They were inside a labyrinth of some sort, with maze-like corridors and countless doors. Looking at a door, Shuxue found out that each of them was sealed by a mechanism. This was the last matrix of the dungeon, and also the treasure matrix. Before, they had never run into the Yellowcloud Sector, because all the matrices save the treasure matrix were different for each group of participants.

Shuxue selected a particularly easy one, breaking open the door. Inside glittered piles of Arithmetic pearls, as well as treasures such as clothing that would facilitate mathivation and delicious foods that could calm the mind. The value of the things inside each room could feed a family for an entire year!

“Fuck that,” Shuxue snorted, walking over to another door. He wasn’t interested in those trivial items. What he wanted were… problem sets and jade slips!

At that moment, a group of children from the Yellowcloud Sector came over, led by a young man with a waxed moustache.

“Haha, if it isn’t the Brownwater Sector. Let me tell you right now, these doors are ours.” He chortled out loud.

Shuxue rolled his eyes, “Yellowcloud fools.” He paid them no mind. It was a fight to see who could solve more mechanisms, and he was determined to win. According to the profound laws of large numbers or something like that, more mechanisms solved was better.

Shouting, two children from each Sector began slapping each other, looking away as they did.

Zhujiao walked out of a room whose door he had blasted into pieces. Seeing a Yellowcloud disciple struggling to solve the mechanism to the door next to him, he sneered. He pushed the disciple away, and then punched the door, which instantly disintegrated.

“Hey! That door was mine!” The kid shouted. He looked like he was about to cry.

“Hey you!” The mustached man shouted. “Play fair, you damn Brownwater kid!”

Snorting, Zhujiao palmed the kid straight in the face. The kid’s head snapped back as teeth flew everywhere. Everyone gasped as the child toppled onto the floor. His face was completely unrecognizable, with blood flowing everywhere and even an eyeball knocked out of its socket.

The child was undoubtedly dead!

“Wh-wh-wh-what the-” The mustached man began stuttering, his face pale. “You can’t actually kill people here! What the hell are you doing!”

Zhujiao folded his arms, dousing his robe in blood. “I’m Zhujiao! Those who are not my friends, are my enemies! Showing mercy to an enemy is the equivalent of showing no mercy to a friend!”

Shuxue’s eyes bugged. “What the fuck, Zhujiao! Do you realize the consequences of what the fuck you just did! You killed a Yellowcloud kid! They’ll be howling for your blood, they’ll be howling for our blood, which means they’ll be howling for my blood! My god, the Sector master is going to be furious at me! Do you know how long it took for that treaty with the Yellowcloud Sector to be made?” Shuxue was panicking as he thought about the repercussions of Zhujiao’s actions.

Zhujiao sneered. “I don’t care, I’m Zhujiao! What are you going to do about it?”

Shuxue wiped some sweat from his brow. They were in deep, deep shit.

“We gotta…” He spoke, groaning as he thought about the only logical thing to do in this situation.

“Kill them all!” Shuxue roared. “I don’t do half-measures! If we killed one, we kill them all! Don’t let anyone escape! That way, they can’t tell anyone what happened here!”

A math dragon blasted out of his arm, shredding a nearby Yellowcloud disciple into a meat patty. Next to him, Zhujiao’s fist smashed straight through another Yellowcloud disciple’s stomach.

The mustached man backed away, vomiting all over the floor. Screaming like a little girl, he turned and stumbling away into a side corridor.

Zhujiao, who was punching the head off a nearby Yellowcloud disciple, looked up at the fleeing man. An illusory grid shined below his feet, and he instantly disappeared, turning into a blur. A scream rang out, and Zhujiao walked out of the corridor the mustached man had just been in, his fingers bloody.

“What!” Shuxue spluttered as he smashed a screaming girl’s head into the wall. “Did you just teleport? That violates the profound truth of continuity! That’s not mathematically possible!”

Zhujiao ran into an opened door, inside of which cowered several Yellowcloud disciples. “I’m Zhujiao!”

Sighing to himself at this nonsensical response, Shuxue grabbed a Yellowcloud disciple who had straddled one of the Brownwater kids, hoisting him up and impaling him with a math blade he had materialized.

“All witnesses must die! Even the chickens, dogs, ducks, and geese must die! Even the little mice that accidentally pass by this place must die!” Shuxue yelled.

“There’s no animals in the dungeon!” A child reported back to Shuxue.

“It was figurative, dipshit.” Shuxue fumed as he finished off the last Yellowcloud disciple. “How many of you dumbasses died? If you died, raise your hands.”

