Records of Mysterious Things in the Southern Dynasties

Chapter 344 Why bother with all that?
Looking at the huge machine in front of him, Zuan had a complicated expression. He turned his head and took a few deep breaths.

"What? If you don't understand, don't force yourself." Ren Yuan said, "Don't treat the deaf to become dumb."

"What a joke! I can handle this with my eyes closed." Zuan turned around and forced a smile.
"This is a self-propelled armillary sphere, but it can't function because of missing parts. It needs to be repaired before it can function."

"You see, it is operated by gear linkage. There are three kinds of gears in it. The one with 28 teeth is the sky gear, the one with 12 teeth is the ground gear, and the one with 24 teeth is the human gear. If the gears are wrong, it will get stuck."

"So we have to calculate the gear ratio first, for example, the ratio between the sky wheel and the human wheel is one hundred to one hundred and sixteen... and then rebalance the gears accordingly."

Su Xiaoxiao and A Yao listened with interest at first, but soon went back to their work. Only Ren Yuan stood by with great interest, watching Zuan rearrange the gears one by one and then balance the weight of the lever.

Although he didn't quite understand it, he could watch the fun all day long without getting bored.

"You never expected that?" Zuan said proudly while busying himself, "Not only am I invincible with my mouth, I also have skills with my hands."

"I can't believe it. Did your father teach you all this?"

“No, I don’t know who taught me…” Zuan shook his head, a little confused, “It seems to be someone very close to me, but I just can’t remember his name.”

"Alas, I feel the same way. I always feel as if we have discussed this topic before, but I can't remember it at all." Ren Yuan smiled bitterly and said, "Could it be that after being in contact with the Fifth Guardian for so long, I have become forgetful?"

"Who knows." Zuan went on to adjust the various connecting rods.

"By the way," Ren Yuan suddenly asked again, "I saw your eyes were red just now, did you cry?"

"No." Zuan was about to deny it, but was suppressed by his own magical powers and could not help but tell the truth: "It would be strange if it wasn't."

"When I was a kid, my father often made all kinds of toys for me, but he always deliberately didn't assemble them correctly, so I had to fix them myself before I could play with them..." He sighed deeply.
"This is the last toy he gave me, only it's magnified a hundred times. It's as if the old guy knew I was coming..."

Zuan's voice became softer and softer, and his eyes gradually softened.

"Let's talk about it when we get back." Ren Yuan said softly.

"Let's talk about it later." Zu An calmed himself down and said unhappily, "Don't bother me. It's from ten years ago. I might remember it wrongly."

Ren Yuan quickly shut up.

Zuan fiddled with it for a while before clapping his hands and saying, "Okay, the smallest common multiple of the three gear numbers is 168, so we need to turn the handle six times."

Ren Yuan followed his instructions and slowly turned the protruding bronze handle.

After the creaking sound of the winding organ, the huge machine began to turn slowly, driving the armillary sphere above to slowly rotate, demonstrating the changes in the celestial phenomena.

At the top of the celestial column of the armillary sphere, there is a little man holding a cloud board and walking slowly around the center of the circle.

The path along which the little man walks is designed with a mechanism according to the twelve hours.

At this time, the little man just walked to the midnight position, and the mechanism struck the cloud board to tell the time...

At the same time, a copper ladder slowly rose up and fit neatly into the groove of the ceiling. Then the stairs slowly rotated and the passage opened!

"This is too awesome!" Ren Yuan couldn't help but exclaimed. It was exactly like a combination of a later-day alarm clock and a planetarium.

As he climbed up the stairs, his admiration for Zu Geng was like a surging river...

~~
As soon as Ren Yuan came up to the sixth floor, he was shocked by the scene before him.

Bronze mirrors magnified the space in front of me infinitely. I could see groups of flying fairies in the sky, their skirts fluttering, and the ceiling falling. There was a long ladder leading to the distant sky.

In the distance are floating pavilions on the blue sea, like the fairy city of Penglai.

There is a long cloud bridge spanning both ends.

Under the bridge is the slowly flowing River Styx, with many bottomless whirlpools on the river.

A bone ship docked at the shore.

And the moment he stepped onto this floor, an hourglass began to count down.

Obviously, this is a huge illusion maze. The designer will not give him a second chance and he must get out of the maze within the specified time.

Ren Yuan thought that he had finally found a professional match, but he did not dare to be careless. He used his spiritual sense to scan the illusion, trying to find a real passage from the ever-changing scene.

However, he saw that whether he was climbing the stairs, going up the bridge or taking the boat, there were countless forks in the road. At the end of the fork, there was another fork in the road, and it kept branching off in the seemingly endless illusion, as if there were thousands of passages, and it was impossible to find which one was the real way out.

Ren Yuan is an expert himself, and he knows that although illusions may seem dazzling, they are actually mental attacks on the target person. Because the easiest thing to lose is the original heart of a person...

The designer is obviously well aware of this, and has connected his inner world through the formation. What he sees is actually his own desires, ideals and evil thoughts.

How easy is it to find a real way out for your soul?
Ren Yuan was pondering over the idea when he suddenly saw his senior sister summon the Ziwei Sword. She flew onto the sword's spine and flew away like lightning!

The purple light instantly beheaded Fei Tian, then split the fairy mountain, and finally cut off the Styx!

The boundless illusion suddenly fell down like a broken mirror, revealing the stairs hidden behind it.

One sword destroys all evil!

Ren Yuan was stunned. The senior sister turned around and smiled casually, "Why bother with all that? Come upstairs."

~~
The two finally reached the top floor.

I saw nine bronze rings nested concentrically on the wall in front of me, with regular polygons inscribed on the ring surfaces. The number of sides increased with each layer of the rings. The innermost ring was a hexagon, and the outermost ring was a 192-gon.

There is a slide rail on the outside of each ring, which can be moved left and right to adjust the side length of the polygon, which is obviously simulating the process of increasing the side in the circle cutting technique.

Ren Yuan couldn't help but laugh: "I knew the top floor must be this."

"What is this?" The senior sister was completely confused, and she no longer had the strength she had just when facing the illusion.

"It's the circle-cutting method, a secret technique passed down from my ancestors." Ren Yuan said with a smile, "This requires the person who wants to solve the problem to use the principle of 'circle-cutting method' to gradually approach the value of pi and calculate the answer he wants."

After saying this, he walked straight to the table by the wall and placed the abacus on it.

"You know it without cutting it?" The senior sister blinked her big eyes that had never been polluted by mathematics.

"Why bother with all that?!" Ren Yuan emphasized his tone and said with a 'Zu-Li' attitude.

Three-five-five to one-one-three!
With a creaking sound, the nine concentric circles on the wall began to rotate rapidly. When they stopped rotating, a square altar was revealed at the center of the circle, on which was placed a jade-white Buddha finger.

Buddha's bone relics!

(End of this chapter)