Lin Zhao Xi thought that there was something wrong with Zhang Liang’s head. However, in this day and age, there happen to be a couple of people with some weird mindsets. There were some special classes that helped kids increase their IQ, and there were also Chi Masters that helped kids develop their brains. Usually, these things cost about 3000 yuans. Although judging from Zhang Liang’s self-entitled mother, it’s not strange if her son had taken these lessons while developing the same entitled way of thinking as well.
When someone declares war on her, she would always accept the challenge. Lin Zhao Xi remembered that she technically did respond to Zhang Liang’s challenge when he told her to go die. At the time when she responded to his(ZL) insult, she didn’t show hostility as he did, but instead just responded casually.
“F*ck, you’re so arrogant!” Hua Juan exclaimed in admiration.
“Not really, that kid told to me to go die before.” Lin Zhao Xi casually replied
“You’re even more arrogant than him!” Hua Juan yelled loudly.
Lin Zhao Xi looked at Zhang Liang, arrogance aside, could she really beat him(ZL)?
Actually, no.
Before travelling back in time, the primary school kids in her era could already play Honour of Kings[/mfn] A Chinese mobile version of League of Legends, Honor of Kings[/mfn], so their intelligence wasn’t that far off compared to this current generation.
She asked shamelessly, So do you want to do the Webster Children’s IQ Test to test our IQ? The Raven’s Reasoning Test could also work. She chose these two specific tests because Lin Zhao Xi had already gone through the contents of both the tests. To put it simply, she remembered the answers.
Zhang Liang, obviously, hadn’t heard of these things so he ignored her. He squatted down and started picking up stones. There was a piece of gravel by the park playground gate and it made a creaking sound when stepped on, he(ZL) picked up the gravel, handed it to another child, and continued.
Lin Zhao Xi didn’t know what he(ZL) was on about, but since he’s the one who suggested the game, she just had to be patient and wait for her opponent to make a move.
Hua Juan gently poked her and whispered, “You’re F*cked.”
“Eh?”
“Zhang Liang’s super good at this game.”
“Super good at what game?”
By the time they’d finished talking, Zhang Liang had grabbed another handful of stones and repeated this action three times. He and his classmates then carried the stones and walked towards the playground resting area under the camphor tree.
Under the camphor tree were stone tables and stools, the tables were occupied by parents and their children eating snacks, all except one.
Zhang Liang carried the stones to the empty table and sat down. Amid the blowing wind, he sat with a good posture. From the looks of it, they were going to play some sort of board game.
Lin Zhao Xi frowned, she didn’t know what that kid was planning. She could only follow him and sit on the other side of the table. Zhang Liang raised one of his eyebrows, he had a triumphant look like he was holding the winning ticket in a lottery. His eyes flashed, she felt something was wrong.
When they both sat down, the two groups crowded around them, Lin Zhao Xi’s group formed an arc around her and Zhang Liang’s group formed an arc around him, it was the perfect position for a group fight.
Once together, they all started to become noisy. There’s like an invisible line between each group holding them back from killing each other.
“Hey, piss off back to your side!” Hua Juan yelled
“You’re the one that should piss off,” Zhang Liang’s classmate retorted.
“We’re playing chess?” Lin Zhao Xi asked.
One of the kids in Zhang Liang’s group gazed at her as if thinking…Ah, that’s right, how can a hillbilly know the rules of this game?”
Right now, she just wanted to return to her present time and come back with Honor of Kings so children wouldn’t have to create stupid games to settle a score.
“The rules are as follows.” Zhang Liang finally opened his mouth, his voice overwhelming all other voices.
Everyone immediately quieted.
Zhang Liang took seventeen stones from the stone piles and lined them up on the table.
“There are seventeen stones, every turn, a player can grab up to three stones, you can’t skip a turn and the player that runs out of stones to take on their turn loses.”
