The establishment of the Time Travelers Alliance began in the first year of Conan

Chapter 185 The difficulty of decrypting the third pointer is more than 360 times that of the second one (two-in-one monthly ticket request)
"Then we'll meet at the office."

After agreeing on a time with Conan, Hattori Heiji's tone was filled with anticipation.

"I also want to see Detective Maori again!"

Maori——A great detective?!
Conan keenly caught the undisguised competitive edge in Heiji's words, and the corners of his mouth twitched involuntarily. Conan tried hard to suppress the urge to laugh out loud.

I actually have expectations for that confused detective...

I can guarantee that the Maori detective you mentioned will definitely give you a "big surprise"...

Then, Conan began to set a trap for the confused detective.

"I'll tell you a secret, Heiji."

He lowered his voice in a mysterious tone, "Uncle Maori really loves puzzle games!"

——If lying on a chair and solving Sudoku and word puzzles in the newspaper when you are bored counts.

Thinking of the performance of that confused detective in the office, Conan laughed in his heart a few times, and then used a firm tone.

"If you give him a puzzle that satisfies him then—"

"Ha! Don't worry about that!" Hattori Heiji said with a confident smile, "See you then!"

"Well, see you then."

After Heiji hung up the phone, Conan finally couldn't help laughing out loud. His arrogant laughter didn't end until Dr. Agasa turned his head and called him in a curious tone.

"Conan?"

"Ah! Dr. Agasa!"

Conan immediately remembered the purpose of his visit to the doctor's house, put away his smile, and quickly ran to Dr. Agasa.

"Doctor, Doctor! Has the new pointer information appeared?"

Hearing Conan's question, Dr. Agasa released his hand from the adjustment knob on the outside of the decoding box, and then straightened up with a slightly painful expression.

For an old man, it is really not easy to bend over and maintain a posture at this age.

Conan's expectant gaze was greeted by Dr. Agasa's embarrassed smile, and he scratched his head in embarrassment.

"Hahahaha... well..."

Dr. Agasa's tone gave Conan a bad feeling.

"Although there has been some progress—"

Dr. Agasa sighed and briefly told Conan the difficulty of deciphering the name of the third pointer.

"After installing the second pointer, this puzzle game has become a hundred times more difficult!"

"More than a hundred times?!"

Conan widened his eyes in shock, then he remembered Dr. Agasa's history of inventions, and a hint of suspicion appeared in his tone.

"But this is only the second pointer! Could it be that you've got it the wrong way around, Doctor?"

"Well, I'm not exaggerating at all."

Dr. Agasa nodded, opened the black box used for decoding, carefully removed the watch clamped on the middle frame, and placed it in front of Conan.

The mysterious watch lay quietly on the laboratory table, like a sleeping puzzle. The jewel hands and amber hands were tightly inlaid on the two dials near the bottom. The light from the overhead light made the dials glow slightly.

Pushing his glasses on the bridge of his nose, Dr. Agasa said with a hint of solemnity: "This has a lot to do with the type of pointer you found. I only discovered this last night."

After saying that, the doctor seemed to remember something. He walked to the wall where the clock was hanging, reached out to take it down, then returned to the laboratory table and placed the two clocks, one large and one small, side by side.

After doing all this, the doctor looked down at Conan and found that his expression had become serious as he expected.

"Conan, you should have figured it out by now."

"Um……"

Conan nodded slightly, and he put his fingers on his chin, making a classic Kudo-style thinking posture.

As his eyes fell on the dial of the black watch, Conan could easily see the problem with the two installed hands. The angles they pointed to were exactly the same as the angles of the second hand and minute hand on the clock that Professor Agasa had just taken off.

"These two hands should be the second hand and minute hand, right?" Conan looked up into the doctor's eyes. "And they should be exactly the same as the current time - am I right, doctor?"

Dr. Agasa nodded approvingly.

"That's right, so this is the crux of the problem—"

"It now appears that in addition to the angle and intensity of the incoming light, if the pointer wants to reflect the correct answer, it must also be at a precise and accurate point in time."

Conan's eyes suddenly became sharp!
It's reasoning time!

He immediately asked, "When did the first pointer give the clue?"

The first thought that came to Conan's mind was to see if he could find any relevant clues based on the numbers given by the watch.

"It's 09 seconds," Dr. Agasa sighed, a helpless look on his face, "That's the problem, Conan."

Dr. Agasa removed the outer casing of the wall clock, then reached out and moved the three hands on the dial.

