Chapter 281 — The Secret in the Shark's Belly
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Clearly the controller had long since stopped working; otherwise, this shark would never have fallen into his hands.
Wei Zhao took the controller out and examined it carefully. It was no high-tech product — with modern technology, manufacturing a thing like this would be no difficult feat.
The key question was: what was this shark for? But since it had nothing to do with him, Wei Zhao did not give it much thought. He was just about to toss the controller aside when he suddenly noticed a small hatch on the underside that could be opened.
Wei Zhao gave it a pull. The hatch was locked. There was a keyhole on it, meant for an ordinary key by the look of it. Wei Zhao rummaged through the kitchen and found a toothpick; after working it back and forth a few times, the hatch popped open.
A small box sealed in plastic film tumbled out. Wei Zhao picked it up offhandedly.
The little box was nothing fancy, but it was very tightly sealed, somewhat like the popular Lock & Lock food containers, except that it was made of metal.
Wei Zhao tore off the plastic film and waited a moment. When the jade pendant on his body gave no warning at all, he pried the metal box open with some force.
Naturally, Wei Zhao was cautious, for there was no telling what might be inside. What if it were a bomb? Blown to bits the instant he opened it — that would be a bit too tragic.
"Huh?" Wei Zhao took out what was inside the box and blinked, mildly taken aback.
What lay within was a piece of parchment — more precisely, a map made of parchment. But it was not a complete map, only a fragment; how many parts made up the whole, Wei Zhao could not yet determine.
And the writing on the map was in a script Wei Zhao had never seen before. He knew a smattering of most of the world's written languages, and even when he could not read one, a glance was usually enough for him to tell roughly which language it belonged to.
But the script on the map did not belong to any language in the world. Of course, he could not rule out some small country or small tribe he had never heard of, or a lost ancient civilization.
What Wei Zhao considered most likely, though, was that this was a cipher, or rather a code! Only someone who knew the decryption rules could read its meaning.
And now Wei Zhao more or less understood: this shark had been used as a courier, a means of transmitting intelligence — or rather, this map! Only somewhere along the way something had gone wrong; the shark had slipped out of control and never completed its mission, which was why both the controller and the map had been left in its belly.
Out in the vast ocean, finding another shark like this one would be next to impossible; it was only by sheer coincidence that Wei Zhao had run into it at all.
What the map was for, Wei Zhao did not know for the moment. He simply stuffed it into his pocket, meaning to study it when he had time. As for the control device, it had no research value whatsoever, so Wei Zhao tossed it into a corner of the kitchen.