Puzzler's Space
09-07-2017, 07:33 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-19-2019, 05:37 AM by Kaynato.)
Puzzler's Space
Lesson 1:Spring's Spirit Departs
Liu Kui and Ban Songqi are walking along a riverside path. The sun beats down, and the flowers are wilting around. Yet the river flows without hesitation, blue in the golden sunbeams.
"Songqi," inquires Liu Kui, "where has the spring's spirit departed to?"
Songqi does not respond.
Puzzle 1: What was the color of Songqi's shoes?
An old hermit sits beneath the willow tree at the end of the path. Ban Songqi, upon arriving at the boundary of the time-smoothed pebbles and the withered grass, stoops down, sleeves hovering above the ground. Liu Kui gazes upon this situation in confusion.
Five minutes pass. Silence covers the scene, a muffled blanket of smothering air.
Ten minutes pass, again. Liu Kui flips through a 760-chapter scroll of philosophical treatises.
Ten thousand years pass.
The old hermit rises from the tree, and defeats the Venerated Judge of the Exhumed Bureaucracy in single-handed combat. The dead rise from their graves in the guise of small rodents and birds, wreathed in the deadly glare of the Unity, and obliterate all surviving civilization in a cataclysm of torrential flame. All fade to dust - all pass away. There is no more.
Two minutes pass.
Ban Songqi stands up from the worn path. "The hermit has long passed away. A burial is appropriate."
Liu Kui brings out a shovel, and they spend two hours preparing a shallow grave.
Puzzle 2: In the seven-and-seven-hundredth reign of the Semi-Immortal Paragon of the Fifth Virtue of Heaven, Avkakathip Tolvittrakhar-Thakartravit, the Assembly of Retaining Avarice fell into internal strife. Out of the conflict, only twelve survived. Why?
The sun is setting, and the faint smell of lightly steaming rice porridge wafts from over the hills, roughly tinged by the sun-dried grass and the dark odor of burning charcoal.
Ban Songqi and Liu Kui, tired from the burial, pack their bags and begin their trek home.
Halfway through the journey, Liu Kui trips on the exposed root of a mangrove tree and drops the 760-chapter scroll into a swamp. It sinks pitifully into the murky emerald waters.
Liu Kui kneels down in sudden agony and grief, for the last position was only the four-hundred-and-twenty-first page, but Ban Songqi interjects. "Fear not," Ban cryptically states, "for the knowledge of nature now returns to its origin."
Burdens left behind, the two have rice porridge under the warmth of their wooden home.
Puzzle 3: When will the mangrove forests rise, hearing the melodies of death, cognizant of hate, and return the endless millennia of suffering inflicted by human hands?
After-school reading: If you were Liu Kui, would you have observed the Accordance of Twelfth Heaven instead of that of Fiftieth Heaven, and set the swamp aflame? Explain in the form of the Law of Coordination why the action would be proper, or alternatively, conduct a psychological analysis.