"You can't just move the hands of a watch like this, or even stop them. I've tried, and there's a certain amount of resistance. If I try to stop it with force, I'm worried I'll damage the watch."

“Trying to get the dial to cast clues required me to play with the angles and intensities of the lights.”

"The first pointer is the second hand. The second hand rotates once every 60 seconds, which means that I can theoretically verify the result once every minute."

"Plus, we were pretty lucky the first time. After all, the angle of the pointer giving the clue was exactly the ninth second, so you quickly figured out the clue for the second pointer."

Then Dr. Agasa paused, and his tone became a little heavier.

"But the problem is, the second hand is the minute hand."

Minute hand...

Conan reacted suddenly and his pupils shrank slightly.

The minute hand rotates once every hour, which means that the time required to verify the result will change from minutes to hours.

"That is to say..." Conan's heart sank at the doctor's words, and his brows furrowed. "The time it takes us to verify the answer has increased 60 times!"

Seeing that Conan realized the seriousness of the problem, Dr. Agasa nodded, sighed, and added: "It's more than sixty times——"

"That's why I said the next puzzle will be a hundred times more difficult..."

"Conan, the problem is not just the addition of a minute hand. The first hand, the second hand, is also working."

“So actually, the light hitting the dial should pass through both hands at the same time, and they both need to be at the correct time.”

Constructing a model of the watch in his mind, Conan tried to reason according to what Dr. Agasa said, then he shook his head with a headache.

This requires knowledge of optics and materials science, rather than reasoning based on clues.

Can't think of it at all.

But he already understood what the doctor meant.

"That is to say..."

"Not only does it need to be verified at a specific '09th second of a certain minute', but the added pointer will also change the angle and intensity of the light, perhaps even requiring an additional light source?"

"That's right, because there's an additional light source," Dr. Agasa nodded, "so the optical lens for adjusting the angle also needs to have another dimension."

Conan fell silent.

He had previously personally debugged those sets of extremely complex optical lenses under the guidance of Dr. Agasa.

If additional light sources are to be added, this means that the refraction path of the light needs to be recalculated, and at the same time, the entire optical system of the decoding box must be rearranged.

After a pause, Dr. Agasa continued with a serious expression:
"So in this case, the existing optical components may not be sufficient, and if we add lenses..."

Dr. Agasa pointed to several unopened boxes piled in the corner.

"I'd have to polish the new lenses myself, and if I did, they wouldn't fit into this small box anymore."

"So we have to increase the size of the decoder box. Then there are the spatial arrangement of the original lens group light source, the position of the regulator, plus the scattering and refraction path of light caused by the increased space..."

As Dr. Agasa threw out more and more questions to be solved, Conan's expression became more and more solemn.

He immediately realized the seriousness of the problem that Dr. Agasa mentioned. Even more critical was the issue of time!
"Looking at it this way, we don't have enough time, Doctor! If the first and second hands are the second hand and the minute hand respectively—"

Conan's eyes fell on the watch, especially the four dials that were now empty.

The sudden guess that popped up in Conan's mind immediately caused a storm in his heart, and his pupils began to vibrate violently.

If the doctor's speculation is correct——

The first pointer is the second hand, the second pointer is the minute hand, then the third pointer is most likely the hour hand!
In other words, the time required to verify the third pointer will be measured in days.

But the most terrifying thing is yet to come——

What do the remaining three pointers represent?
Conan's mind was racing, and cold sweat involuntarily slid down his spine.

What if the fourth hand represents "day", the fifth represents "month", and the sixth represents "year"?

If the next pointers represent the day, month, and year respectively...

Then the time window for verifying the answer will increase exponentially!

Especially the last pointer——

How could there be a way to determine exactly what year it was?!
A terrifying thought emerged in my mind—

What if...what if I finally discovered that it would take hundreds or even thousands of years to obtain the truth?!

Doesn't that mean I'll never be able to solve this mystery and get the truth?!
It was as if some invisible chill seeped out from time, and the venom of fear dripped into Conan's mind drop by drop.

It even made him feel like he was having a horrible hallucination before his eyes.

It was as if time had become his enemy now, and the black watch lying on the laboratory table now looked so scary and weird.

It is no longer a sophisticated mechanical device, but rather some indescribable existence—

A monster that haunts time, or something else, anything terrible.

It just stared at Conan.

Those six dials seem like the six eyes of time.

Two oddly shaped pointers transformed into strange pupils and eyeballs, filling the monster's two empty eye sockets, making it stare at him quietly with a chilling look.

