551 Hidden Information
"What are we looking for here?" Astoria wondered without any guard.
Although her late father's study held great sentimental value, she wasn't concerned Vaan would ruin it. She had that much trust in him.
Nevertheless, Vaan didn't answer her question.
"Do you think your father was a wise king?" Vaan replied to her question with a question of his own instead, causing furrowed her brows slightly.
She didn't understand his intention, but she gave him an honest answer with a nod.
"Of course!" Astoria stated firmly.
"That's good then," Vaan acknowledged before gesturing to the study, "Take a look around with me. See if anything stands out to you. There's a high chance your father left something behind for you to inherit."
If Siegfried Braveheart were truly wise, as Astoria believed, he would not have taken the history of the Braveheart family to the grave with him when he died.
It was impossible for the knowledge of the past to be passed on to each succeeding head of the Braveheart family through word of mouth alone and survived to the present day.
Instances where the heads of the Braveheart family died untimely deaths must have happened more than once over such a long passage of time.
As such, the heads of the Braveheart family must have at least had insurance in case they couldn't pass on their knowledge verbally.
And as the only child and heir of Siegfried Braveheart, it would only make sense for him to leave Astoria a clue.
At first, Astoria was only curious about Vaan's surprise. But now, his words had caught her full attention.
King Siegfried Braveheart's study was where she had spent most of her childhood learning about moral values, principles, and responsibilities. Most of her memories of the study had already become vague over the years. However, her father's teachings were still quite vivid in her mind.
Her father didn't believe royalty born with privileged statuses shouldn't abuse their privilege. Instead, they had to conduct themselves in a manner that was befitting and deserving of said privilege.
Astoria traced her hand along the row of books on the left shelf as she recalled her memories of the place.
However, nothing particularly special stood out for her, even after she passed all the bookshelves. None of the books on the shelves were particularly memorable or special to her.
But thinking of special books, Astoria suddenly recalled one particular book that had caught her interest - her fathers diary.
She remembered her father always wrote in his diary while he was educating her. Thinking back carefully, he only wrote in the diary after she gave answers to his quizzes.
She immediately glanced at her late father's clean desk. The diary wasn't on the desk. Thus, she pulled open the drawers and searched. But even then, the diary was not there.
"Not here..." Astoria muttered blankly before the sound of flipping pages prompted her to glance up at Vaan.
It turned out he had already picked out the diary during the time she wandered around the study's small private library with her mind preoccupied.
Vaan flipped through the pages very quickly but also carefully to avoid damaging the diary. When he sensed Astoria's gaze on the diary, he immediately knew the diary was the object of importance he was looking for.
Whatever King Siegfried Braveheart left behind for Astoria must be hidden in it.
However, even after finishing the diary, he failed to find a piece of important information related to the Braveheart family's history with Pangea and the Sun God Temple.
The diary's contents were mostly about King Siegfried Braveheart's thoughts and praises for his daughter as he watched her grow and learn, becoming an excellent model person.
Of course, he knew the hidden knowledge couldn't possibly be written in plain sight. Thus, he used every known secret code in Pangea to decipher the diary's contents. Unfortunately, he still failed to decipher the diary's hidden information.
Despite his failure, Vaan didn't doubt his judgment regarding the diary being an object of importance.
He could tell there was hidden information contained within the diary due to their sentences not connecting and appearing more like scrambled thoughts that accumulated over time.
The problem was there, but the right formula to reach the answer was missing.
"Your father most likely left something for you inside this diary. Have a look and see if you can figure anything out. His message to you should be coded," Vaan said, passing the diary to Astoria.
After Astoria accepted the diary with a nod, she quickly perused the diary. Reading how proud her father was of her, Astoria's eyes couldn't help but become watery with emotions. She suddenly missed her father again.
Nevertheless, she wiped her tears and kept reading from start to end.
Astoria's reading speed was much slower than Vaan's. Thus, they both ended up spending the entire evening in the study.
During this time, Vaan perused the other books on the shelf and played with Topaz. Ruby, on the other hand, was kept inside the fire spirit space.
He wouldn't want to risk burning the study, even if he were confident in preventing it.
The study was a place with sentimental value to Astoria.
"I remember now!" Astoria suddenly exclaimed, prompting Vaan to glance over.
"You found out how to crack the message hidden in the diary?" Vaan inquired, focusing his attention on the diary. Astoria had only read a third of the diary during this period.
"Mm!" Astoria nodded.
She excitedly sat down at the desk and flipped back to the front of the diary to start over. She also pulled out a spare piece of paper and an ink pen.
"The formula to crack the hidden information in my father's diary is based on my father's answer to a question I once asked him in my early years. It was a question about the conflicting religions between the Holy Knight Kingdom of the past and the Great Ratholos Empire of today."
"I once asked my father, "How come the two countries dislike each other so much due to our conflicting religions yet never warred each other over it?" At that time, I thought it was quite blasphemous that another religion could have such a differing understanding of the beginning."
"Can you guess how my father responded to my question, Vaan?" Astoria asked while deciphering the diary's context at the same time.
However, Vaan calmly shook his head and let her continue.
"My father simply laughed it off and told me a story about the constant bicker between the Great Ratholos Empire's people arguing with our country's people when the two countries still had contact with each other..." Astoria started recounting what she heard.
Supposedly, during the early stages of both countries' religions, there were constant arguments as each side denounced each other's faiths and tried to prove theirs was the correct one. But because there was never a conclusion to the bickering, it became heated to the point where both countries wanted to destroy each other to prove their faith.
Both countries had mobilized their armies on the borders and met each other at the borders. But before the battle could start, they ended up recalling their armies and cutting off all contact.
This was due to something one of Astoria's ancestors said before the battle could happen.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions and beliefs. It's either I'm right, and you're wrong, I'm wrong, and you're right, or we are both wrong. But we both can't be right!" Astoria's ancestor had said.
Because of those words, the two countries eventually learned to acknowledge each other's religions, even if they didn't agree with them.
Nevertheless, Vaan immediately saw the pattern.
Right, wrong, wrong, right, wrong, wrong, right, right...
After realizing it was a formula for the preservation and elimination of words, Vaan immediately applied it to the diary's texts in his mind, deciphering it countless folds faster than Astoria's handwriting speed.
Shortly after cutting out the excess words, he was left with the remaining half of the dairy's texts.
Although it still looked like a bunch of nonsense when the words were connected in order, all the keywords were kept. Thus, he mentally rearranged all the words until they made sense.
There was most likely a second part to deciphering the remaining content, but he didn't need it at this point.
After countless rearrangements of words, Vaan finally acquired a complete text that made sense.
King Siegfried's hidden information was divided into three parts.
One part was about the Blessed Golden Dragon Tribe's history with the Golden Dragon Pangea, which matched the story from the Elderwatch family.
However, it also included the names of the five ancient families from the Blessed Golden Dragon Pangea.
Namely, they were the Braveheart and Elderwatch families, which he had already learned, the Armstrong family, the Weissman family, and finally, the Evermore family.
The second part included the origin of the Sun God Temple and how to control it.
Unfortunately, the secret method was outdated and no longer worked on the current Sun God Temple since they entered the era of magic and aura users.
Lastly, the third part revealed secrets about Astoria's birth.
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