Chapter 57

Cui Zui endured and endured, but in the end, he still couldn't help asking Xue Jin'an once more, "So how on earth did you manage that? Don't tell me 'anyone with hands can do it'—I have hands, and I certainly can't. There has to be some kind of trick to it."

If it had to be called a trick, and if Xue Jin'an were forced to summarize it, there indeed was one. It could be explained in two words: calculation.

Distance, gravity, air resistance, target hardness, arrowhead hardness, bow weight, and other known information flashed through his mind. Complex calculations were completed in a split second to determine the optimal trajectory and draw strength, and any errors could be completely eliminated after adjusting at most twice. If necessary, other data such as the initial velocity and acceleration of the arrow could also be computed.

In theory, once he mastered this set of parameters, he could achieve this astonishingly precise hit rate from any angle and in any posture.

For a code-based lifeform with super-powerful computational abilities, this was an instinct that required no thought whatsoever.

However, facing Cui Zui's persistent questioning, Xue Jin'an merely glanced at him without answering. Instead, mimicking the teasing tone Cui Zui had used earlier, he said, "If I teach you these things, I ought to count as half a teacher to you. Why don't you address me as such and let me hear it?"

Cui Zui gave a reaction that exceeded Xue Jin'an's expectations. The surprise on his face flashed and instantly turned into wild joy. "You're serious? A gentleman's word is final, no taking it backsies!"

With that, he dropped to his knees with a solid thud.

Cui Zui knelt down very cleanly and without the slightest hesitation, seeing no problem at all in kneeling before a child nearly ten years younger than him. To him, as long as he could acquire genuine skills, he would kneel to anyone; otherwise, how could he have ever mastered his current abilities?

As the saying went since ancient times, "teach the apprentice and starve the master," which was why many skills were kept strictly within families, and martial arts were no exception. Back when Cui Zui was the son of a pleasure-house dancer and managed to learn martial arts, he relied entirely on his quick wits to seize every opportunity and his shameless tenacity in climbing up the social ladder.

The unexpected and sudden thud of Cui Zui's kneeling startled Shou Quan, who was carrying a tray of tea and water, making him stutter, "W-w-what are you doing?"

Ignoring him, Cui Zui—as if afraid Xue Jin'an would change his mind—lightning-fast snatched a cup of tea from the tray, shoved it into Xue Jin'an's hands, gathered his inner breath from his dantian, and shouted, "Master is above, please accept this disciple's bow!"

Then he struck the ground with three loud, solid kowtows: thump, thump, thump.

While Xue Jin'an had clearly used the term "teacher" in his words, Cui Zui had cunningly and directly upgraded it to "Master."

Although "teacher" and "Master" differed by only one character, and both referred to mentors who imparted knowledge, taught skills, and resolved doubts, the degree of closeness was worlds apart.

One could have many ordinary teachers and instructors; starting from primary education, anyone who touched upon teaching and imparting knowledge could be respectfully addressed as a teacher, much like the relationship between mentors and past associates. But "Master" carried the character for "father"—it was a true lifelong mentorship where "once a teacher, always a father." It meant wearing mourning sackcloth, holding the spirit tablet, and shattering the mourning basin upon the person's death. It was not a title that could be casually bestowed upon anyone.

In truth, had it been solely for the archery skills Xue Jin'an had just displayed, Cui Zui wouldn't have gone so far as to directly kowtow and call him Master. While the difficulty was high, with enough practice, one could eventually master it. What Cui Zui valued more was Xue Jin'an's nonchalant attitude, which indicated that his capabilities went far beyond this.

Even more spine-chilling was Xue Jin'an's age—his life had only just begun, and his martial path had not even reached its peak.

It was hard for Cui Zui not to be tempted by this.

Previously, he had thought he was single-mindedly determined to enter officialdom through scholarship and walk the path of literature to the very end. Only today did he discover that when someone sufficiently extraordinary appeared on the path of martial arts, he simply could not let go of the opportunity.

At his core, he admired the strong.

