The Joy of Setting Questions

Too few questions?

No rush. Let's look at the others first.

Someone's pirating it?

Lu Mingyuan stared, stunned, at the message left for him by the frequently appearing "Sweet and Adorable Jiang Zichun."

A pirated version had come out this fast? Even faster than back on the original Blue Star.

The illusion-type divine ability Lu Mingyuan had created was very simple. Especially after he had already blazed the trail for it, it could be called the simplest divine ability in history.

So Lu Mingyuan had expected pirated versions to appear. But he still hadn't expected one to show up on only the fourth day.

Thinking of the tens of millions of copies he had already sold, Lu Mingyuan thought, Maybe it's just too popular.

Still, this was fast.

It was practically leaving no way for anyone else to survive!

Lu Mingyuan really wanted to shout, I haven't earned enough yet!

Though he had just said he no longer cared about Qi Luck Points, and that what he had earned was enough to spend, the thought of someone else snatching food from his mouth still left him indignant.

If he hadn't worried that suddenly cursing someone would be inappropriate, Lu Mingyuan would have let loose a stream of abuse long ago.

Wait, no. I can go curse them out in Soul Space~ Wouldn't that work? That way, no one else could hear me or use it against me.

"You..."

"I..."

"Who..."

In Soul Space, Lu Mingyuan let it all out before finally calming down.

"Ah, that feels good! So cursing people is this satisfying."

Then Lu Mingyuan came to his senses. He must have been repressing himself for too long, which was why he'd reacted like that.

It was true that he didn't care much about a lot of things, and that he was usually even-tempered. But he was harboring a huge secret in his heart, and if it ever came out, it would bring him death. That left him feeling ill at ease, never quite safe.

He didn't even dare speak carelessly in his daily life, or let himself make offhand remarks, for fear of causing trouble.

One could imagine how miserable and repressed he felt inside.

In his previous life, Lu Mingyuan had studied psychology, too. He knew that living like this for too long would indeed harm his mental and physical health. So he was always telling himself, comforting himself, not to worry about it and to focus on his plans. After all, achieving certain things always came at a price.

He had mentally prepared himself for that.

But now, things were better. After letting it all out in Soul Space, he really did feel much better.

Having discovered that cursing people had an unexpected effect, Lu Mingyuan murmured to himself, "Looks like whenever I'm in a bad mood in the future, I can come to Soul Space and unwind. That way, I won't bottle everything up until I make myself sick."

Once he felt a little better, Lu Mingyuan began looking into the piracy issue.

He searched "Chicken and Rabbit in a Cage" under the divine abilities section of the Heavenly Dao Virtual Network.

Good grief. The search brought up nearly a hundred divine abilities. Though Anonymous's [Chicken and Rabbit in a Cage] was in first place.

Yesterday, I was the only one. In just one day—or maybe just one afternoon—there are this many?

What kind of speed is that?

Most people hadn't even caught on yet, and there were already so many. At this rate, there'd probably be several thousand, or even ten thousand, more by tomorrow.

By then, the Mind-Fixing Divine Ability market would be fiercely competitive. It would probably turn into a sea of red.

Seeing this, Lu Mingyuan counted himself lucky. "Good thing I'm the original creator, so I can still claim the lion's share. Otherwise, I'd have to fight those people bare-chested. And thank goodness I set my price at the lowest possible level back then. No one can undercut me. Otherwise, they could start a price war, and things would get ugly."

"Ah! It's also because the principle behind this divine ability is too simple. Now that I've laid the groundwork, anyone who's been to school can make one."

Of course, Lu Mingyuan had already made a fortune, so he had no regrets.

When he'd first put the divine ability up for sale on the Heavenly Dao Virtual Network, he'd already prepared himself for people to pirate it.

There was no helping it. His divine ability was both simple and easy to sell. If people didn't pirate it, they wouldn't be doing their jobs. Honestly, if Lu Mingyuan had seen this divine ability and knew it would sell so well, he would have pirated it at the first opportunity, too.

Now, there was no need. Even Lu Mingyuan could easily do it with one of his other accounts.

In Lu Mingyuan's view, today the market was still a blue ocean. Tomorrow, it would probably be a red one. Once it sank, it wouldn't come back up.

And he estimated that apart from Anonymous, only a handful of people would earn the price of one Divine Ability Stone—that is, ten million Qi Luck Points. He couldn't say the rest would lose money, but they wouldn't earn much. After all, the first Divine Ability Stone was free.

Lu Mingyuan had already used up his free Divine Ability Stone. On top of that, he planned to keep creating divine abilities under the account "Road Under Feet." If he couldn't earn back the cost of a Divine Ability Stone, he'd be taking a huge loss.

Next, Lu Mingyuan tried out a few divine abilities also labeled "Chicken and Rabbit in a Cage." Sure enough, they were much like his own, except that the creators had changed the questions a little.

"Just as I thought..."

Lu Mingyuan shook his head, not even wanting to speak.

"I'd better add some questions first. That should take a bite out of the pirated versions, too."

After saying that, Lu Mingyuan remembered his plan and whispered, "After a while, I'll wipe them all out in one fell swoop."

