By the time I arrived in Qinghe Town, I had gained a newfound appreciation for the conveniences of modern transportation.

  No, really. I had never once in my past life sat down and thought, .’

  I thought it now.

  The journey had drained both my patience and my coin pouch. The fastest, most direct route would have taken me through a major city, but that was absolutely out of the question. If novels had taught me anything, it was that big cities were walking death traps filled with cultivation clans, young masters with zero conflict resolution skills, and hidden old monsters waiting to impart life-changing cultivation insights to some clueless street rat who bumped into them.

  That was not going to be me.

  Instead, I had taken the long way around, spending a painful amount of money on carriages and boats to avoid anything remotely resembling a plot-relevant location. By the time I reached Qinghe Town, I was exhausted, broke, and one more terrible meal away from losing all faith in the culinary arts of this world.

  Qinghe Town was perfectly ordinary.

  Small enough that no major sects would bother with it. Large enough that I wouldn’t be trapped on a mountain with five families who all married each other. The streets were dusty but well-kept, lined with modest wooden buildings, market stalls, and the occasional idle old man who was probably an ex-expert in disguise. A river cut through the outskirts, feeding irrigation ditches and the small fishing industry.

  The most dangerous thing I saw was a particularly aggressive chicken chasing a child down the street.

  This was exactly the level of excitement I wanted in my life.

  I didn’t waste time sightseeing. Hunting for a job could come later. After days of travel, the first order of business was finding a place to sleep.

  After asking around, I found an inn with reasonable rates — by which I meant I could afford to stay here for maybe a week or two before becoming homeless.

  The innkeeper was a woman in her fifties with a permanent scowl and the air of someone who had long since stopped tolerating nonsense. She barely glanced at me before shoving a key into my hand.

  “Room’s upstairs. Supper’s extra. Don’t break anything.”

  A woman of efficiency. I respected that.

  I climbed the stairs, found my room, and shut the door behind me.

  It was… modest.

  Which was a generous way of saying it was barely above a storage closet.

  The bed was small and hard, the walls were unadorned, and the only window looked out onto a suspiciously loud chicken coop. There was a wooden desk, a stool, and a single candle.

  And most interestingly — a brush, ink, and sheets of paper sat neatly on the desk.

  I stood there, staring at them.

  Then I stared at the bed.

  Then back at the desk.

  The exhaustion in my body screamed at me to collapse and not move for the next ten hours. But the sight of actual writing materials — of paper — stirred something in me.

  A strange, absurd hope.

  I had thrown away my cultivation. I had left behind a world obsessed with strength, conflict, and power struggles. And now, for the first time since coming to this world…

  I could finally begin.

  I took a seat, dipped the brush into ink, and carefully wrote the first thing that came to mind:

  I exhaled slowly, watching the ink dry.

  It wasn’t much. Just a simple formula. Something I had learned long ago. Something even the most casual math enthusiast would recognise. Something so trivial a seven year old child would understand it.

  No, really. Just ask Carl Friedrich Gauss.

  Indeed, nothing more than a simple formula.

  But it was .

  The ink dried as I watched, the brush still poised in my fingers. The simple equation sat there, unassuming, utterly harmless, and yet something about it felt… profound. Not in the way cultivators spoke of enlightenment, where they mysteriously vanished into the mountains only to return decades later with glowing eyes and cryptic one-liners. No, this was something else.

  For the first time since waking up in this ridiculous world, I had done something deliberate. Not out of necessity, not to avoid being beaten, not to escape a sect full of people who thought jumping off cliffs in search of enlightenment was a reasonable thing to do. No, I had chosen this.

  had written it.

  And that meant something.

  I let out a slow breath, set the brush down, and stared at the paper. A sum formula. Simple. Elementary. Something that would make a real mathematician scoff and toss me out of their office if I tried to pass it off as deep thought. But that was fine. I wasn’t writing to impress anyone.

  I was writing to start over.

  I reached for another sheet.

  What next? Something I knew. Something I had seen, over and over, throughout my life. Something that had stuck with me even when I was buried under research papers about cell signaling pathways and experimental failures.

  The Pythagorean theorem? No, too easy. Too well known.

  Euler’s identity? Tempting. Beautiful, even. But not tonight.

  I hesitated, then dipped the brush into the ink again, pressing it carefully to the paper.

  A small smile tugged at my lips. The sum of squares. Another simple equation. Nothing groundbreaking. A piece of knowledge known for thousands of years, before humanity had even invented the language that formalised mathematics.

  But again, this was

  I let the ink settle, watching the characters take form under the dim candlelight.

