The Divine Sequence

"Today is the final lesson I will give you, and also the last one before I retire. Once this class concludes, I shall officially step down..." As the second Natural History Class began, the teacher's opening words plunged the entire classroom into absolute silence. Even Zhang Tie had not expected this to be the teacher's final lecture. Since entering the Seventh Middle School, he had grown accustomed to this silver-haired old man arriving quietly to teach and leaving quietly when the bell rang. He had never imagined that one day, this old man would stand on the podium to bid them farewell. Once the words were spoken, even the students who had been burying their heads to catch up on sleep seemed to wake up, staring at the old man in stunned silence. A sense of reluctance began to take hold.

"Teacher, are you really leaving..." a student in the front row voiced what everyone was feeling.

"I am old enough, and I have served Black Flame City for long enough. It is time to retire!" The old man on the podium smiled kindly. "I know what you are all worried about. As long as the walls of Black Flame City are not breached by alien races, my pension should be enough for me to enjoy my twilight years in peace. But for the walls of Black Flame City to remain forever sturdy, that depends on you, not me. So, whether my future retirement is a comfortable one is entirely up to you! Because of this, for today's final Natural History Class, I will use the experiences and insights of my entire life to talk to you about the question you care about most: what is the path of a powerhouse capable of protecting the human race?"

The old man's final sentence jolted everyone to attention. They all straightened their backs, their eyes burning as they looked at this old man who had suddenly become so respectable and difficult to part with.

The old man said nothing more. Instead, he pulled a small, ordinary snail shell and two pinecones from his pocket and passed them down from the front row for everyone to examine. In one minute, the two mundane objects were passed through every hand in the room. There was nothing special about them. Zhang Tie held the items, turning them over in his hands for several seconds, but he couldn't make heads or tails of them.

"Did anyone discover anything special about this snail shell and these two pinecones?" the old man asked.

Everyone shook their heads.

"Do you know that the mystery of a human powerhouse's advancement is hidden within these ordinary things? You all know that a person can continuously improve their strength by igniting the Divine Palace Bright Point in their body, but what is the standard for classifying the strength of human Battle Soldier? Why are some people level five, some level six, some level seven, some level ten, or even higher? Who set the ranks and levels for our human Battle Soldier? Was it some big shot at the Warrior Guild who just pulled the idea out of thin air?"

Zhang Tie was stunned. Previously, he had truly believed these standards were set by those big shots. Weren't they?

"Of course not. In this world, who could possibly have the authority to set such standards that millions of humans and countless powerhouses would obediently follow?"

"Teacher, then who set these standards?"

"The one who set these standards is not a human, but God, or rather, the great laws of the universe!"

The herd of students in the classroom erupted into an uproar, discussing the matter fervently.

"This standard was not created specifically for the human race, but by the laws of the universe for everything within it. The snail shell and pinecones I just passed around also contain these standards; you simply didn't notice them!" After saying this from the podium, the old man turned and used chalk to draw two patterns on the blackboard: one was a spiral curve resembling a snail shell, and the other was a set of intersecting lines similar to a pinecone.

After finishing, the old man turned back around. "How many Bright Points must a first-rank Battle Soldier ignite?"

"One, just ignite the Divine Palace Bright Point..." everyone answered. The old man then drew a square at the center of the snail shell's curve, letting the spiral curve pass through the two opposite corners of that square from its starting point...

"What about the second rank?"

"Still one, just ignite the coccyx Bright Point of the spine..."

The old man expanded the diagram again, drawing a square of the same length.

"What about the third rank?"

"Ignite two spinal Bright Points!"

This time, he increased the side length of the square wrapped by the curve to twice the original size.

"What about the fourth rank?"

"Three!"

"Fifth rank?"

"Five."

"Sixth rank?"

"Eight..."

As the old man asked each question, the spiral curve on the blackboard was wrapped by squares whose side lengths increased in the same proportion. By the time he reached the tenth rank, no one in the class could answer. The world of Battle Soldier above the tenth rank was already beyond the limits of what the students could look up to; for them, that world was as unreachable as the Great Cataclysm...

The Natural History Class teacher did not mock them. Instead, he wrote the sequence of numbers they had just provided on the blackboard—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34... He then wrote the corresponding levels and ranks beneath the numbers, starting from the first 1 corresponding to level one, all the way to 34 corresponding to level nine. Finally, he turned back to look at them with piercing eyes. "Have you not discovered a pattern in these numbers representing the ignited Bright Points?"

After staring at the row of numbers intently for a while, someone finally had a flash of insight. "Teacher, each number in this sequence is the sum of the two preceding it!"