Beside them was a small tree, the sun cast a shadow of the small tree onto the table. The shade created by the shadow caused the stones to stand out.
Lin Zhao Xi immediately understood the game, it’s a question of sub-selection. The game Zhang Liang presented seemed way too simple, this question was in the syllabus of Grade III mathematics. However, she was still cautious, it may seem simple but one wrong move could cost the game. If she remembered correctly, there were a total of ‘m’ items and every time you could only take ‘n’ amounts, this was The Bash Game principle.
The Bash Game was not that complicated and there was a winning strategy as well. Like what Hua Juan said before, Zhang Liang must have mastered this principle before beating others in this game.
Lin Zhao Xi bit her lips and looked at the stones on the table. Honestly speaking, she had forgotten most of the contents of the Bash Game. However, she remembered that in this scenario, the player who starts first would gain an advantage.
“Who will start first?” she asked.
“Let’s decide with a coin toss,” Zhang Liang replied.
She smiled. “Let’s take turns, I will start first and you can start in the next round.”
With 17 stones it is very easy since you can only take a maximum of 3 stones, therefore, you can win if you finish your turn with 4 stones left on the table. If you follow the pattern of leaving your opponent with an even number of stones each turn, you can win.
Zhang Liang didn’t say anything but nodded, acting generously. She raised her hand and took one stone off the table and there were 16 left.
With this one move, she was sure that she was going to win. Lin Zhao Xi glanced at Zhang Liang who slowly raised his hand and took 3 stones from the table, 13 left.
Lin Zhao Xi took 1, 12 left.
Zhang Liang took 3, 9 left.
Lin Zhao Xi took 1, 8 left.
Zhang Liang took 3, 5 left.
Lin Zhao Xi took 1 stone from the table, there were 4 stones left, Zhang Liang was sure to lose.
Lin Zhao Xi retracted her hand and looked at Zhang Liang
Zhang Liang didn’t speak and stopped as well. Even kids with poor math skills could tell that Lin Zhao Xi was destined to win.
There was a short pause and Lu Zhi Zhao shouted: “1 to 0!”
“Holy sh*t you won!” Hua Juan squeezed her shoulder very hard out of excitement.
Behind her, the Red Star Elementary School children started celebrating.
Someone took a red brick out of nowhere and wrote down 1:0 onto the concrete floor. The fonts are crooked like it’s an insult.
The students behind Zhang Liang stayed silent and lowered their heads in embarrassment due to the celebration on the other side.
One side’s atmosphere was warm while the other was very cold. There was a sharp contrast between the two sides. Passersby cast curious glances towards the two groups before walking away.
Unlike others, Lin Zhao Xi didn’t celebrate her win, because across from her was Zhang Liang with a calm and calculated look that was telling you he would still win. She knew this look all too well. Since the teachers from the Experimental School constantly bragged about Zhang Liang’s maths skills, how could he be lacking? He didn’t act angry or upset like he knew he was going to lose,
which was strange.
Right then, there was the sound of high heels, Zhang Liang’s mother came behind Zhang Liang and opened her parasol like there was a pink halo above her head.
Zhang Liang slowly raised his head and looked at Lin Zhao Xi and smiled at her, there was an obvious smirk on his face that couldn’t be hidden by the smile. “That’s just warm-up, the real match has started.”
Zhang Liang spread his hand and moved it towards the tiny stone pile. He pushed the pile to the middle of the table, many tiny stones rolled off the table while the majority remained. He suddenly said, “Now you can take up to 5 stones every turn, begin!”
Lin Zhao Xi quickly looked at the table, there were at least a hundred tiny stones, densely packed together like stars.
“What the hell, you’re so shameless! Who knows how many stones there are!” Hua Juan felt something was wrong as well and shouted.
“Estimating numbers is a basic skill in maths, I haven’t counted yet, if you don’t believe me, you can count the stones yourself,” Zhang Liang quickly retorted, he didn’t even look at Hua Juan when speaking.