  Mathematics was supposed to be a universal language. Even in my past life, before I had ever imagined something as absurd as transmigrating into a xianxia world, numbers had always felt eternal. Nations could fall, civilisations could vanish, languages could erode, all of humanity could be wiped out by an alien invasion or nuclear holocaust — but the truths of mathematics endured.

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  They were eternal. Absolute. .

  So what did this world know?

  Had they developed calculus? Did they have a concept of limits, of convergence, of prime distributions? Was algebra in its geometric, static equation-solving, dynamic function, or abstract stage? Had anyone here stared at an infinite series or an expression of nested radicals and felt that creeping, terrible certainty that it was hiding something just beyond their reach?

  I stopped myself.

  It was too soon to think about that. Too soon to wonder if, in some far-off sect library, a scroll existed that contained knowledge beyond anything my world had ever dreamed of.

  I wasn’t here for that.

  I was here to study. To understand what I never gave myself the chance to. I knew my experiences from Earth well enough — if even the nineteenth century mathematics of Riemann and Poincaré may as well be nothing but indecipherable hieroglyphs to me, what hope did I have of the knowledge immortals held? Of ones who weren’t constrained by limits of mortality?

  I trembled. If this world had an Abel, a Galois, a Ramanujan, a Ramsey, an Eisenstein… what sort of absolutely insights could they have developed in a world where they weren’t unfortunately cut down before their time?

  No, I was utterly unprepared to bear witness to such knowledge. To quote the locals — I was a frog in a well, a toad lusting after swan meat, an ant who does not know the heavens. If I wanted to even glimpse a morsel of those grand truths, I would have to work my way up.

  I reached for another sheet.

  My brushstrokes grew steadier, my mind sharper. The exhaustion of the day lingered in my muscles, but it no longer weighed me down.

  For the first time in who knows how long, I wasn’t running from something.

  I was moving forward.

  And so, I kept writing.

  -x-x-x-

  I woke up with my face stuck to paper.

  This was not a metaphor. My cheek was quite literally adhered to a sheet of calculations via a thin layer of dried ink, the kind that would definitely leave a mark if I peeled away too fast. I blinked groggily at my surroundings, the world shifting into focus as my brain slowly booted up.

  It was morning. Sunlight filtered through the small window, casting sharp lines across the wooden desk. My candle had long since burned out, leaving only a stub of wax. I could hear the sounds of Qinghe Town waking up outside — vendors calling to each other, the distant clatter of hooves on stone. The shrill war cry of a particularly aggressive chicken.

  I lifted my head and squinted at the desk.

  What… had I even been doing?

  My handwriting sprawled across several sheets of paper, neat columns of numbers and symbols interwoven with increasingly erratic diagrams. The longer I stared, the more I realized that at some point, I had completely zoned out.

  The first sheet was orderly. A simple table of approximations, trigonometric functions calculated from their infinite series expansions. I traced the numbers with my finger, the memory slowly returning. Right. I had started with that. Just testing the waters, seeing what I could derive from scratch. Something simple I could whet my teeth in.

  The next sheet… was different.

  It was covered in circles.

  Not just circles, but elaborate geometric constructions—bisected arcs, intersecting chords, careful tangents meticulously drawn with what appeared to be a self-fashioned compass.

  I frowned.

  At some point in my sleep-deprived haze, I had evidently decided that compass-and-straightedge constructions were my new passion. There was even an entire page dedicated to constructing a regular pentagon, a feat I was certain I had last attempted when I was, what, sixteen?

  I leaned back in my chair, rubbing my eyes.

  Well. That happened.

  I had completely lost myself in the math last night, which, in another world, would have been a wonderful sign of passion and dedication.

  In this world?

  It was a fast track to starving in a ditch.

  I sighed, stretching out my sore limbs. As much as I wanted to stay here, work through every theorem I could remember, and attempt to reconstruct as much mathematics as humanly possible, I could not afford to.

  I needed money.

  Reluctantly, I turned my attention to the reality of my situation.

  I had a few silver taels left from my journey, but not enough to sustain me for long. My room at the inn was paid for — for now — but without a steady income, I was living on borrowed time.

  My possessions were minimal. A few spare robes, plain and travel-worn. A dagger, mostly for utility rather than combat.

  …a handful of low-grade spirit stones.

  The last item was valuable.

  Spirit stones were used by cultivators to supplement their qi and were a common currency in sects. In theory, I could exchange them for silver, but there were several problems with this.

  One: Spirit stones were not commonly used in small towns. The kind of people who could buy them were usually cultivators or merchants with cultivation connections.

