- gamertag: ALI217
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I'm gonna finish it. Just like Jigga did to the pyramid.
Posted by: TheMisssingLink
Duncan's revealed the larger share of it, but I'll willingly explain it in full.
The top grid is the cipher. Starting with the 1 in the upper-left corner, you follow the increasing powers of seven through the grid, moving only up, down, left, or right. Those numbers are:
1 = 7^0
7 = 7^1
49 = 7^2
343 = 7^3
2401 = ...
16807
117649
823543
5764801
40353607
282475249
1977326743
13841287201
96889010407
678223072849
4747561509943
33232930569601 = 7^16
There's only one path through the grid that yields these numbers; however, there's a lot of overlap. This was a small diversion to make everyone doubt the legitimacy of it, but the red-herring sentence was meant to confirm that this was indeed the proper thing to do.
(The red-herring sentence starts with the Y, down to O, right to U, up to A, over to RE, down to T, left to R, and so on.)
Following the same path in the lower grid as the upper grid yielded the red-herring sentence, which was written very carefully (stupid repeating patterns!) to make it clear that that wasn't the correct solution.
Taking the leftover letters that weren't traced over (29 in all) led to the proper question, which led to the proper answer.
what the -blam!-,