The Hidden Treasures

Question

Credit: Brandon X.

My friend made this riddle and I think it’s pretty well made with lots of components, so here it is:

Look
there Is treasure Here
    in Its purest Form

The large Key is Here
    In front Of Your Face
    found  In Moments,
        Used only After… 

The start of its passage
    Begins below the entrance
        With the number of lines

To find the treasure
Measure your happiness
    And theirs
    And write it down
        But not with numbers
            As the first is one
But Wait-
    They are listening
        So reverse its path
            From whence it came

Now place it in a box 
    Of four and four
    For there you’ll find the treasure’s core
… 
Now look across
    See the joining line
    In the distance
        For there lies the key
            For what is hidden.
So, given these clues, what does the following text say?
PJFOIHIHFIHIHIIHNNQDRVKHK

Hint #1:

The third stanza is first.

Hint #2:

Focus on where the capital letters are.

Hint #3:

Beware of the red herring.

Hint #4:

Look at a keyboard for the third stanza.

Hint #5:

Solve the riddle in this order: 3rd stanza, 1st & 2nd stanzas, then the rest.

Hint #6:

Look across the infinite sea for the last stanza.

Hint #7: Big(ger) Hint!

Count the number of words in the first 2 stanzas, and the letters in the hidden message. Now, hint #2 looks interesting...

Please leave a comment if you have any suggestions or feedback!

Partial answers are encouraged, feel free to share your thought process.

Answer 1

Partial Answer, more like initial analysis really...

Hint #2 says to focus on where the capital letters are. In the first two stanzas there is unusual capitalization. I believe it is a pattern of zeroes and ones meant to be binary.

The fourth stanza says "As the first is one".

Starting with 1 and continuing word to word, ignoring new lines I got:

1111101101001001

16 digits, which fits nicely with the four by four box mentioned in stanza six:

1111 1011 0100 1001

Hint #1 says stanza 3 is actually 1, so when looking at Hint #4 we need to compare the original stanza 2 with a keyboard. I believe the large key in front of our face could be either the Enter key or the Space-bar.

Evidence toward it being the Enter key comes from the use of the word entrance in the original stanza 3. Evidence toward it being the Space-bar comes from the extra space in the third line of the second stanza (original position).

This information is used with the final stanza because there is "..." just above it, based on the line "Used only After…".

Answer 2

Another initial analysis

Relating to the third stanza, I believe that the "start of its passage" beginning below the entrance relates to

The shift key, being right under the entrance key

This goes hand in hand with hint #2 and a comment from @Xcoder. However, the "number of lines" clue in stanza #3 still feels like a complete mystery to me.

Following hint #7 we have that :

There are 25 letters in the message, 25 words in stanzas #1 and #2.

Thus, applying hint #2 :

We get a binary code, that differs from @takintoolong one :

    1
    0 1 0 1
      0 1 0 1

    1 0 1 0 1
      1 0 1 1 1
      0 1 1
        1 0 1

I followed indentation provided by Xcoder, and used upper case letters as 1 and lower case letters as 0. There is 25 bits. Turning each line into numbers and then letters using A=1... gives EE, UWCE. This just feels random so this is not how to proceed.

After this, I feel quite stumped because I do not see any way to go forward. Scraping for ideas, and compiling ideas in the comments and the puzzle itself, I think that:

In stanza #4 I should measure "your happiness" and "theirs". No idea of how to get that out of science class, but anyway !

I should then get a result in numbers that I translate in letters using Cesar's code with A = 1 at some point as pointed out by @Somebody.

Then, using the key found in stanza #2, and the "box" of four by four filled with stanza #4 and reversed as per stanza #5 instruction we find the "treasure's core", meaning possibly the key to use with the final message.

I don't think that is for sure, but it's what I've arrived at. Any contribution and help is appreciated, I already used a lot of results from others and feel like I haven't made much progress !

