Chapter 0091: Culinary Genius Su Qinghe? Mathematical Prodigy Su Qinghe!
Watching this scene, Su Qinghe grew restless, thinking to himself that had he known earlier, he should have woken up a bit sooner to make more, sparing the Second Prince and the princess from developing any discord.
Zhu Xiaobiao leaned in close at that moment, whispering into his ear, “Young Master Su, could you make a bit more next time? I’d like to share some with my friend—I can pay in silver!”
Su Qinghe was taken aback, blinking in confusion.
This was the first time someone had offered to pay him.
In the past, others had indulged their cravings, pretending to befriend him, and some had even taken the pastries he made to curry favor with others, all while belittling him behind his back.
No one had ever paid him.
Su Qinghe shook his head, “No need for silver.”
“How can that be? As our Highness says, one who puts in labor deserves fair compensation. Commoners must be paid for their work, and friends should be rewarded for their efforts in helping out.” Zhu Xiaobiao had picked up many new phrases from Xie Chengze and rattled them off smoothly. He fished out a small golden melon seed from his belt and discreetly placed it in Su Qinghe’s hand.
Having lived a life of luxury before, he knew the ingredients for these pastries couldn’t be cheap, so he didn’t skimp on the price. “Young Master Su, just bring an extra portion for me whenever you come to the palace to see His Highness~”
Su Qinghe stared blankly at the golden melon seed in his palm.
It felt like a burning ember, searing his hand with pain and heat. He didn’t need the money, nor did he want to accept it, yet he clenched the golden melon seed tightly in his palm, unwilling to let go even as the pain shot straight to his heart.
He coveted this scorching sincerity.
And he coveted the way this golden melon seed could tightly bind them together.
“Alright,” he said softly, a rare, genuine smile lifting the corners of his lips.
Another wall had crumbled.
In the end, Xie Chengze left some pastries for the two young girls and had Zhu Xiaobiao fetch two food boxes from the kitchen so they could take them back to honor their mother.
Then, he hushed them and pretended to flip through an arithmetic book, continuing to write his textbook.
He wanted Su Qinghe to notice his involvement with arithmetic—first to leave a strong impression, then to gradually guide him, making it easier for Su Qinghe to whisper into the Su Family head’s ear.
The two young girls had long been curious about what their second brother was writing. They crowded in, jostling each other, and exclaimed in surprise, “Second Brother, when did you start studying arithmetic?”
“Oh?” Xie Chengze looked up, somewhat surprised. “You know about arithmetic?”
“Uh…”
Xie Shu and Xie Ping’an immediately lowered their little heads.
Xie Chengze: …
Xie Chengze understood. If they dared to climb the walls of Cheng Huan Palace and sneak out of the imperial palace, they had surely explored the Directorate of Celestial Observation from top to bottom as well.
“Do you know arithmetic?” he asked, smiling at them.
The two girls shook their heads.
Xie Chengze couldn’t help but curl his lips into a mischievous and playful grin.
Since he’d time-traveled, how could he miss out on the classic trope of “stumping ancients with classic arithmetic problems”!
“Then let Second Brother give you a problem~” Xie Chengze flashed his white teeth and wrote the “chickens and rabbits in a cage” problem on paper: “There are chickens and rabbits in the same cage, with 35 heads and 94 feet in total. How many chickens and rabbits are there?”
The two little girls enthusiastically began counting on their fingers, but when that proved ineffective, they started squatting on the ground to draw chicks and rabbits.
The amount of problems was probably enough to keep them drawing all day. Xie Chengze lowered his head again to continue writing the textbook.
Zhu Xiaobiao watched for a while but couldn’t sit still, so he joined the two princesses in drawing chicks and rabbits.
This left Su Qinghe alone, momentarily unsure what to do. Just as he was considering whether to help the princesses like Zhu Xiaobiao, Xie Chengze seemed to finally notice his idleness and handed him the completed portion. “Qinghe, could you take a look at this? Is the content I’ve written difficult to understand?”
Su Qinghe suddenly felt like he’d been handed a hot potato.
He had never been exposed to arithmetic problems before—how could he possibly understand them?
But being accustomed to enduring hardships, he steeled himself and lowered his head to read.
The first page contained the multiplication table rhymes, which rolled off the tongue easily. It explained what multiplication and division were, using shop transactions as examples—vivid and easy to comprehend. Later sections covered multiplication and division methods for two-digit and three-digit numbers, presented so clearly that they appeared simple and engaging.
The second page featured large diagrams and peculiar small symbols Su Qinghe had never seen before. Fortunately, annotations accompanied those strange symbols, making their representative meanings not too hard to grasp.
This symbol represented an angle, that one served as an auxiliary notation, and when combined, they meant…
The more Su Qinghe read, the more absorbed he became. The content was written in plain language, and as he deciphered what these elements represented, the diagrams and numbers gradually took shape in his mind. He gently traced one line and felt something suddenly click, as countless new questions flooded his thoughts. An irresistible itch for immediate answers seized him.