What he(ZL) said was right, this was the actual battle, he probably already knew the way to win so he probably wouldn’t cheat to gain an advantage.
Lin Zhao Xi nodded, there was no turning back, she quickly took three stones from the table and threw them onto the ground.
At the time she nodded, Hua Juan quickly ran off, probably to get more stones. The students behind her started complaining, calling Zhang Liang a shameless bully.
Zhang Liang didn’t react to the complaints but instead said, “Change of rules, now everytime you can only take a maximum of 4 stones, the way to win doesn’t change.” When he finished speaking, he picked up a stone on the table and threw it away, he then said, “On the next turn, you can also change the rules, however, you can’t change the rules so that you can take more than 5 stones, to make it fair.”
His last 4 words were just to taunt her, Lin Zhao Xi panicked for a moment. Everything she had calculated was disrupted, she quickly calmed down and forced her brain to go into overdrive, counting the stones, the number of stones that must remain on the table for her to win, and also thinking about how to change the rules. This was no longer a simple intelligence test, this was an unreasonable and chaotic competition.
She took a deep breath and said to Zhang Liang, “ No matter who wins, the next round will get disrupted and ruined, it’s meaningless.”
“You know?” Zhang Liang was surprised, his tone was like an adult and treated Lin Zhao Xi as a child.
“Of course, I know.” She disliked him more and more.
“The carousel,” Zhang Liang pointed in the distance and said, “when the carousel music stops, we will stop changing the rules.”
She could hear the faint music of Fur Elise [/mfn] Fur Elise[/mfn], Lin Zhao Xi looked at where Zhang Liang was pointing and saw the candy-coloured carousel. There were pink, white, and blue horses moving to the rhythm of the music as children’s laughter drifted towards them.
She glanced to the side of the colourful horses. There was the curly-haired boy from earlier talking with Pei Zhi, then he started pointing at Lin Zhao Xi and Zhang Liang. At that moment, Pei Zhi looked this way.
Lin Zhao Xi thought that there was something wrong with Zhang Liang’s head. However, in this day and age, there happen to be a couple of people with some weird mindsets. There were some special classes that helped kids increase their IQ, and there were also Chi Masters that helped kids develop their brains. Usually, these things cost about 3000 yuans. Although judging from Zhang Liang’s self-entitled mother, it’s not strange if her son had taken these lessons while developing the same entitled way of thinking as well.
When someone declares war on her, she would always accept the challenge. Lin Zhao Xi remembered that she technically did respond to Zhang Liang’s challenge when he told her to go die. At the time when she responded to his(ZL) insult, she didn’t show hostility as he did, but instead just responded casually.
“F*ck, you’re so arrogant!” Hua Juan exclaimed in admiration.
“Not really, that kid told to me to go die before.” Lin Zhao Xi casually replied
“You’re even more arrogant than him!” Hua Juan yelled loudly.
Lin Zhao Xi looked at Zhang Liang, arrogance aside, could she really beat him(ZL)?
Actually, no.
Before travelling back in time, the primary school kids in her era could already play Honour of Kings[/mfn] A Chinese mobile version of League of Legends, Honor of Kings[/mfn], so their intelligence wasn’t that far off compared to this current generation.
She asked shamelessly, So do you want to do the Webster Children’s IQ Test to test our IQ? The Raven’s Reasoning Test could also work. She chose these two specific tests because Lin Zhao Xi had already gone through the contents of both the tests. To put it simply, she remembered the answers.
Zhang Liang, obviously, hadn’t heard of these things so he ignored her. He squatted down and started picking up stones. There was a piece of gravel by the park playground gate and it made a creaking sound when stepped on, he(ZL) picked up the gravel, handed it to another child, and continued.
Lin Zhao Xi didn’t know what he(ZL) was on about, but since he’s the one who suggested the game, she just had to be patient and wait for her opponent to make a move.
Hua Juan gently poked her and whispered, “You’re F*cked.”
