Hearing this, Shuxue rolled his eyes and took out a jade slip and some paper. “Let’s keep quiet until these bandits finish robbing those men and raping that girl. Gah, so annoying. Hey, give me a pencil.”
Zhujiao took a pencil out of his forehead and tossed it to Shuxue. “That poor girl! I wonder how pretty she is? I have to help!”
As Shuxue began doing the first problem, he snorted. “They’re all idiots! If they had to blame someone for their misfortune, they can only blame themselves for being too weak!”
“True!” Zhujiao shouted. “But that only applies to men! I hate seeing helpless girls being oppressed! I have to save that Lady Daoli and add her to my harem!”
“Tch, suit yourself.” Shuxue muttered. “How do you even know a word like oppressed, anyway?”
Five minutes passed, and Shuxue could hear the screams of men being chopped up by bandits as he did his problem set. A girl was shrieking and crying over her fallen friends. Yet Zhujiao just stood there, not moving at all.
Shuxue looked up after finishing another problem, raising an eyebrow at Zhujiao. “I thought you were going to save that Lady Daoli and add her to your harem?”
Zhujiao nodded vigorously. “I am!”
“Then why aren’t you helping?” Shuxue couldn’t understand this damn kid sometimes.
“I have to wait until all the men are killed! Then, when they’re about to rape the girl, I run in and save her! Plot says that’s the only time I can save a potential harem member!” Zhujiao spoke solemnly.
“Uhh…” Shuxue was at a loss for words. “Okay then.” He looked back down and went back to his problem set.
Stifled sobs could be heard. The woman begged them to spare some old man. A bandit laughed, and Shuxue could hear a chopping sound. The woman screamed again.
“Almost… almost…” Zhujiao began breathing heavily. The moment he heard some tearing sounds, he sprung away, charging through the brush.
“What the! What’s this kid doing here?”
“I’m Zhujiao!”
Shuxue sighed, put his problem set away, and leaped up onto a tree to watch the fight.
The bandit leader, a masked man with his pants down, was staring at Zhujiao, an annoyed expression on his face. “Hey, kid, can’t you see I’m busy? Give me some face and get out of here.”
“No! You have to show me some face and let this girl go with me!” Zhujiao yelled, sending a 1 bouncing off the man’s chest.
The other thirty bandits snickered, holding up their various weapons. “This brat at the Arithmetic level actually wants to challenge us Sword Mountain bandits? Can it be that his eyes have grown to the top of his head?”
The bandit leader sneered. “I’m a bandit leader, you little shit! If I showed people my face, then I would be arrested the moment I enter the Jade Water Paradise! You won’t be getting face from me!”
Zhujiao sent a 2 streaking over his head. “Don’t blame me for being ruthless and heartless!”
Shuxue twirled his pencil between his fingers, frowning to himself. “That idiot Zhujiao is still using the factorial Channeling equation. That’s one of the most ridiculous equations I’ve ever seen!”
The mathforce Channeling equation regulated the maximum amount of mathforce a Mathivator could put into an attack. Zhujiao used the factorial Channeling equation, meaning that the maximum mathforce he could put into his attacks was extremely low. The trade-off was, as time went on, the upper cap of mathforce Zhujiao could use per attack became stupidly high!
Only, having a high mathforce cap per attack also had its drawbacks. To maintain the mathforce Channeling equation, one had to pay 10% of the cap every few seconds. What this meant was that when Zhujiao used an attack with 1,000,000 units of mathforce behind it, he would have to pay 1,000,000 units of mathforce for the attack, and an additional 100,000 units of mathforce would be siphoned away by the mathforce Channeling equation.
Now, Arithmetic stage practitioners would generally have a mathforce pool of around 30,000. How could they possibly pay 100,000 units of mathforce before even attacking? Only Zhujiao could do it!
Shuxue, for his part, had a mathforce pool of 50,000. Most Algebra stage Mathivators would have anywhere between 300,000 and the millions, but the mathforce pool was determined by the amount of Mathivation a person had and not their insights into the laws.. Shuxue had never bothered to Mathivate in his life; how could his mathforce pool possibly be high?
As a result, the mathforce Channeling equation he used was simply 5,000; he paid 500 units of mathforce per attack, and he could use a maximum of 5,000 units of mathforce in his attacks. For an Algebra stage practitioner, this was more than enough. After all, these were 5,000 units of Algebraic mathforce, 10 times stronger than Arithmetic mathforce!
“You dared interrupt my activities! Damn you, I’ll help you understand that what little kids hate the most: having their heads chopped off!” The bandit leader roared, swinging a large broadsword at Zhujiao. It bounced off the illusory Plot Armor, making no effect on Zhujiao whatsoever.
“Do you understand? I’ll make you understand that what little kids fear the most is being beheaded!” The bandit leader swung again to no avail.
“Little kids dread being decapitated the most! Little kids are most scared of being decollated! Remove this kid’s head from his body, so he can understand!” The bandit leader roared to his subordinates.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Zhujiao palmed towards one of them. 40,320! The man smashed into a tree, a large gash in his chest. Shuxue frowned. That attack should’ve killed anyone at the early Algebra stage or under. How could a lowly bandit stand up to it?
