At this point, Mera felt she was firmly stepping closer to the answer, as if only a thin membrane remained to be pierced.
Looking back at the sequence, Mera noticed another strange point: the groups of two-digit numbers.
18, 12, 14, 21, 11, 10, 22. Among them, 18, 10, and 22 appeared only once. 11 and 14 appeared twice. 12 appeared four times, while 21 appeared five times.
12 and 21 were the focus. They were interchangeable cases because the triplet 1|2|1 appeared three times, meaning there were three instances that could potentially be 12 or 21.
The question was: why? What role did 12 or 21 play in this logic to warrant such frequent repetition?
Excluding the confirmed 10, the numbers 18 and 22 appearing only once were likely 1|8 and 2|2. 11 was straightforward, and 14 appearing twice could simply be 1|4. All these could be explained as pairs of numbers or consecutive letters. This was very different from something repeated with such high frequency as 12 and 21.