  Two: That meant I would have to go to a city to trade them.

  And cities were where plot happened.

  I exhaled slowly. Selling the spirit stones was my last resort. I needed to find work first. Anything that could keep me afloat.

  My skills, however, were not promising.

  Martial arts? Out of the question.

  Alchemy? Had no experience.

  Scribing? A viable option, but I knew if I started working as a scribe, I would be dragged into some kind of scholarly nonsense that would eventually involve angry cultivators. No thanks.

  Mathematics? Not marketable at my level.

  Biology? Absolutely useless unless someone needed mice surgically implanted with tumours, and then research ways to treat them.

  I ran a hand through my hair, sighing. This was going to be difficult.

  But I had no choice.

  I had walked away from a life of cultivation. I had left behind sect drama and martial rivalries. I had chosen a new path.

  Now, I just needed to figure out how to survive it.

  Pushing aside the scattered papers, I stood up, straightened my robe, and prepared to face the day.

  The morning air was crisp as I stepped out of the inn, the faint scent of frying dough and boiling porridge wafting in from the street. Qinghe Town was already bustling—merchants setting up their stalls, villagers haggling over vegetables, and somewhere in the distance, an old woman loudly berating her ox for stopping in the middle of the road.

  I, however, was not here to enjoy the atmosphere.

  I needed a job.

  Preferably something low effort, low risk, and unlikely to result in someone trying to kill me. Unfortunately, this was proving to be far more difficult than anticipated.

  The local apothecary had a sign posted outside looking for an assistant. For a brief moment, I considered it — I had studied some pharmacology before, after all. But then I imagined trying to explain that, no, I had never actually prepared a medicinal decoction before, and, no, I didn’t know anything about spiritual herbs or whatever mystical nonsense these people used instead of proper active ingredients.

  Something told me they wouldn’t be impressed if I asked whether they had metformin, lisinopril, clotrimazole, or atorvastatin in stock.

  So that was out.

  Next, I checked a few shops. The butcher was hiring, but I was fairly sure I’d clumsily chop off my own fingers within a week if I tried that. The blacksmith needed an apprentice, but the moment I stepped inside, I realised I would die of heat exhaustion before my first lesson ended. The fisherman’s guild had an opening, but I had spent enough time on boats recently to never want to see open water again.

  It was beginning to dawn on me that I was tragically unqualified for nearly every form of employment in this town.

  I rubbed my temple, exhaling slowly. Okay. Think. I needed a way to make money that wouldn’t kill me. Teaching? Maybe. But I had no connections. Manual labor? Absolutely not. Gambling? Definitely a fast way to get stabbed in a back alley.

  Lost in thought, I almost didn’t notice the commotion happening ahead.

  A furious-looking scholar was storming away from a schoolhouse, his expensive silk robes billowing dramatically behind him. Behind him, an older man — round, balding, deeply distressed — hurried after him.

  “Master Liu, please reconsider! The children need your guidance —”

  “I am finished!” the scholar roared, spinning on his heel so fast that his hat nearly flew off. His face was red with rage, and judging by the way his veins were bulging, he was one more bad interaction away from an aneurysm. “I have tolerated these undisciplined hooligans for long enough! These little demons are beyond salvation! Not one of them respects the Confucian classics! Not one of them has a shred of decorum!”

  “They’re just a bit unruly — ”

  “Unruly?!” The scholar whirled around, eyes blazing. “That was not unruly, Headmaster Song! That was a coordinated assault on my dignity! One of them threw an inkpot at my head! Another stole my brush while I was writing on the board! And then — then they had the audacity to ask why they needed to study at all!”

  The headmaster clasped his hands together in desperation. “They are young! Surely, with time, they will —”

  “?!” Master Liu nearly strangled himself with his own sleeve. “Time will not make them literate! Time will not make them stop throwing ink at each other in the middle of lessons! Time will not remove the goat they smuggled into the classroom last week!”

  I blinked.

  Well.

  That sounded… promising.

  The scholar took one final, seething breath. “I am done! I am ! I wash my hands of this wretched school! Good luck finding another dignified instructor in this forsaken town!”

  And with that, he stormed off, kicking a stray chicken out of his way as he left.

  The headmaster watched him go with the defeated air of a man who discovered twenty steps later that he’d evaluated an integral wrong on step two.

  Then, very slowly, he turned and saw me.

  I stared at him. He stared at me.

  A strange moment passed between us.

  Then, before I could stop myself — before I could even think through what I was about to do — I opened my mouth.

  “…Do you need a teacher?”