Chapter 533 — The Day the Firmament Made the Sun

In midair, the heaven-demon commander's two halves came tumbling down. He had not yet breathed his last; when he struck the ground, he could still twitch once or twice.

He was, after all, a master of the Heaven-Man realm, and he had four heads. Shen Mu had merely sliced him in two with the Lunar Jade Eye; with vitality as formidable as his, there was no chance he would drop dead in the space of a breath.

His four heads glared venomously at Shen Mu, but even so, his life ebbed away.

Around them, the astonishment had not yet faded from the faces of the many divine-arts practitioners of Taihuang Heaven. They stared, dumbstruck, at the big boy who stood in the blood-soaked battlefield, absorbed in his own calculations.

That heaven-demon commander, so savage and so vicious, had been a great master of the Heaven-Man realm, a young powerhouse of no small renown among the demon race, his strength unfathomable. Had he chosen to fight, a hundred or more would likely have died on the altar, and even then they might not have been able to keep him.

"Who is that man?" one of the Taihuang Heaven practitioners asked in a low voice.

Someone beside him said, "A disciple of the demon god Furiluo. Among the demon race's Heaven-Man realm masters, he ranks seventh. They say he is a powerhouse who could grow into a true demon, Furiluo's most beloved disciple..."

"No. I meant him."

"I don't know..."

...

The girl with the long braid pulled Shen Mu to his feet and said with a laugh, "You killed Fuyuxiao! That fellow holds a very high place among the demon race's Heaven-Man realm. You've done a great service!"

Shen Mu glanced at the corpse and said in surprise, "His standing is that high? No wonder his strength was so overbearing. If I hadn't learned that one move from the Woodcutter Sage, I doubt I could have survived even a single blow from him."

He crouched down again and went on with his calculations.

The long-braided girl looked at the jade eye beside him and said doubtfully, "How did you kill him? This eye is..."

"This jade eye was probably forged by a god of the Shanghuang era. They built an array on the moon and used the moonlight for illumination."

Shen Mu kept calculating as he spoke. "Fuyuxiao had four heads. When all four control the body at once, their thoughts conflict. Faced with something sudden, his four heads have no time to each take charge of their own part of the body, so his reaction would be muscle memory. All I had to do was calculate, from Fuyuxiao's divine abilities and techniques, what his muscle-memory response would be, work out how that muscle memory would affect him in a moment of crisis, and then I would know his trajectory. Then I activated this Lunar Jade Eye. The instant he leaped into the air, he ran himself onto it and killed himself."

The long-braided girl's eyes went wide. She stared at him in shock. He ran himself onto it and killed himself?

Arithmetic could be used like that? How had he calculated it?

"Do you have anyone here who excels in the arts of calculation?"

Shen Mu opened the Taotie Pouch, and the arithmetic elemental soldiers went clattering back inside. Frowning, he said, "To build a world bridge, the volume of computation is enormous. If I have to do it all myself, I estimate it will take me the better part of a year to work out the sacrificial spirit-energy conversion equation and derive the spirit-energy transfer equation, and only then can I construct the spatial-arithmetic model of a bridge spanning two worlds." (Note 1)

Silence fell all around.

After a moment, the long-braided girl said, her voice rough, "What was that word you just used? A cheng?"

"An equation. Fang means things set side by side; cheng means the vertical form. An equation is used to solve for the yuan... yuan? Not yuan-qi. You don't know what a yuan is? A yuan is an unknown. Put into arithmetic, it is an unknown quantity."

Shen Mu looked up and saw the expressions on her face and on the faces of the Taihuang Heaven practitioners around them. They looked as though they were listening to a scripture from heaven. An uneasy feeling rose in him, and he ventured, "You don't have the Ten Mathematical Classics here? What about the Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, the most elementary of them... You haven't studied that either? Then the Taixuan Mathematical Classic? The Sunü Mathematical Classic, not that either? Surely you've at least studied the Celestial Star Array Equations? That is the calculation of the movements of the heavens!"

The people around him shook their heads blankly.

The long-braided girl said, "What use is there in studying arithmetic?"

The others nodded, one after another, and said with smiles, "We fight on the battlefield every day. Who has the time to study such things? The fastest way to raise your strength is to train hard, learn divine abilities, and comprehend them!"

Shen Mu said angrily, "You don't calculate the heavens? Surely you at least calculate the paths of the stars as they move across the sky?"

Their faces turned strange. Shen Mu wondered inwardly why they should wear such expressions, when suddenly one of the practitioners said, "There are no stars in the sky. Calculate what?"

Shen Mu was struck dumb. He raised his head and looked up.

The sky of Taihuang Heaven was a murky expanse. There were no stars; only a half-sun hung there. And the reason there was still half a sun was that the sun truly was only half!

Shen Mu could even see, on the broken edge of that half-sun, some grand structures, though unfinished. This half-sun seemed to have been built, not formed by nature!

What made him want to laugh and cry at once was that neither of the two suns in the sky was round!

The last time he came, he had seen no sun; it must have been night. Only now did he see the sun of Taihuang Heaven. Yet not only was there a half-sun in the sky, the suns were not even regular spheres: some parts square, some elliptical, some places crooked and warped!

Shen Mu wished he could fly up into the sky and grind those two suns smooth!

Even in Jingping, where the heavens were false, where every sight was an array, the gods and demons who built those arrays to blind the world had been scrupulous. Sun and moon alike were perfectly round, leaving no flaw for anyone to see.

Even the stars and constellations and star-rivers in the sky had been made with the utmost fidelity, deceiving the ox-nosed Daoist priests for twenty thousand years, so much so that when Dao Lord Lin Xuan discovered the secret, his dao heart shattered on the spot.

But Taihuang Heaven, for its part, had not even bothered to make a decent job of its one and a half false suns!

Shen Mu's mind went blank. He shook his head. The sight struck him harder than his first glimpse of Xizhou, though of course one was the shock of godlike craftsmanship, and the other the shock of sheer slapdash carelessness.

"Not a single star. You really don't need the Celestial Star Array Equations..."

Shen Mu nodded and nodded, and could not help missing Long Qilin. He thought, "The practitioners of this world can't be very accomplished in arithmetic. If I had brought Fatty Long along, it would be much easier for me..."

The practitioners of this world, he reasoned, had been at war every day since the demon race invaded. To survive, they had to keep raising their strength, and the best way to raise strength was to cultivate divine abilities bitterly, temper the body, and strengthen their elemental soldiers.

Arithmetic was of no great importance to them. It was dry and dull, and its contribution to strength was not obvious. And so, generation after generation, their mastery of arithmetic had dwindled.

More and more Taihuang Heaven practitioners came onto the altar. The altar was high ground, commanding the field below. These practitioners drew out long bows one after another, bent them, and shot downward. Streaks of arrow-light crossed the battlefield, striking down demon after demon.