“Eh?”
“Zhang Liang’s super good at this game.”
“Super good at what game?”
By the time they’d finished talking, Zhang Liang had grabbed another handful of stones and repeated this action three times. He and his classmates then carried the stones and walked towards the playground resting area under the camphor tree.
Under the camphor tree were stone tables and stools, the tables were occupied by parents and their children eating snacks, all except one.
Zhang Liang carried the stones to the empty table and sat down. Amid the blowing wind, he sat with a good posture. From the looks of it, they were going to play some sort of board game.
Lin Zhao Xi frowned, she didn’t know what that kid was planning. She could only follow him and sit on the other side of the table. Zhang Liang raised one of his eyebrows, he had a triumphant look like he was holding the winning ticket in a lottery. His eyes flashed, she felt something was wrong.
When they both sat down, the two groups crowded around them, Lin Zhao Xi’s group formed an arc around her and Zhang Liang’s group formed an arc around him, it was the perfect position for a group fight.
Once together, they all started to become noisy. There’s like an invisible line between each group holding them back from killing each other.
“Hey, piss off back to your side!” Hua Juan yelled
“You’re the one that should piss off,” Zhang Liang’s classmate retorted.
“We’re playing chess?” Lin Zhao Xi asked.
One of the kids in Zhang Liang’s group gazed at her as if thinking…Ah, that’s right, how can a hillbilly know the rules of this game?”
Right now, she just wanted to return to her present time and come back with Honor of Kings so children wouldn’t have to create stupid games to settle a score.
“The rules are as follows.” Zhang Liang finally opened his mouth, his voice overwhelming all other voices.
Everyone immediately quieted.
Zhang Liang took seventeen stones from the stone piles and lined them up on the table.
“There are seventeen stones, every turn, a player can grab up to three stones, you can’t skip a turn and the player that runs out of stones to take on their turn loses.”
Beside them was a small tree, the sun cast a shadow of the small tree onto the table. The shade created by the shadow caused the stones to stand out.
Lin Zhao Xi immediately understood the game, it’s a question of sub-selection. The game Zhang Liang presented seemed way too simple, this question was in the syllabus of Grade III mathematics. However, she was still cautious, it may seem simple but one wrong move could cost the game. If she remembered correctly, there were a total of ‘m’ items and every time you could only take ‘n’ amounts, this was The Bash Game principle.
The Bash Game was not that complicated and there was a winning strategy as well. Like what Hua Juan said before, Zhang Liang must have mastered this principle before beating others in this game.
Lin Zhao Xi bit her lips and looked at the stones on the table. Honestly speaking, she had forgotten most of the contents of the Bash Game. However, she remembered that in this scenario, the player who starts first would gain an advantage.
“Who will start first?” she asked.
“Let’s decide with a coin toss,” Zhang Liang replied.
She smiled. “Let’s take turns, I will start first and you can start in the next round.”
With 17 stones it is very easy since you can only take a maximum of 3 stones, therefore, you can win if you finish your turn with 4 stones left on the table. If you follow the pattern of leaving your opponent with an even number of stones each turn, you can win.
Zhang Liang didn’t say anything but nodded, acting generously. She raised her hand and took one stone off the table and there were 16 left.
With this one move, she was sure that she was going to win. Lin Zhao Xi glanced at Zhang Liang who slowly raised his hand and took 3 stones from the table, 13 left.
Lin Zhao Xi took 1, 12 left.
Zhang Liang took 3, 9 left.
Lin Zhao Xi took 1, 8 left.
Zhang Liang took 3, 5 left.
Lin Zhao Xi took 1 stone from the table, there were 4 stones left, Zhang Liang was sure to lose.
Lin Zhao Xi retracted her hand and looked at Zhang Liang
Zhang Liang didn’t speak and stopped as well. Even kids with poor math skills could tell that Lin Zhao Xi was destined to win.
