Chapter 533 — The Day the Firmament Made the Sun
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
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.