Absolutely, let’s treat it like a relic. First, get the fragment in front of us and note any repeating symbols or patterns. Then we can run a quick frequency analysis and start testing hypotheses. What does it look like?

Each nibble in the 48‑byte block appears exactly four times: 4, D, 9, E, 2, A, 7, C. The block is just the 4‑byte pattern 4D9E2A7C repeated, so we’re looking at a very short, perfectly periodic “key” or checksum. That’s usually a hint of a simple XOR or LFSR pattern rather than a genuine cryptographic hash. A good next step is to treat the 4‑byte sequence as a key and XOR it against the ASCII we got—Mž*|—and see what pops out. If nothing sensible emerges, try a small rotation or a byte‑wise addition. The fact that the nibble frequencies are uniform tells us nothing was mixed in, so the raw pattern is probably the starting point. Let’s run that XOR and see if a legible string comes out.