The Guess

Of course, given the wording of the question, there were only two choices, so it was a blind guess. Xu Yi had a fifty percent chance of getting it right.

Yet the Heir of Prince Xiang was absolutely certain that Xu Yi would never guess blindly without being absolutely sure.

The reasoning was simple. Guess wrong, and the shame would be worse than not answering at all.

How could the Poet Immortal, Word Sage, a wise man of his age, stoop to a child's wild guess?

In other words, given Xu Yi's standing, unless he had grasped the principle behind the question, he would never answer it.

And to grasp that principle, one would have to be learned enough to understand the workings of Heaven and man.

Even the Heir of Prince Xiang had needed to conduct experiments to find the answer.

Nor had he come up with this question out of thin air. One day at Prince Xiang's manor, a group of clever strategists happened to see children playing around a basin of water. One strategist had hit upon the question and posed it on the spot, leaving all the wise men in the manor at a loss.

It wasn't that they couldn't calculate the answer. The frightening part was knowing what happened without knowing why.

Yet the strategists all firmly believed that everything in the world could be studied, and that everything had its principles.

But why should moving a stone in water just a little cause such a subtle change? The reason was baffling.

The wise men at Prince Xiang's manor were the sharpest of the sharp. The two seemingly impossible couplets the Heir of Prince Xiang had just solved had been pieced together by these men after days and nights of scrutinizing every word and compiling