Here are some assorted things I've been pondering, looking at Jan-Poo's railway theory...
Is it really certain that the starting string is 11 or 13 characters long? It seems like there might be issues with duplicate letters. Using 'quadrillion' as an example, if you ended up having to sacrifice 'I', you'd have to pick one to get rid of, or otherwise the count for the rest of the epitaph would be off. Instead of that, maybe we're looking for a starting string that contains 11 or 13 different letters, and killing means you delete all of the copies.
Carrying on with that line of thought, maybe "the two who are close" refers to adjacent letters remaining in the alphabet, rather than the original string. Alternately, they might refer specifically to doubled letters, like 'ss'.
The phrasing of "gouge the whatever and kill" seems odd. Maybe we're supposed to take something like the stop name, "gouge out" part of that first, and only "kill" the remainder from our overall string.
The inscription at the chapel seems like a great choice for the initial string, but it has 18 unique letters in it. Maybe some of them are intended to be left over at the ninth twilight to form the witch's name (the witch will be revived), or something similar. Maybe even directions to where the gold is, which would solve the problem of where to go from the chapel.
Assuming the word "quadrillion" or the entire inscription is the starting point, either the Q has to get killed somewhere, or both the Q and the U have to not be killed.
Speaking of the inscription:
- This door is opened only at probability of a quadrillion to one.
- You will be blessed only at
a probability of a quadrillion to one.
It could be a typo, but considering it was preserved in the anime, it might be another deliberate thing, like the "village of gold" clue. For it to be useful, A would probably need to not be killed in any of the twilights.
Well, probably most of this is off the mark. I haven't made a lot of progress.