Lifting his head with a red mark stamped across his forehead, Cui Zui saw Xue Jin'an looking at him in silence. He quickly curved his eyes into crescents and flashed a deep dimple at the corners of his lips, wearing a smile that could only be described as utterly harmless. "Master, have some tea."

Xue Jin'an: "..." He had miscalculated; he never expected a human could be so flexible in bowing and scraping.

In the end, Xue Jin'an drank that cup of tea and acknowledged this disciple who was more than a decade older than him, taking it as payment for learning the skill of "shamelessness." He unreservedly taught Cui Zui the techniques of mathematical calculation applied to archery.

"Wait, wait!" Cui Zui was bombarded with a head full of unfamiliar terms like "gravity, acceleration, and wind resistance." Although he had no idea how to calculate them, he at least understood what these things were.

Thus, his shock only deepened. With a blank expression that suggested his worldview had been overwritten, it took him a long while to find his voice. He swallowed hard and said with some difficulty, "If it's truly as you say, and everything in this world cannot escape these principles, then as long as one masters them, doesn't that mean—"

"Theoretically speaking, this set of algorithms applies to all fields," Xue Jin'an confirmed his conjecture.

Xue Jin'an had used this very set of algorithms to kill Chu Wenwan, ensuring with extreme precision that she died violently on the spot.

Cui Zui now truly felt that this master-seeking kowtow was worth it; this single skill alone was enough to get his investment back. He immediately started shouting "Master" with even greater cheerfulness, eagerly pulling out brush, ink, paper, and an inkstone to take notes. "Master, how do you calculate all these things you mentioned? I want to learn!"

Xue Jin'an opened his mouth like a machine gun and rattled off a string of formulas, instantly rendering Cui Zui completely dazed. Even though he had written down every single word on the paper with his own hand, when he looked back at it, he realized he hadn't retained a single thing.

"Master, I didn't understand. Could you trouble yourself to explain it again?" Cui Zui asked once more, putting on an obedient and adorable face.

Xue Jin'an looked him up and down with some skepticism: "..." To think he was supposed to be the future anti-king who would terrorize the Northwest in the original novel—wasn't it a bit too abnormal for him not to know even this bit of mathematics?

Moreover, those words gave him a strong sense of deja vu, as if he were looking at a voice-activated AI assistant.

Teacher Xiao X was summoned by his inner voice: *I am here.*

Teacher Xiao X popped up a message to complain: *AI is not this stupid. Unqualified products like him should be sent back to the factory for repairs.*

Xue Jin'an felt it made a lot of point. However, thinking back to campus novels, human students attending elite schools seemed to have endless homework every day, especially during their senior year of high school. The main and supporting characters stopped dating, and the skimmed-over content consisted entirely of doing exam papers or practice workbooks. Humans had a specialized name for this: the "sea of questions" tactic.

Xue Jin'an figured Cui Zui probably needed the sea of questions tactic. He directly extracted all relevant problems from his database, slightly altered the numbers and formulas, and assigned him a set equivalent to "Five Years of College Entrance Examination, Three Years of Simulation."

In Cui Zui's eyes, Xue Jin'an picked up his writing brush and brushed away, directly filling a thick stack of paper with heavenly scripts. The characters written thereon were even more rigid and squared than the official *taigetih* calligraphy used in imperial examinations, with the spacing between every single character being completely identical.

"Do these problems to consolidate your knowledge, and you'll get the hang of it later," Xue Jin'an encouraged him.

Cui Zui stared at the heavenly script and fell into silence: "..." Forget about consolidating knowledge, Master, I don't even know how to do the first question!

Cui Zui attempted to consult his master: "Master, which formula should be used for this first question? I seem to have forgotten..."

Xue Jin'an looked at him with a heavy gaze: "You forgot knowledge you just learned?"

"……Very well, Master, I remember it now." Extremely attuned to the current situation, Cui Zui pretended he truly had remembered it. Silently pulling his classroom notes over for comparison, he pondered over which formula he ought to use.

Watching him fail to put brush to paper for a long time, Xue Jin'an finally picked up a cup of tea from the tray and thrust it into Cui Zui's hands without giving him room to refuse.

Accepting it with both hands out of sheer reflex, the latter wore a somewhat dazed expression, yet still offered his thanks, "Thank you, Master."

