Chapter 533 — The Day the Firmament Made the Sun
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
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."