The moment Su Zhen finished speaking—
The Hall of Supreme Harmony fell deathly silent.
You could have heard a pin drop.
Every civil and military official of Dayuan stood dumbfounded, wondering whether they had heard wrong.
What madness was His Majesty spouting?
After that brief silence, the head of the envoy delegation froze for a moment.
Then he threw back his head and burst into raucous laughter.
“Ha ha ha! Emperor of Dayuan, have you been driven mad with anger?”
Snapping his folding fan shut, he pointed at the delicate little girl seated on the small golden throne.
“You want a little girl who hasn’t even grown up yet to solve one of Zhongzhou’s national treasures?”
“Even if your Dayuan can’t bear to lose, there’s no need to use such a absurd excuse to stall for time!”
“What a complete joke!”
The Dayuan court officials panicked as well.
The Chief Academician of the Hanlin Academy scrambled forward and dropped to his knees, knocking his forehead frantically against the floor.
“Your Majesty, you must not! This concerns the fate of the nation—how can it be treated as a child’s game?”
“Your Highness is only eight years old! She has not even learned all the characters in the Thousand Character Classic. How could she possibly solve this ancient, unsolvable puzzle?”
The generals, too, believed that the Emperor had simply given up in desperation. Their faces turned ashen.
Yet Su Zhen, seated upon the dragon throne, remained perfectly calm.
He looked at his daughter with indulgent affection.
“Yaoyao, go. Open the eyes of these Zhongzhou bumpkins who have never seen the world.”
Su Yaoyao let out a huge yawn.
[Ah, I was planning to watch the show a little longer, but it looks like I’ll have to step in and crush these amateurs myself.]
[Honestly, treating a third-order Rubik’s Cube like some priceless treasure... I almost feel bad bullying them.]
She brushed the crumbs from her hands and slowly slid down from the little golden throne.
The magnificent ceremonial robes of the Crown Princess looked especially adorable on her tiny frame.
Su Yaoyao moved her short little legs, taking one step at a time down the white jade stairs.
She stopped in the center of the great hall, directly in front of the arrogant envoy leader.
At eight years old, she was not even as tall as his waist and had to tilt her head back to look at him.
But the disdain in her eyes was a hundred times stronger than his.
“Little girl, this is not one of your Dayuan mud toys.”
The envoy leader looked down at her, his gaze filled with utter contempt.
“If you break it, you couldn’t afford to compensate us even if we sold you!”
Su Yaoyao could not even be bothered to respond. She simply reached out.
Casually, she picked up the Nine-Palace Heavenly Mechanism Lock from the tray.
The cube was fashioned from hardwood and jade, and it was far from light.
It should have been difficult for Su Yaoyao’s small hand to hold, yet she supported it steadily with one hand.
“Old bastard, watch carefully.”
Su Yaoyao’s crisp, childish voice echoed through the hall.
“Today, this Crown Princess will show you what it means to be a frog at the bottom of a well.”
The instant she finished speaking, beneath the shocked gazes of everyone in the hall, Su Yaoyao actually closed her eyes!
Not only was she using just one hand—she was not even looking at it!
The envoy leader flew into a rage.
“Outrageous! How dare you treat Zhongzhou’s treasured artifact with such contempt!”
“Emperor of Dayuan, you are bringing humiliation upon yourselves!”
Before he could finish, a crisp series of mechanical clicks cut him off.
“Click!”
With her eyes closed, Su Yaoyao lightly flicked her thumb and forefinger.
The top layer of jade blocks rotated ninety degrees.
Then—
“Click, click, click! Click-click-click-click-click!”
Crisp clacks rang out in rapid succession, like a torrential downpour battering banana leaves.
Su Yaoyao’s tiny, pale hands moved so fast they became a blur.
Her fingers were impossibly nimble, every twist precise to the extreme.
Everyone in the great hall was dumbstruck.
The elderly scholars from the Hanlin Academy, who had been wailing only moments ago, now looked like roosters with their throats gripped shut.
Their eyes were wide as they stared at the cube spinning madly in Su Yaoyao’s hands.
They could not even make out how its colors were changing!
The envoy leader’s mocking expression froze stiff.
He looked as though he had seen a ghost.
He stepped forward, his eyes nearly popping out of their sockets.
How was this possible?!
The internal mortise-and-tenon mechanism of the Celestial Mechanism Lock was extraordinarily complex. The slightest resistance would cause it to jam.
Yet in this little girl’s hands, it moved as though there were no resistance at all!
One second, two seconds, three seconds...
The red face was complete!
Five seconds, six seconds, seven seconds...
The blue and green faces were complete as well!
A casual, icy smile curved Su Yaoyao’s lips.
【Top-layer cross, flip the colors, position the corners—done.】
Her fingers exerted force one final time.
Click!