---

Edit : Revelations

After applying hint #2, with this result we can see this pattern :

PJFOIHIHFIHIHIIHNNQDRVKHK # The hidden message
1010101011010110111011101 # The result of hint #2

By picking the letters by the number under them, we get

PFIIFIIIINNQRVKHK # For 1 : 16 letters => fits nicely in a four by four box
JOHHHHDH # For 0 : 8 letters

I believe those two are linked to the happiness clues, no idea how yet ! Feel like a bit of progress has been made, I'm keeping it up ! Will edit along. I like this !

Answer 3

The Solution to “The Hidden Treasures”

By Natalie Aldenderfer

Welcome to an explanation of a very weakly connected and convoluted riddle, where things only get weirder and more convoluted as you go on!

Using human instinct, you believe that the first stanza leads to the first clue. You read the riddle once, and see that there at the bottom of the second stanza, you see a clue: “Used only After…” This hints that you should look at the next stanza, the third stanza first. Now, to quote the third stanza:

“The start of its passage

Begins below the entrance

With the number of lines”

You can connect entrance to the verb form of the word, “enter”. Now, since this is a riddle, and since there is a statement saying “The large Key is Here”, meaning that the riddle refers to the clues as keys. If you combine “enter” and “key”, you get “enter key”, like the enter key on the keyboard. Now, since the poem states “below the entrance”, you know that it’s below the enter key, or the shift key. Now, you know it’s a shift cipher. Now, once you get to the third line, you see the phrase “with the number of lines”. The number of lines in that stanza is three. When you apply a shift 23 cipher(because text below was originally shifted by 3) to the encoded phrase, you get:

MGCLFEFECFEFEFFEKKNAOSHEH

Now, we go back to the top again(to the first stanza, you notice the really weirdly capitalized letters:

“Look

there Is treasure Here

in Its purest Form

...and in the rest of the stanza.

Now, if you look closely, there are 25 words in the first 2 stanzas, and 25 letters in the encoded message. That leads to the idea that whenever a word is capitalized, the corresponding letter should be capitalized. For example, since “Look” is capitalized, the “M” should be capitalized in the message. However, since “there” is not capitalized, the “g” should not be capitalized. So you get this:

MgClFeFeCFeFeFFeKKNaOSHeH

… which looks awfully like

elements of the periodic table

In the next stanza, you get how to decode the elements. The stanza reads thus:

“To find the treasure

Measure your happiness

And theirs

And write it down

But not with numbers

As the first is one”

If you look at the phrase “Measure your happiness… And theirs”, it’s an indication that you should probably measure the positivity of the atom if it were fully ionized(or just take the atomic number). That means you would get the sequence of numbers:

12 17 26 26 12 26 26 9 26 19 19 11 8 16 2 1

However, in the poem you are strictly instructed to write it down “But not with numbers”. If not numbers, then what would you write it with? The answer is letters of course. The next line explains how you correspond letters to numbers--“As the first is one.” This indicates the a=1, b=2 code. So you get this:

L Q Z Z F Z Z J Z S S K H P C B

Now, the next stanza says that somebody is listening. That indicates that it’s a false clue. The treasure is meant to stay hidden, they don’t want those unworthy reaching the treasure. So you skip it.

The next stanza is probably one of the more crucial ones. It’s explicitly telling you what to do: “Put it in a box… of four and four”. If you plot these letters left to right on a 4x4 grid, you start to see it looks a lot like a rail fence cipher, which it is. Once you decode that cipher, you get this:

LFZHQZSPZZSBZIKA

Now, you’re almost there! Just one last stanza. It says,

“Now look across

See the joining line

In the distance

For there lies the key

For what is hidden.”

Now, what do you see when you look across to see a joining line? This is probably one of the most confusing clues. Assuming that treasure is usually hidden in the ocean, the answer is the horizon(the “joining line” between the sky and the sea). And the word “horizon” is the “key… For what is hidden.” The combination of “key” with the word “horizon” should indicate that you want to get a keyword cipher--the keyword being “horizon”. Once you plug that in, you get

PLEASETREETHEDOG

… or “Please tree the dog.”(It’s a long story.)

And there you have it! The solution to “The Hidden Treasures”.

Natalie Aldenderfer

Approved By:

Felipe Cazador--President of Llameante Institute Jorge Conservillo--Founder of Llameante Institute