It was like staring at leftover cake crumbs on a tea table—if he didn’t get answers, he wouldn’t sleep tonight.
He secretly glanced at Xie Chengze, who was diligently drawing diagrams with a paperweight, then swallowed his words and calculated when might be a good time to ask questions.
Noticing the restlessness beside him, Xie Chengze finally looked up and asked, “Do you need to pee?”
Su Qinghe: ?
Su Qinghe’s face flushed bright red.
Second Prince, how—how could you speak so crudely!
He shook his head vehemently. “N-No, I just have some questions about the content on these pages.”
“Oh?” Xie Chengze instinctively tried to drag his chair closer, then remembered he was sitting on a stone stool. After grabbing at empty air twice, he realized he couldn’t move it.
So he stood up, walked to Su Qinghe’s side, placed one hand on the stone table and the other on Su Qinghe’s left shoulder. Sinking his waist and sticking out his hips, he adjusted imaginary glasses—the perfect image of an old teacher. “What questions? Tell me!”
The young man’s shadow fell across the stone table, casting partial darkness over the pages. The weight on his shoulder was neither light nor heavy, lingering at just the level to be noticeable.
Su Qinghe stiffened slightly, ignoring the unfamiliar embarrassment of such closeness. He extended a finger and lightly traced the diagram three times. “If we move this line here, and add another line here to make it… well, stand up? Would this theorem still hold?”
Xie Chengze fell into an odd silence.
Why did an eerie silence fall? Because this was a plane geometry problem, and with Su Qinghe’s slight adjustment and addition, plus his explanation upon standing up, he had directly transformed this plane geometry problem into a solid geometry one.
Could this fellow be the legendary innate spatial geometry sage?
“That belongs to another branch of mathematics,” Xie Chengze said gravely, patting his shoulder. “Don’t look at it for now. Just focus on solving the chicken-and-rabbit cage problem.”
Su Qinghe tilted his head slightly, his gaze showing rare determination. “If I solve it, will I know the answer then?”
“Mmhmm,” Xie Chengze nodded perfunctorily. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to explain, but solid geometry was much harder to grasp initially. Even if he explained, without foundational knowledge, Su Qinghe would struggle to understand.
Better to wait until he could prepare a separate teaching plan. He estimated the chicken-and-rabbit problem would keep them occupied for several days.
Unexpectedly, Su Qinghe’s soft voice suddenly sounded beside him: “Second Prince, there are 23 chickens and 12 rabbits.”
Xie Chengze: ?
Xie Chengze: ???
Xie Chengze whirled his head around. “What did you say?”
Seeing Xie Chengze’s intense reaction, Su Qinghe grew somewhat flustered. “I-Is it wrong?”
“Holy shit! Brother!” Xie Chengze gripped his shoulders excitedly. “Are you a math genius?!”
Su Qinghe didn’t understand, but he instinctively shook his head in denial, because the word “genius” had never been associated with him.
Refusing to believe it, Xie Chengze quickly thought of two numbers and, after calculating the answer, asked: “Let me ask you: In a chicken-and-rabbit cage, there are 218 heads and 676 legs total. How many chickens and rabbits are there?”
Su Qinghe pondered slightly while looking at the multiplication table, his slender index finger tracing something on the stone table. After a moment, he said softly: “There should be 120 rabbits and 98 chickens.”
Xie Chengze: !!!
What? He could solve this too?
“How did you calculate it?” Xie Chengze was utterly baffled. Hadn’t Su Qinghe claimed he’d never encountered math problems before?
“Well, I’m not sure if my reasoning is correct,” Su Qinghe ventured, encouraged by Xie Chengze’s expression which suggested he’d gotten it right. “Seeing how you used this symbol to represent the angle, I thought perhaps the numbers of rabbits and chickens could also be represented by symbols. And the multiplication you wrote on paper – about a shop placing four pastries in each food box, and using the multiplication table to calculate that six boxes would be four times six equals twenty-four – corresponded perfectly to rabbits having four legs each, so six rabbits would have twenty-four legs.”
“The rabbit symbol plus the chicken symbol equals the total number of heads. Meanwhile, four times the rabbit symbol plus two times the chicken symbol equals the total number of legs.”
“Chickens have two legs, rabbits have four – rabbits have twice as many legs as chickens. So if chickens had only one leg, rabbits would effectively have only two legs, and the total would be halved. In that case, one rabbit symbol plus one chicken symbol equals 218, while two rabbit symbols plus one chicken symbol equals 338. The latter has one extra rabbit symbol, meaning that rabbit symbol equals 120, representing 120 rabbits. Naturally, the number of chickens would be 98.”
After finishing, he glanced cautiously at Xie Chengze. “Second Prince, is my reasoning correct?”
Xie Chengze: …
“Right on, my man!
I just wrote down some basic arithmetic and labeled a few geometric shapes with ∠ABCD, and you’ve already learned to use ABCD to represent X and Y, solving problems with methods close to linear equations?!
This ability to connect the dots is just fucking incredible, isn’t it?”