CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 42
— REMEMBER THAT POST, Problems?
Gregory and Benjamin nodded.
— So, now we find this ImagoOnNib, and we find this image that is compressed several times, it's a King Arthur stereogram, just for example, stereograms are images that create an optical illusion in 3D.
— The ones you have to squint a little and find the right perspective for your brain to identify, in which case the image forms a chalice.
They noticed the difference.
— So we used Outguess, in that image and found a new message:
"The key has always been right in front of your eyes.
This is not the quest for the Holy Grail. Stop making things harder than they are.
Good luck.
3301"
— In this entire image, the real clue is in the name of the guy who posted the image.
— ImagoOnNib.
He confirmed.
— Imago is the last stage of an insect's metamorphosis, it's basically the moment when the insect becomes an adult.
— The cicada...
Zumerick and Yuliya smiled, like good teachers, they had an excellent student in front of them.
— This is another prank of theirs, because Imago in Latin means Image, On means No and Nib is Ponta, we translate to...
— Image at the tip.
— Referring to the image at the top end of Reddit, so the first thing you see?
— A sort of hieroglyp.
— Yes, that's basically it, however, when we talk about hieroglyphics we refer to the Egyptians, in this case they are Mayan numerals, so we take the Mayan numeral table and converting to Indo— Arabic numbers we have:
10 2 14 7 19 6 18 12 7 8 17 0 19
— But those numbers alone don't mean anything, until we compare them to the Reddit title, check it out:
10 2 14 7 19 6 18 12 7 8 17 0 19
A 2 E 7 J 6 IC 7 8 H 0 J 7 EIEJD 0 12 0
— And so it goes, so see that clearly the upper letters represent the lower numbers, so we have:
10 14 19 18 12 17 19
A 2 E 7 J 6 I C 7 8 H 0 J 7 EIEJD 0 12 0
10 2 14 7 19 6 18 12 7 8 17 0 19
— Using this as a basis, we were able to translate the entire title into a sequence of nineteen numbers:
10 2 14 7 19 6 18 12 7 8 17 0 19 7 14 18 14 19 13 0 12 0
— And this sequence of numbers is the key that ImagoOnNib was mentioning and this is exactly how it works: first we take all these nonsense posts from Reddit and put them in a text block, where each post is a line and now we take the numerical sequence and uses as the base of the Caesar Cipher, that is, the first round 10 letters, the second 2 and so on... until you have the entire text and... voilá...
They noticed that the text formed right in front of them.
— The text is a part of the King Arthur story called: The Lady of the Fountain, which is an excerpt from a book called Mabinogion, a collection of very ancient Celtic stories, written up to the mid — 600s ago, The Lady of the Fountain is the story of a knight who loses the love of his life, for dedicating himself a lot to going out in search of adventures and the title, MABINOGION, coincidentally is an anagram of IMAGOONNIB, the real tip was this all along.
— That explains all the hints about King Arthur so far.
— Exactly... that's when we go to the next chapter of this story... THE COUSIN NUMBERS...
— NOW WE HAVE A huge TEXT divided by lines, the book code gives us the following message:
"Call us on the phone number
2143909608"
— Calling this phone number someone would answer and a recording would play saying:
"Very good, you did well, there are three prime numbers associated with the original image — final.jpg— 3301 is one of them, you will have to find the other two, multiply all 3 numbers and add — .com— at the end to find the next step...
Good luck
Goodbye "
— Going back to the original image, we have 3301 as the signature and we have to find the other two hidden numbers, ironically, they are not hidden, we realize that the width and height of the image, 509 and 503, respectively, are prime numbers, multiplied the two together with 3301 and arrived at 845145127.
— Then we add the ".com"
— Before that we have to make an addendum, maybe you didn't realize that this number appeared before when we checked Cicada's signature, look what number appears in front of it...
— 845145127 — Gregory repeated.
Zumerick does so by putting the ".com" in front.
— Look what we found...
— For the first time we see the official logo of Cicada 3301 and underneath, there was a countdown, so, as usual, we took the picture of the Cicada logo and increased the brightness and our faithful square squires appear, so we use Outguess again and the message reads like this:
"You did well to make it this far.
Patience is a virtue
Return at 5pm on Monday, January 9
3301"
— Obviously we checked if this was a message from Cicada by Kleopatra and confirmed that it was, at the end of the countdown, the site was updated with this:
Find our symbol at the location nearest you:
52.216802 21.018334
48.85057059876962 2.406892329454422
48.85030144151387 2.407538741827011
47.664496 122.313301
47.637520 122.346277
47.622993 122.312576
37.577070 126.813122
37,5196666666667 126,995
36.0665472222222 94.1726416666667
33.966808 117650488
29.909098706850486 89.99312818050384
25.684702 80.441289
21.584069 158.104211
33.90281 151.18421
— A series of coordinates appeared, as seen in this page backup . And this is where things start to get scary. The coordinates led to fourteen completely crazy places around the world: Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii and Sydney, among others. In the indicated places, papers were found nailed to posts with the design of the cicada and a QR Code, which at the time was new technology, checking Google Maps, we didn't find anything much, so we had to go to these places in person and found the posters of the cicada.
— Scanning these codes with the cell phone we found two different messages and at the end of the two messages they had the same thing:
"You've shared too much so far. We want the best, not the followers. The first to arrive here will receive the prize.
Good luck
3301"
— This is where things start to get interesting then.
— Even more?
Zumerick smiled and looked at Yuliya, who nodded for him to continue.
— It is from this moment that we delve into the Deep Web.
— And what would that be?
— The underworld of the internet...— added Yuliya.