There was a short pause and Lu Zhi Zhao shouted: “1 to 0!”
“Holy sh*t you won!” Hua Juan squeezed her shoulder very hard out of excitement.
Behind her, the Red Star Elementary School children started celebrating.
Someone took a red brick out of nowhere and wrote down 1:0 onto the concrete floor. The fonts are crooked like it’s an insult.
The students behind Zhang Liang stayed silent and lowered their heads in embarrassment due to the celebration on the other side.
One side’s atmosphere was warm while the other was very cold. There was a sharp contrast between the two sides. Passersby cast curious glances towards the two groups before walking away.
Unlike others, Lin Zhao Xi didn’t celebrate her win, because across from her was Zhang Liang with a calm and calculated look that was telling you he would still win. She knew this look all too well. Since the teachers from the Experimental School constantly bragged about Zhang Liang’s maths skills, how could he be lacking? He didn’t act angry or upset like he knew he was going to lose,
which was strange.
Right then, there was the sound of high heels, Zhang Liang’s mother came behind Zhang Liang and opened her parasol like there was a pink halo above her head.
Zhang Liang slowly raised his head and looked at Lin Zhao Xi and smiled at her, there was an obvious smirk on his face that couldn’t be hidden by the smile. “That’s just warm-up, the real match has started.”
Zhang Liang spread his hand and moved it towards the tiny stone pile. He pushed the pile to the middle of the table, many tiny stones rolled off the table while the majority remained. He suddenly said, “Now you can take up to 5 stones every turn, begin!”
Lin Zhao Xi quickly looked at the table, there were at least a hundred tiny stones, densely packed together like stars.
“What the hell, you’re so shameless! Who knows how many stones there are!” Hua Juan felt something was wrong as well and shouted.
“Estimating numbers is a basic skill in maths, I haven’t counted yet, if you don’t believe me, you can count the stones yourself,” Zhang Liang quickly retorted, he didn’t even look at Hua Juan when speaking.
What he(ZL) said was right, this was the actual battle, he probably already knew the way to win so he probably wouldn’t cheat to gain an advantage.
Lin Zhao Xi nodded, there was no turning back, she quickly took three stones from the table and threw them onto the ground.
At the time she nodded, Hua Juan quickly ran off, probably to get more stones. The students behind her started complaining, calling Zhang Liang a shameless bully.
Zhang Liang didn’t react to the complaints but instead said, “Change of rules, now everytime you can only take a maximum of 4 stones, the way to win doesn’t change.” When he finished speaking, he picked up a stone on the table and threw it away, he then said, “On the next turn, you can also change the rules, however, you can’t change the rules so that you can take more than 5 stones, to make it fair.”
His last 4 words were just to taunt her, Lin Zhao Xi panicked for a moment. Everything she had calculated was disrupted, she quickly calmed down and forced her brain to go into overdrive, counting the stones, the number of stones that must remain on the table for her to win, and also thinking about how to change the rules. This was no longer a simple intelligence test, this was an unreasonable and chaotic competition.
She took a deep breath and said to Zhang Liang, “ No matter who wins, the next round will get disrupted and ruined, it’s meaningless.”
“You know?” Zhang Liang was surprised, his tone was like an adult and treated Lin Zhao Xi as a child.
“Of course, I know.” She disliked him more and more.
“The carousel,” Zhang Liang pointed in the distance and said, “when the carousel music stops, we will stop changing the rules.”
She could hear the faint music of Fur Elise [/mfn] Fur Elise[/mfn], Lin Zhao Xi looked at where Zhang Liang was pointing and saw the candy-coloured carousel. There were pink, white, and blue horses moving to the rhythm of the music as children’s laughter drifted towards them.
She glanced to the side of the colourful horses. There was the curly-haired boy from earlier talking with Pei Zhi, then he started pointing at Lin Zhao Xi and Zhang Liang. At that moment, Pei Zhi looked this way.
