All the secrets of this world are held in dreams

“All the secrets of this world are held in dreams” is a maxim that brings the novel’s dream imagery into contact with cryptography: both involve searching for what is hidden, but the search does not always follow a clear path. Set beside Rong Jinzhen’s long failure to decipher BLACK and its sudden solution, the expression suggests a way of knowing that may exceed methodical analysis without explaining discovery as supernatural fact.

The maxim and the dream world

The statement appears amid claims about Rong Jinzhen’s lifelong dealings with the dream world. People say that this association has exposed him to wickedness and evil and lets him catch a bird in mid-flight. The language makes his perceptiveness seem uncanny, but the passage presents this as what people say, not as a verified account of how his abilities work. The maxim therefore gathers an existing image—the elusive bird seized in motion—into a broader proposition about secrets and access to knowledge.

The line’s reach is wider than dream interpretation. In the surrounding material, Rong Jinzhen’s work is cryptanalysis, where information is concealed behind a cipher and a solution depends on finding an opening. Dreams provide an image for that concealedness: their contents are not immediately available to ordinary, deliberate reasoning. The expression connects the dream world to the novel’s central problem of how hidden meaning becomes apprehensible.

Method, history, and the closed forest

The book contrasts that suggestive image with the usual procedure of cryptography. Intelligence agents gather relevant information; the cryptographer uses it to form hypotheses and tests possibilities, in an almost limitless search for keys and doors. The work’s scale depends on how much material is available and how sensitive the analyst is to the cipher. The narrator calls this process simple and stupid, yet also the safest, most secure, and most effective approach, especially against a high-level cipher.

Cryptographic history offers no easy guide. It is described as a silent, lonely forest, where practitioners cannot freely ask directions or build on a shared tradition. Its accumulated knowledge can seem like a burden to later generations, and its history is strewn with obstacles and dead ends. Rong Jinzhen departs from the safer procedure by entering this forbidden territory and studying the field’s past. That choice might eliminate some routes among thousands, but it also exposes him to the traps left by earlier cryptographers. Against this landscape of blocked paths, the maxim imagines secrets as present in a domain not reached by ordinary navigation.

BLACK and the failure of expected openings

Rong Jinzhen’s prolonged failure with BLACK sharpens the contrast between labor and insight. The narrator compares a cipher to an enormous seamless net, but says that use can produce slips—like drops of blood marking a breach. For years Rong Jinzhen waits for such an opening, exercising patience through countless days and nights, without finding one in BLACK. The failure is called irregular and strange precisely because his work has depended on locating a flaw that never appears.

The account offers two possible circumstances behind that absence. Cracking PURPLE had made the adversary more cautious and deliberate, as if it had learned not to let a drop of water escape. Separately, Liseiwicz understood Rong Jinzhen’s decryption skill and could have warned the creators of BLACK to prepare countermeasures. The former closeness between the two men is set against the spiritual gulf created by their political positions and beliefs. When Unit 701 learned that Liseiwicz was Weinacht, its members wanted to warn Rong Jinzhen of the ruse; he responded with anger rather than caution. These explanations make BLACK’s apparent impenetrability a matter of both technical concealment and personal history.

The zero key and the meaning of discovery

The eventual solution overturns the expectation that the cipher must yield to a properly found key. At three in the morning, the narrator uses the calculator given to Rong Jinzhen by Headquarters, capable of more than 40,000 calculations, to test an absurd assumption. After deciphering BLACK, the narrator rushes out of the underground mountain-cave offices and cries out before dawn. The key, the account reveals, is zero; BLACK has no real lock. Its door only seemed firmly shut, and a small push was enough to open it.

That reversal gives the maxim its literary force without proving that dreams literally disclose cryptographic answers. The account describes a solution reached through calculation, but also emphasizes the bizarre assumption, disbelief, and apparent impossibility of the result. The discovery feels less like the completion of a predictable search than the recognition that the supposed barrier was false. The dream expression resonates with that sudden change in what can be seen: a secret may be present all along, yet remain inaccessible until the searcher finds a way to perceive it. The book sustains the resonance between dream, intuition, and discovery while leaving the exact source of such insight unresolved.