Shuxue counted the hands, nodding to himself as he wiped his bloody hands on a corpse’s clothes. “What the hell, that girl died and she didn’t raise her hand. Idiot, can’t follow directions. Why did I have to be stuck with this lot? Anyway, cram all the bodies into this room, and use the Math Flame technique to burn them to ashes.”

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Ignoring the sobbing and vomiting children, Shuxue went back to work on breaking open the mechanisms. After several hours, they had all been broken open. He had gained many insights while solving these mechanisms, even developing an astonishing technique to instantly solve those strange ‘!’ problems with large numbers on both the numerator and the denominator!

Some rumbling sounds were emitted as the last door opened. Turning, Shuxue saw another room that had risen out from the ground. It was an ornate room, much more decorated than the other rooms in the labyrinth, and looked like it came out of a royal palace of some sort.

After fiddling around for a few minutes, Shuxue opened the mechanism, triumphantly walking in.

“Eh, what the?” Shuxue gaped at the sight of Zhujiao, who was already inside. “How the hell did you get in here?”

“I’m Zhujiao!”

The room had clearly held a stack of thousands of Arithmetic pearls, yet only a few stray pearls were left scattered across the floor. Even those last few remnants were being scooped up by Zhujiao and deposited into his pocket.

Shuxue seized a jade slip lying in the center of the room. It was a large “!” symbol on the back.

“My god! This is a priceless treasure!” Shuxue gasped as the jade slip’s knowledge imprinted itself upon his mind. Unknowingly, his free hand snaked into his pants.

“So this truly is a new notation! It’s called factorials!” Shuxue began panting excitedly as he imprinted the jade slip into his mind again and again, trying to gain enlightenment.

As Shuxue writhed on the ground, a child edged past him and picked up a small sticker with a ‘!’ on it, sticking it onto his skin.

“Wow! A mathforce channeling equation!” The child gasped in admiration. Mathforce channeling equations were incredibly important artifacts! They regulated the maximum amount of mathforce somebody could shoot out at any given moment. An excellent mathforce channeling equation, such as this sticker, which had branded itself into the child’s skin, could mean the difference between life and death!

Children gathered around him in excitement.

“Kyaaaaa, so cool!”

“Show me, show me!”

Smugly, the child turned to fire into the wall. A puny 1 shot out, fizzling away on the wall.

“Eh? That’s so weak.”

“What, this channeling equation is trash!”

“Maybe try again?”

The children were quite disappointed. Being able to only shoot 1 point of mathforce, that was beyond pathetic.

A 2 plinked off the ground. Then a 6. Then a 24.

The boy stripped off the sticker, tossing it onto the ground bitterly. He was so excited, thinking that he had found something nice. Beside him, all the children sighed and walked away. They had gone to this Arithmetic dungeon and had done absolutely nothing; Zhujiao and Shuxue had done nearly all the fighting, and Zhujiao had taken all the spoils.

Indeed, they had only be used for corpse clean-up. For everyone but Zhujiao and Shuxue, it was a completely useless, and even traumatizing venture!

Zhujiao walked over, picking up the sticker and slapping it onto his palm. He settled down into a cross-legged position to meditate, while Shuxue continued to gasp as he pressed the jade slip to his forehead.

A few hours later, blight flashes of light appeared in front of the dungeon, coalescing into Shuxue and the other Brownwater disciples. Behind them, the dungeon began to evaporate into mathforce.

An old man with a waxed moustache collapsed to his knees as he watched the dungeon evaporate, his face completely devoid of blood. Beside him, his fellow Yellowcloud Sect members looked on in disbelief.

“My disciples! My only son!” He howled, bitter tears streaming down his face. “How could they have died? It was just an Arithmetic dungeon!”

Zhujiao simply sneered. Seeing this, Shuxue edged to the side to block the old man from seeing  Zhujiao. He didn’t want to kill all of these people, too. Shuxue was only at the early Algebra stage, but it was quite possible this old man was at the middle Algebra stage or even the late Algebra stage!

The old man’s gaze landed on Shuxue. He clutched Shuxue’s shoulders tightly, rattling his insides. “Did you see my son? Did you see any of the Yellowcloud children? Please, for the love of all that is holy, tell me!”

“Uh…” Shuxue blinked as he was being shaken. “Nope, sorry.”

Shuxue extricated himself from the old man’s grasp, unfurling the carpet to allow all the disciples to sit down upon it. The Brownwater children all flew away, leaving the old man and his comrades to wallow in misery.

All this took time to describe, but it happened in the blink of an eye.