Just as he was about to drink the tea and not let down his master's good intentions—though he wasn't particularly thirsty—he heard his newly acquired little master say, "In the future, do not tell people outside that you are my disciple, and do not mention my name either."

When Patriarch Bodhi told Sun Wukong not to mention his name outside, it was because he anticipated the monkey would cause disasters. Xue Jin'an forbade Cui Zui from mentioning his name outside because he felt this disciple was far too incompetent, and telling others would somewhat shame a code-based lifeform.

Meeting his master's gaze, Cui Zui was struck by a sudden flash of insight and actually understood the implication behind those words. His tea-drinking motion paused mid-air.

Cui Zui attempted to retract the master-submitting tea he had just offered: "Master, please demonstrate it once more. This time I will definitely understand."

"Alright." Xue Jin'an took the brush and swiftly worked through the first three problems. "Look at the problem to extract the following known conditions, then substitute them into the formula, and thus you get the answer. Understood?"

Cui Zui: "............" Am I supposed to understand?

Just as Cui Zui was sliding into despair, beginning to suspect that he truly wasn't suited for the scholarly path, Cui Pengfei finally returned.

"Master, Grandfather, you chat slowly. I'll go over to the side to do my problems." To prevent himself from being expelled from the sect on his very first day as a disciple, Cui Zui neatly scooped up his thick stack of practice sheets and scurried away.

Cui Pengfei was momentarily dazed upon hearing this form of address. Watching Cui Zui's fleeing, escape-like back, he found it both exasperating and amusing: he had told the boy to seize the opportunity to find a path into officialdom and enter the Seventh Prince's faction to serve him. Now look—he had indeed seized the opportunity and entered the Seventh Prince's faction, all right, but not as a political strategist; instead, he had become a disciple.

Having lived for so many years and experienced many things, Cui Pengfei viewed everything with a sense of broad-minded detachment. He didn't mind that Cui Zui, a full-grown adult who had reached his capping ceremony, was taking a mere youth as his master. As the saying went, "among any three people walking, there must be one who can be my teacher." For Cui Zui to willingly submit and kowtow, the Seventh Prince naturally possessed extraordinary qualities.

It was just that Cui Zui's kowtow had thoroughly tricked them, the older generation—especially him. Originally, his age was a full zodiac cycle older than the Empress Dowager's. As the youngest and least experienced of the original three regent ministers, he had maintained an equal generational standing with the Empress Dowager. But now? Look at this: decades later, as he was practically ready to step into the grave with one foot, he had inexplicably found himself lowered by two whole generations.

Cui Pengfei didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Even so, he was still gratified that Cui Zui had managed to seize this opportunity to establish a connection with the Seventh Prince.

He instructed the people behind him to carry the books they had retrieved from the library archive and place them on the desk.

Xuan Shiyi moved the books with eyes focused inward and nose attuned to his breath, minimizing his presence. This was the closest he had ever been to the Seventh Prince in all these days, yet he felt no sense of elation—only a head full of questions.

He had only been gone for a couple of hours, so why did it feel like a day and a night had passed? How on earth did the Seventh Prince and Cui Zui end up in a master-disciple relationship? It sounded so baseless and fake; how was he supposed to report this to the Emperor?

Xuan Shiyi even wondered if he had overworked his brain over the past few days, leading to auditory hallucinations that made him hear such an absurd form of address. Yet Cui Zui had already bolted away, while the Seventh Prince and Cui Pengfei sat opposite each other with the composure of seasoned veterans, holding their ground with utmost steadiness. Not a single word about Cui Zui was mentioned by either of them until Xuan Shiyi finished placing all the books and prepared to withdraw.

Xuan Shiyi knew that even if he asked anyone else, he wouldn't get an answer. His current status in Zhaoyang Palace was barely a notch higher than little Xiazi's; normally, he couldn't even step foot into the sleeping quarters where the Seventh Prince lived, and the people of Zhaoyang Palace kept watch on him both openly and secretly. Thinking of this, he couldn't help letting out a silent sigh in his heart, his mood uncharacteristically depressed.