Superman Termination Manual - Chapter 503

Chapter 503: Chapter 254 Bedlam Asylum Journal (Part 5) Chapter 503: Chapter 254 Bedlam Asylum Journal (Part 5) London time, 7:30 AM, at the Bedlam Asylum’s card room for patient entertainment.

Ke Yin Zhi picked up a deck of poker cards that Francis had tampered with and sat down at a table with Fan Quan.

“Shall we take a look?”

He rested his chin on one hand while speaking and opened the deck marked with serial number 02.

Then, keeping their internal order unchanged, he gently flipped through them, starting from the top card and looking down one by one.

The playing cards provided by the asylum followed the standard 54-card set.

Aside from the two joker cards, “Big Joker,” and “Little Joker,” the remaining 52 cards consisted of four instances each of: A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K.

Subsequently, Ke Yin Zhi, while keeping the order of the cards the same, checked the decks marked with serial numbers 05 and 09.

Soon, both he and Fan Quan discovered that each deck adjusted by Francis had a different arrangement from top to bottom.

However, they shared a common feature: each time they reached the middle of the deck, the Big Joker and Little Joker were next to each other, seemingly symbolizing some sort of “interruption”.

Ke Yin Zhi raised his eyebrows, intrigued, and thought for a while, then suddenly turned his head, looking at Fan Quan with bright eyes.

“Mr. Gu Zhenning, if we say that Francis wants to clearly express and transmit text messages using these playing cards, what kind of logic do you think is used?”

Upon hearing this, Fan Quan pondered a bit before responding: “To express text information clearly with playing cards, I think there’s only one way: using the numbers on the cards to represent the order of the alphabet, thus, translating each card’s numeral into a letter.”

He paused, “Then, forming complete sentences by combining the adjacent cards into English words. Of course, if this is the case, one deck of cards is definitely not enough.”

“Pretty much what I was thinking,” Ke Yin Zhi slowly said, “According to our thought, the poker card A equals the number 1, which corresponds to the first letter of the alphabet — ‘a’, and the card 2 equals the second letter — ‘b’, and the card 3 equals the third letter — ‘c’, right?”

Fan Quan nodded, “Exactly, and so on until the 10th letter: card 10 equals the number 10 equals the 10th letter — ‘j’.”

.c0

He thought a bit more, then added, “But there are 26 letters in the alphabet, and playing cards are completely insufficient for representing them, which is a problem.”

“Maybe by further categorizing using the suits of cards?” Ke Yin Zhi speculated while studying Francis’s arrangement method, still flipping through the cards.

“It’s possible, but from the two decks we flipped through, it seems this conjecture might not hold.”

Fan Quan calmly continued, his gaze, along with Ke Yin Zhi’s, focused on the playing cards.

All of a sudden, his eyes widened slightly, and, catching a particular arrangement pattern in every deck tampered by Francis, he was about to speak when Ke Yin Zhi suddenly said, “Oh… I get it.”

Fan Quan turned to him, and after a moment of silence, said, “You tell, let’s see if it matches what I was thinking.”

As Ke Yin Zhi spoke his thoughts, “For letters beyond 1 to 10, Francis engineered combinations using three poker cards; for instance, to represent the 11th letter of the alphabet, which is number 11, he used card A (number 1), sandwiching a card other than 1 to 10, followed by another card A (number 1).”

While speaking, he sat down at a table, taking paper and pen available there, and listed out the corresponding pattern.

…

Poker card A (equivalent to number 1, which is the first letter of the alphabet — “A”)
Poker card A-Joker card A (represents 11, which is the letter — “K”)
Poker card A-King card A (as above)
Poker card A-Queen card A (as above)
…

“Just as I thought: using combinations of three cards to represent figures beyond 10, thus we can completely express numbers 1-26, which correspond to the 26 letters of the alphabet.”

Fan Quan said slowly, barely perceptibly taking a deep breath.

He began to suspect whether Black Judge had the ability to read minds, as if his thoughts were continually exposed before Black Judge, or perhaps the two just happened to be on the same frequency.

Ke Yin Zhi raised his eyebrows, “By the way, what do you think if we encounter a number like 20?”

Upon hearing this, Fan Quan bowed his head in thought for a while, then took the paper and pen from him, starting to list several ways of expressing “number 20”.

…

Poker card 2-J-10 (equivalent to 20)
Poker card 2-K-10 (as above)
Poker card 2-Q-10 (as above)
…

Ke Yin Zhi, looking at the combinations listed by Fan Quan, said intrigued, “I see, so when card 10 is at the end of a combination, it’s automatically treated as ‘0’.”

Fan Quan nodded and continued, “This arranging method can indeed reproduce all 26 letters of the alphabet using playing cards, but there’s an important problem.”

Ke Yin Zhi picked up the thread, “This problem… is that a single deck of cards can easily run out since there are only four of each rank.”