"Anything else?"

Zhang Tie looked at the sequence, feeling as if something was about to surge forth in his mind, but he couldn't quite grasp it.

"Calculate the quotient of two adjacent numbers in this sequence and see what the pattern is."

The students, all possessing a certain foundation in mathematics, buried their heads at their desks and began calculating. The first quotient was 1, the second was 0.5, the third was a repeating decimal of 0.66666, the fourth was 0.6, the fifth was 0.625, the sixth was 0.61538..., the seventh was 0.619047..., and the eighth was 0.617647...

"Have you noticed that these values are infinitely approaching the golden number 0.618..." The old man revealed the answer. Everyone was enlightened; indeed, why would it be like this?

"The Divine Palace Bright Point is 1, and the human spine has 34 vertebrae. When you start from the Divine Palace and ignite all the Bright Points along the spine, that is the mark of becoming a level 9 Battle Soldier. Each leap in rank has strict standards. Knowing this pattern, calculate how many Bright Points are needed to become a tenth-rank Battle Soldier? Is it 55? And after that, 89? The further you go, the more terrifying the calculated number becomes; it increases geometrically. This is why the disparity in strength becomes greater the higher the rank. And this sequence..." The old man turned back and pointed to the numbers on the blackboard, "is called the Fibonacci Sequence. It is a golden sequence discovered by human mathematicians hundreds of years before the Great Cataclysm, containing countless mysteries. It holds the laws of the universe and creation. Look at the spirals on those two pinecones. Count them. Isn't it true that the smaller pinecone has five rows on the left and eight on the right, while the larger one has eight on the left and thirteen on the right? 5, 8, 13—are these three numbers not within the Fibonacci Sequence? As for the snail shell curve you saw earlier, I drew it on the blackboard. You only need to look at the squares on this snail shell curve to understand the relationship between this curve and the sequence. This curve is called the Fibonacci Curve, also known as the Golden Curve; it is the geometric representation of this sequence. This golden sequence and golden curve can be found in almost every living thing. If you observe nature and the things around you, you will make even more discoveries. You can observe the flower head of a sunflower; it also contains two sets of spirals: 34 and 55, 55 and 89, or 89 and 144. You will find the same in roses, thistles, and other plants. After the Great Cataclysm, humans discovered the mysteries of human cultivation from ruins unearthed from the underground world. The path of human advancement and cultivation is progressing precisely along this golden curve and sequence rule drawn by the Creator. All living things are moving along this curve. This curve and sequence are the embodiment of the laws of the universe, which is why the Battle Soldier ranks divided by this curve and sequence can gain the unanimous recognition of all humans and all powerhouses..."

All the students felt as if their horizons had been broadened and everything had suddenly become clear, Zhang Tie included. Previously, he only understood that to advance, one had to continuously ignite the Bright Points in their body, and that each rank required a different number of Bright Points, but he had never thought carefully about why. It turned out that the secret to all of this was hidden within the cosmic laws contained in that golden spiral and that sequence.

"Teacher, what is the highest level of cultivation rank after level ten?" Baghdad raised his hand and asked a question.

"To this day, no one has been able to answer that question, because cultivation after level ten is the greatest secret everywhere. Knowledge beyond level ten is the most guarded of secret transmissions. A greater reason is that the golden sequence has no end; it is merely approaching, constantly approaching that 0.618 which represents the most perfect law of God and the universe. It has been less than 900 years since humans returned to the path of cultivation, stepped onto that golden spiral, and began to re-excavate the treasure that is their own body, while the evolution of the universe may have spanned tens of billions of years. On the journey along that golden spiral, humanity has only just taken its first steps. Before the Great Cataclysm, humans were always blind and arrogant, considering themselves the masters of the universe and all things. After the Great Cataclysm, humans finally understood that the so-called human race is merely an insignificant member among the countless races of the universe and the Kun'ang Continent. It is even very likely that for a long period before the Great Cataclysm, human bodies and the level of civilization were not evolving, but regressing. When humanity had nowhere left to retreat, the Great Cataclysm and the Star of God arrived, and everything was rewritten. In order to survive, humans discovered the mystery of the body's Bright Points and began the path of evolution anew. The Black Iron Era is the final conclusion, and also a brand-new beginning..."

In this final Natural History Class, the teacher opened a window for everyone that they had never imagined, one through which they could see a much broader world. At the end of the lesson, everyone was manually calculating where that golden sequence would lead—

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597...

When he pushed this golden sequence to the seventeenth position, Zhang Tie was dumbfounded. He looked at the last seven numbers with disbelief. Could this be the world beyond level ten...