Hey, Richkiller here. So recently one of the two unsolved Gorod Krovi ciphers was solved by /u/finsternacht, detailing a message from the Reporter regarding "The Subjects", and revealing a connection between the Shadowman and Nyarlathotep from Lovecraft. See the post here!
The goal of the post is to entail new details on this cipher (as well as other related details), that could have implications for the unsolved GK cipher, and possibly even for some Revelations ciphers (however don't get your hopes up for a Revelations cipher breakthrough).
The keys
The cipher used to encrypt the newly-solved message was Double Columnar Transposition, which double encrypts a message using a Single Columnar Transposition twice, each layer has its own key. While the keys themselves were found as a part of solving the cipher, the keywords from which the keys were derived were unknown.
Coldstone and I were working on finding the original keys for the ciphers and eventually I found them. The keys are the numbers 654371979 and 10271978. The reason these numbers are special is because they originate from Kronorium Excerpts of two Gorod Krovi ciphers:
The first key is exactly the Kronorium Excerpt of the cipher talking about the Great War: "Kronorium Excerpt 654371979: Once the Great War ended with the defeat of the Apothicons, the Keepers ascended to become the wards of all universes. ... "
The second key is a slight alternation (more info below) of Kronorium Excerpt of the cipher talking about "the flow with all creation" (still interesting information to this day): "Kronorium Excerpt 27101978: The life force from the dead world allows the bearer to flow with all creation."
Excerpt numbers used to solve the GK transposition cipher
Following this, and other tricks in the GK ciphers such as SSMJABR being Victis' initials as well as the Nyarlathotep anagram, this is a good opportunity to look again at the Gorod Krovi ciphers and information surrounding them:
Kronorium Excerpts
There are five "Kronorium Excerpts" (if I'm missing any, please share ASAP!)
- 654371979 - "Great War" GK cipher, Used here.
- 27101978 - "Flow" GK cipher, Used here after altered to 10271978
- 349561223 - GK cipher about the Summoning Key mixing life with dimensions.
- B - GK cipher talking about the Keepers creating a transference device (teleporter).
- 1023816121016 - The Exceprt of the Zombies Chronicles timeline.
The Numbers:
First, I want to point out that the Kronorium numbers are not random- In particular, all numbers have 1 as their 4th digit. Here is a possible view of the numbers: 65437 / 1979, 2710 /1978, 34956 / 1223, 10238/1612/1016.
The number 27101978 is the only one with 7 digits here. It is possible that this number may in fact represent a date: 27/10/1978 . This would make the alternation to the key into 10/27/1978 making more sense. Is there anything significant (in the story or real life) about October 27th, 1978? Can we derive further meaning from the numbers themselves? I want to point out here that there is a similar Easter Egg with the "red scarf" message from the BO3 computer, which has the birth date of Menendez in disguise as a number.
Excerpt B:
Next point of discussion is Excerpt 'B', which is outstanding compared to the Excerpt numbers. The original cipher is a Navajo Code talker, which converts letters and words into code-words of the language. It is decently possible the letter 'B' here is a glitch in the encoding, thus we're possibly missing a number Excerpt (if there was originally a number there, there is no way to recover it from the given ciphertext). This is highly concerning given the new find of Kronorium Excerpts being potential keys for ciphers.
Chronicles Excerpt:
The new find sheds an interesting light on the The Zombies Chronicles timeline having an Excerpt number. 1023816121016 is particularly longer than all the others, and it was released with the timeline after DLC 4 arrived. It is possible this number was given as a part of a Revelations cipher, and I want to bring two parts of relevant interviews with Jason Blundell. The first talks about the Revelations ciphers themselves, in which Jason says there are "things that will appear", possibly hinting towards future information helping to solve Rev ciphers. The second being about people copying the timeline into easily-to-read formats, and how we miss info in the timeline and overlook the original representation, which could also be a nod to the importance of the Excerpt number (on top of the Monty and Richtofen signatures on the timeline).
It is also possible that this number is used for some secret in DLC 5 embedded into the timeline or Zombies Chronicles itself, though there is no clear unknown secret that this number can be applied to. It's also possible that Treyarch gave us the missing number from excerpt B, though I find it being a key to a Revelations cipher being the most likely. On a related topic, there is a number sitting on the Arcade Ticket cipher from Revelations, which hasn't been used either: 30957298.
In-game suspicious information
I want to showcase some in-game suspicious information, which may be relevant. First, there are two screens within Gorod Krovi that are hoarded with numbers.
Gorod Krovi Screen #1
Gorod Krovi Screen #2
Note that the second screen actually holds one of the Gorod Krovi ciphers, specifically the octal cipher talking about Monty instructing Maxis to initiate Primis Richtofen's journey. Also notice that the first screen holds the word "decryption".
That being said, It's very unclear whether these numbers do serve any parts with ciphers (either being a cipher or being related to the last unsolved GK cipher), but following the Excerpts being the keys, I don't want to underweight them.
There are two important notes to state. First is that the different screens appear to be correlated, with each one being an alternation of the former. Thus, it is fair to assume that if these screens are relevant, then either the first or last versions of each screen are relevant. The second note is that apparently the numbers are filled in columns from top to button, instead of filling in the rows. In particular, a binary series (0s and 1s) can be found in one of the columns of the second screen.
I also want to take the opportunity to bring again a piece of information that appears within Gorod Krovi. As first found by Thor over CoDz around the release time of Gorod Krovi, there is an alphabet appearing on the purple Cylinder used within the map. After looking into it, the alphabet appears on the other colored cylinders: AYCDWZIHGJKLQNOPMVSTXREUBF. This alphabet is far from random, and particularly binds a few pairs of letters together, similarly to an Enigma plugboard: BY EW FZ GI QM RV UX.
Gorod Krovi Cylinders, each rotor has the alphabet above.
It is worth mentioning that the cylinders are also mentioned with respect to ciphers in the Harvey Yena letter that talks about the Dragons, Die Glocke and Sophia (which is relevant to the Easter Egg, but possibly also relevant to ciphers).
The List Cipher
As said earlier, there are several tricks being applied in the GK ciphers such as SSMJABR being Victis' initials, the Nyarlathotep anagram, using the Primis bios to solve a cipher (The other map bios remain unused as of now),... and now we have the Excerpt Numbers.
This brings again the suspicious Gorod Krovi cipher, detailing a list of things to get and do made by someone, now becoming ever more suspicious than before.
Things to get and do: Duct tape Rope Eggs Finish reading that book Poultry Nails Saw World domination Bleach Compressor Onions Boiling water
Is there some secret in this list that we have yet to figure out? Can we derive a key from this list to be used for the last unsolved GK cipher, similarly to the excerpts?
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And that's it for this post, thank you for reading! Feel free to ask questions or share any thought you have.
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