After scrutinizing every combination of equations and checking them over and over, Xu Yi could find no flaw. His attention turned to the line of text. He chewed it over repeatedly, feeling that this phrase, much like a Buddhist verse, concealed some mystery.
"To solve the puzzle within the puzzle, one must seek the self beyond the self. To solve the puzzle within the puzzle, one must seek the self beyond the self..."
Xu Yi mulled it over again and again. Suddenly, he pulled his consciousness out of the jade wall in his sea of consciousness.
He stared blankly at the square. Carefully, he examined the frame formed by thirty-six lines, trying to imagine each line as the equation corresponding to it. Once he had transformed every line into an equation in his mind,
in a flash, he sent all those equations into the frame.
In a flash, the thirty-six lines vanished one after another. In their place, a string of numbers seemed to come alive, swimming across the jade wall: 3.1415926...
The moment the first string of numbers entered his sight, Xu Yi froze. Wasn't this damn pi?
He couldn't remember how many digits of pi came after that, but he knew these first few by heart. With his abilities, he could work out the first ten decimal places by mental arithmetic alone.
He quickly calculated them in his head. Sure enough, the ten digits after the decimal point matched the ones displayed on the jade wall exactly.
At last, all 3,637 digits had been laid out on the jade wall.
In a flash, the numbers disappeared, replaced by thirty-six lines moving across the jade wall. In a flash, they joined together. This time, though, they formed not a square, but a perfect circle.
Breaking the square to make