stood up staggeringly. No one was holding it, but it wrote on the sand by itself.

"Fuyi" was the first thing Tom thought of.

Soon a line of words appeared in front of Tom and Hermione: I can't stop going.

"What is this?" This time it was Hermione's turn to be dumbfounded.

"Change the pool." Tom didn't answer Hermione immediately, and went to the other three pools to open the trapdoor. The layout inside was exactly the same, just a piece of sand and a brush that could write by himself.

The remaining three lines are:

Burning incense under the bead curtain to go to divination

It's hard to say a innocent word when dyed into soap

Clearly a pair of good mandarin ducks were cut off by a knife

Tom took a few glances and said to Hermione, "The four numbers in the password should be four, one, seven, and eight, in the order of the pools."

Hermione: ?

"Why? What are these sentences?" She didn't quite understand.

"This is a four-line poem, and there is a word hidden in it." He wrote the four characters of ba, xia, soap and fen on a piece of sand, and then wiped off the neng, bu, bai and dao in it, and there was nothing left. down four numbers.

"These are ancient Chinese, a very common way of splitting the characters. The only difficulty is to find someone who understands Chinese. It seems that the senior who left the scroll can not only know Latin, but also Chinese."

Hermione brushed the dust off her body, but she wasn't too surprised: "There is magic in Europe, and there should be corresponding mysterious powers in the Central Plains. The seniors who left the agency may have learned Chinese to understand ancient witchcraft in the Central Plains."

Hermione's conjecture made sense.

"But why do you understand this?" Hermione looked suspicious.

Tom just smiled: "Go and open the treasure chest first!"