Well, this is strange. Somebody just emailed me saying that they had found an old Chinese book and were wondering if it was valuable. The title is 網俠, or "Knight of the Nets", which I'd never heard of and can find no information on.

The thing is, it's not really text. The pages are filled with random characters in what looks like a square grid, but most of the squares are blank. Sometimes there are short sentences at the top of the page, often in the second person, like they're addressing the reader.

The scan I was sent is a bit hard to make out, so I copied some of the grid on paper. As best as I can tell, the accompanying sentence here says something like "you [honorific] hear the sound of water falling on coins of gold".

There is no information about the author, the publisher, or the year of publication, only a date of some sort on the first page: the first day of the fourth month.

Any ideas?

#ChineseLanguage #puzzles #games #YetAnotherStupidJoke #AprilFirst #Nethack