“Feh! I’ve had it with you! Even if I don’t show you that removing your head from your neck is the thing you are most terrified of, you’re still going to die! HYPERBOLA STRIKE!” The bandit leaped backwards, and two illusory parabolas appeared. One surrounded the bandit leader, while the other encased Zhujiao. A line appeared in between the two parabolas. It was the y-axis! The bandit leader was covered by the parabola on the negative side of the axis, while Zhujiao was surrounded by the parabola on the positive side!
Shuxue blinked, shocked. This was an attack that required insights at the late Algebra stage level! A bandit leader would actually be at the late Algebra stage? This was ridiculous!
“AHHHHH!” The bandit leader bellowed. Shuxue watched with wide eyes as mathforce attacks began shooting out into Zhujiao from the positive parabola, while mathforce poured into the bandit leader.
“This attack… uses the concept of negative numbers!” Shuxue was shocked. “The bandit leader is using the negative portion of the hyperbola to charge up his own body with mathforce!”
All attacks used positive mathforce for its attacks; it stood to reason, then, that negative mathforce could be used to do the opposite of attacks: healing! Only, what the bandit leader was doing was replenishing his mathforce stores! He was actually not spending any mathforce attacking Zhujiao, because for every unit of mathforce spent in attacking Zhujiao, there was also a unit of mathforce spent in replenishing his own mathforce pool.
The only mathforce he was spending was what was required to maintain the hyperbola!
Shuxue was mesmerized by the hyperbola attack. He felt as if he was about to achieve an insight. “Zhujiao and the bandit leader are standing at very special points in the hyperbolas, at the center of all the mathforce… the focus…” Thoughts raced through his head as he struggled to comprehend the profound mysteries of this hyperbola attack.
Some time passed. Shuxue was brought back to his senses by a flick of Zhujiao’s finger.
“Hey, big bro Shuxue! Are you okay?”
Shuxue came back to his senses, and began laughing maniacally. “Hahaha… the focus of the hyperbola… the focus of a parabola… determined by the Pythagorean theorem... “
Shuxue had made the leap into the late Algebra stage! This was a monstrous advance, since he had only entered the middle Algebra stage several days ago, when he had obtained the full set of Conics jade slips from a destroyed Sector. His Algebraic mathforce power was still the same as an early stage Algebra Mathivator, but the techniques he could use were infinitely more profound! Indeed, though he didn’t know the nuances of the Hyperbola attack the bandit leader had used, with just some testing time, he could replicate it on his own.
“Big bro Shuxue! Let’s go!”
Shuxue snapped back to his senses. “Right! To the Algebra dungeon!” He began walking towards the faraway dungeon.
“No, big bro Shuxue! We have to go to a restaurant and comfort Lady Daoli!”
Shuxue blinked, then turned around to look at Zhujiao. Next to him was a beautiful girl of around fifteen years old. Though her cheeks were tear-stained, her visage could be said by people whom were not Shuxue to be stunningly attractive.
Shuxue mumbled some curses under his breath, before nodding. “All right, let’s go dump this bitch off at some restaurant motel place. Hurry up, let’s go, let’s go!”
Nearby, there was a village with several small restaurants. All of them were fairly empty, save one with only one free table. Zhujiao chose this restaurant to sit down at.
“Hey, useless woman, tell me which continent we’re on.” Shuxue jabbed a finger at Daoli. “Where I come from, there’s no way bandits would be at the Algebra stage! Besides, the mathforce here is much thicker.”
“Continent 10.” She mumbled, stirring her tea with a blank expression.
“Ehh? We’re that far away?” Shuxue was shocked. Currently, they resided in the Weakest Continent on the Weakest Plane! Planes had infinite size, but past a certain point there would be no mathforce. These barren lands, devoid of mathforce, were completely lifeless. Thus, the Weakest Plane only had 30 inhabitable continents and 29 inhabitable oceans. Of those continents, Continent 10 was the 10th strongest Continent! For them to have traveled instantly to Continent 10… who knows how many hundreds of millions of kilometers they had gone?
Suddenly, a group of rowdy men entered the restaurant.
“Such bad luck, to have no open tables.” One of them cursed.
Another swept across this room with his gaze, which landed on the table Shuxue, Zhujiao, and Daoli were occupying.
“Haha, who said there were no open tables. Isn’t that an open table right there? Even though it’ll be a bit crowded, all of us sitting together at that table isn’t impossible.”
Author note: Some things are so silly that they don’t need to be changed at all in a parody. I’d like to thank Er Gen and Deathblade for the beheading stuff, which was taken from chapter 171 of I Shall Seal the Heavens, and the last 3 paragraphs which were almost taken word for word from Chaotic Sword God Chapter 82, translated by Deceptioning and written by the main character of Zhan Long,
心星逍遥 (Xin Xing Xiao Yao)!
The insight scene, obviously, comes from Coiling Dragon, translated by RWX and written by IEatTomatoes.