Once he decided to add more questions, Lu Mingyuan conjured paper and a pen in Soul Space, then prepared to work out the calculations and set the questions.

The Chicken-Rabbit Cage Problem could be solved quickly with a system of two linear equations. But setting the questions didn't need to be so complicated; multiplication and addition were all he needed.

[Number of heads per beast] multiplied by [number of beasts] plus [number of heads per bird] multiplied by [number of birds] equaled [total number of heads].

[Number of legs per beast] multiplied by [number of beasts] plus [number of legs per bird] multiplied by [number of birds] equaled [total number of legs].

And that was how he came up with the questions.

Given beasts with so many heads and so many legs, and birds with so many heads and so many legs, there were this many heads above and this many legs below. How many birds and beasts were there?

He only needed to fill in the numbers for [number of heads per beast], [number of legs per beast], [number of heads per bird], [number of legs per bird], [total number of heads], and [total number of legs].

As for the answers, those were simply the [number of beasts] and [number of birds] in the formulas.

Simple and clear. It just took a little time.

About the time it took to burn one incense stick later, Lu Mingyuan set down his pen. He decided this approach wouldn't work. It wasted too much time, and there was a chance of duplicating questions. Then he'd have to check them one by one. What a hassle.

So he needed to come up with a better method to optimize the process and cut down on the workload.

To prevent duplicates, he could use the "traversal method," or, in other words, "exhaustive search." That would also let him create more questions and divide their difficulty into finer levels.

For example, suppose the numbers of [heads] and [legs] each beast and bird had, as well as their respective [quantities], were all less than ten. Then he'd have the following combinations.

1*1+1*1=2;1*1+1*1=2;

2*1+1*1=3;1*1+1*1=2;

3*1+1*1=4;1*1+1*1=2;

9*9+9*9=162;9*9+9*9=162;

[The numbers corresponded to the quantities in the formulas above.]

Throughout this process, he also had to ensure that the multipliers in each row—that is, the [number of beasts] and the [number of birds]—were equal to their respective quantities.

Once he'd gone through all the possibilities, there would be tens of millions of combinations.

That was far too many to write out by hand. He couldn't finish them all, so he needed to find another way.

After experimenting, Lu Mingyuan discovered that if he modified his original divine ability a little, he could have it generate calculations directly by spending Qi Luck Points, as long as he had a formula. He could generate hundreds of millions of calculations this way.

That was easy enough.

For Lu Mingyuan now, any problem that could be solved with Qi Luck Points wasn't a problem at all. He was spending fewer Qi Luck Points than he earned, so whenever he could save himself some trouble by spending them, he did. He wasn't short of points.

About the time it took to burn one incense stick later, he had finished generating the numbers under ten. Next came numbers under a hundred.

Of course, he had to exclude combinations where all the numbers were under ten, to avoid duplicates.

Also, "under a hundred" here referred to the [number of beasts] and the [number of birds]. The [number of heads] and [number of legs] were still under ten.

Otherwise, the questions would be too absurd. People would probably curse him out.

After finishing the numbers under a hundred came three-digit, four-digit, and five-digit numbers.

As for even larger numbers, Lu Mingyuan decided to forget it. It was the same as before: he was afraid people would thank him for it.

As the numbers of digits increased, so did the number of results. In the end, the total even exceeded the trillion-trillion range.

There was no way he could use that many. Just looking at the number was enough to make people despair!

No one could finish that many questions even if they worked themselves to death. Lu Mingyuan didn't want to crush everyone's enthusiasm. So he had to pick and choose.

He followed the rules he'd designed, first removing questions that were too easy, then randomly selecting from the remainder. Fortunately, this step could also be handled with a simple modification to the original divine ability.

In the end, Lu Mingyuan picked about a hundred thousand pairs of calculations for each number of digits, then sorted them into broad levels.

That way, in less than a day, Lu Mingyuan had created five hundred thousand questions and divided them into five levels.

He further subdivided each level.

And last of all, he added a few packages of extra questions. He made sure people would be left wanting more.

Although he'd spent another five thousand Qi Luck Points or so, Lu Mingyuan had thoroughly enjoyed himself this time—the joy of being the one who set the questions.

After spending about three days, Lu Mingyuan finally finished everything. Then he put "these added questions and changes to the divine ability" up as an update patch for the original [Chicken-Rabbit Cage Divine Ability] in the divine abilities section of the Heavenly Dao Virtual Network, priced at one Qi Luck Point.

Patches were actually standard practice. Lu Mingyuan wasn't the only one doing it.

Take the Mohist School's [Sword Formation], for instance. Almost every sword they made was a patch. If you wanted a particular sword, you just downloaded that patch. Of course, you still needed the original [Sword Formation], or the patches wouldn't be any use on their own.

You could think of patches as data updates for a single-player game. Without them, you could still play, but you couldn't play the latest version.

Now that he had these patches, Lu Mingyuan's [Chicken-Rabbit Cage Divine Ability] had been strengthened. It could be considered version 2.0. At the same time, he had widened the gap between it and the pirated divine abilities.