A crisp final note rang out, and the blur came to a halt.
Only ten seconds!
Su Yaoyao opened her eyes and flicked her small hand forward.
Smack!
The heavy Nine-Grid Celestial Mechanism Lock struck the envoy leader squarely in the face!
Caught off guard, he was hit so hard across the bridge of his nose by the wooden-and-jade cube that tears sprang to his eyes, and he nearly got a nosebleed.
He cried out and hurriedly caught the cube as it slipped down.
Ignoring the pain, he lowered his head and stared fixedly at the national treasure in his hands.
Everyone in the hall focused on it as well.
Red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue.
All six faces were perfectly restored, their colors distinct and flawless!
This ancient puzzle lock, which had baffled the Central Plains Empire’s finest craftsmen for countless years and was said to possess hundreds of millions of possible configurations—
had been restored by an eight-year-old girl.
With her eyes closed.
One-handed.
In ten seconds.
Silence.
A prolonged, deathly silence fell over the Hall of Supreme Harmony.
Then, with a boom—
the entire hall erupted like a powder keg set alight!
“She solved it! Your Highness solved it!”
“Heaven bless Great Yuan! Heaven bless Great Yuan!”
The civil and military officials of Great Yuan flushed with excitement, rising to their feet and cheering as one.
The old men from the Hanlin Academy hugged one another, jumping up and down without a shred of decorum.
One elderly scholar had coughed up blood and fainted earlier. Hearing the uproar, he groggily came to.
The moment he opened his eyes and saw the restored Celestial Mechanism Lock, he gave a little crack—and fainted again from joy.
Su Zhen, seated upon the dragon throne forged from pure steel, smugly stroked his chin.
His expression practically said: See? I told you it was a kindergarten toy, but none of you believed me.
Wonderful!
This humiliation was a thousand times more satisfying than chopping off the heads of those Central Plains envoys!
“No... This is impossible...”
The envoy leader held the cube in both hands, trembling violently as though he were clutching a red-hot iron.
The confidence he had taken such pride in had been utterly shattered by Su Yaoyao.
He raised his head and shrieked.
“That was only mechanics! There’s still mathematics!”
“That centuries-old, unsolved chicken-and-rabbit problem—perhaps you guessed the mechanism by luck, but you’ll never be able to calculate the answer!”
The envoy leader pointed at the enormous scroll on the dragon-carved pillar, his face twisted as he howled.
Su Yaoyao stood where she was, looking at him as though he were an idiot.
“Old bastard, are your ears failing you? Didn’t this Crown Princess just say it? This is a basic problem.”
She stuck out one pale little finger and picked at her ear.
[Let the number of wild rabbits be X; then the number of golden toads is 0.5X.]
[The number of pheasants is 3,568 minus 1.5X.]
[Substitute these into the total number of legs: 4X, plus 3 times 0.5X, plus 2 times the number of pheasants, equals 9,472.]
[A problem any middle schooler could solve mentally—and Zhongzhou has treated it as an unsolved puzzle for a hundred years?]
After ranting wildly in her heart, Su Yaoyao’s clear, childish voice rang through the hall again.
“Three thousand five hundred and sixty-eight heads above, nine thousand four hundred and seventy-two feet below, and the golden toads are half as numerous as the rabbits, right?”
“Something this simple, and you people of Zhongzhou have been calculating it for a hundred years?”
“Listen carefully. The answer is—”
The great hall fell silent in an instant. Everyone held their breath.
“One thousand and forty-two pheasants.”
“One thousand six hundred and eighty-four wild rabbits.”
“And eight hundred and forty-two three-legged golden toads.”
Su Yaoyao recited the answers in one breath, without the slightest hesitation.
The moment her words fell, the mathematical masters behind the envoy leader looked as though they had been struck by lightning.
With trembling hands, they pulled a sealed top-secret answer sheet from their sleeves.
Shaking, they tore open the wax seal and stared at it.
One thousand and forty-two!
One thousand six hundred and eighty-four!
Eight hundred and forty-two!
Not a single digit differed!
Thud!
One of Zhongzhou’s mathematical masters could no longer bear it and collapsed onto the floor.
“She got it right… Every single answer…”
“Not one word was wrong. She didn’t even touch an abacus!”
Seeing this, the officials of Great Yuan laughed even more uproariously.
The sheer satisfaction shot straight to their heads.
The envoy leader stared at his subordinates sprawled on the ground, his mind buzzing.
His vision went dark, and his legs gave out beneath him.
Thud.
As if struck by lightning, the envoy leader crumpled onto the cold stone tiles.
“Th-This is impossible!”
Su Yaoyao turned around and trotted over to a writing desk at the side. She grabbed a brush from its stand.
“It would be discourteous not to return the favor. This Crown Princess will give you people of Zhongzhou a problem as well!”