The light reflected from the watch dial suddenly lost its white and bright feeling and turned into a cold white tone like white bones.

This watch stared at itself and laughed at itself with a lifeless gaze that was as cold and greedy as time.

The reflected light became as sharp as a sword, piercing into Conan's eyes and his mind like a needle, forcing him to avoid the gaze of the watch staring at him.

For Conan Edogawa, at this moment, a sense of panic and fear rose in his heart.

——A kind of inexplicable panic and fear.

"But there is good news."

With a hint of excitement in his tone, Dr. Agasa suddenly pulled Conan back to reality from that desperate fantasy.

"Conan? Are you listening?"

Conan blinked.

The violently beating heart, the cold sweat clinging to the shirt on his back, the feet still firmly on the ground - these real sensations made Conan feel his body and his consciousness again.

"W...what?" Conan asked subconsciously, his voice slightly hoarse.

“I was thinking, since I had to rebuild the optical decoder box, I might as well just use the black box and add natural light to create a panoramic light.”

Dr. Agasa yawned. He had been trying for the whole night yesterday.

"But the sunlight is too strong. I'm worried it might interfere with the decoding process, so I thought I'd try moonlight instead."

Conan sat up straight, "The name of the third pointer just happened to appear?!"

"Ah, that's not the case."

Dr. Agasa scratched his head and gave an embarrassed smile, "But the first word is out, it's the word 'moon'."

The glimmer of hope in his eyes was instantly shattered, and Dr. Agasa's words immediately made Conan collapse on the sofa again.

"There's only one word..."

——Isn’t this the same as having no clues at all?

"It's not just a single word that appears! If this hypothesis is correct, Conan, you don't have to worry about the pointer problem later."

"Why, Dr. Agasa? If it's really as you said, it might take several years to verify the next step..."

"Because this means we have the possibility of a 'database collision'. Also, have you forgotten about the first pointer?"

Conan suddenly opened his eyes wide and jumped up from the sofa almost like a spring: "Doctor, are you talking about that organization?!"

Dr. Agasa nodded.

"How else did they get the news of the first pointer?"

"The first hand has no previous hand to guide it."

"And later we can use computers to simulate and verify the possible angles. Besides, there might be other clues!"

Seeing Conan's eyes glowing again, Dr. Agasa's tone softened:

"Conan, think about it. Whoever made this watch and these hands, his ultimate goal was definitely not to cover up the truth."

After patting his waist, the doctor sat down next to Conan, then patted his shoulder gently and said earnestly:
"Conan, I know you want to find the truth right now, but don't be too impatient."

Dr. Agasa sighed inwardly, the key still lies in the third pointer.

In fact, the most crucial thing is the alliance, just like the decoding method he told Conan today, without the help of the alliance, this ceremony will never be completed.

This is also why the universe so generously agreed to the start of the ceremony in the first place.

Conan will never find the truth alone.

Now the dual timelines make the long river of time wander between reversal and advancement, and the universe only gives Conan half a year, plus the interference of the dual timelines.

——Without the alliance, how would Conan have enough time to verify those conjectures?

Although he has now voluntarily forgotten the other three words except "moon", Dr. Agasa knows that the alliance has found three options.

After all, for the alliance, the alliance's [loop] can be used to perform exhaustive cracking methods infinitely.

Combined with Koizumi Hongzi's previous prediction, the alliance soon got the real answer -

The shadow of the full moon, the heart of the moonlight, the heart of the moon shadow.

This is the three choices presented in the third case.

The Alliance even had to ask Dr. Agasa to temporarily forget the location of the third case and the possible names of the three pointers.

Now it's the league that needs more time.

"Anyway..." Dr. Agasa smiled, "You should take a few days off now. It's a good opportunity to get familiar with this."

Before he finished speaking, a very large, tall but very flat package was taken out from behind Dr. Agasa and handed to Conan.

"I can't hold it, Doctor... Eh? It's so light?"

Conan weighed the package doubtfully and was about to open it.

"Conan! It's time to eat!"

——Kogoro Mouri's voice sounded coincidentally.

Looking up at the sky outside, Dr. Agasa stopped Conan from opening the package and pushed him towards the door.

"Go home and dismantle it. If you don't go back, your sister Xiaolan will be worried again."

Standing at the door, the doctor winked at him and gave him a mysterious smile.

"A surprise! I promise, you'll love it!"

(End of this chapter)