Many years ago, a scene had unfolded in a pavilion on Chessboard Mountain in Chaoge City.
Hundreds of black and white stones had hung suspended in the air, forming a complex structure before the eyes of He Zhan, Que Niang, and countless Daoist cultivators.
Such a scene was often described with one phrase-scattered like stars, arrayed like stones.
The stones back then had looked like stars.
The stars now looked like stones.
In fact, compared with a game of Go, an activity Jing Jiu knew better was more suited to describing this problem-the Sand-Piling Game.
From Small Mountain Village to the Green Mountain Sect, he had often slept in a bamboo chair. That porcelain plate would appear beside it from time to time, and every so often he would place a grain of sand inside, until it finally became a picturesque landscape of mountains and rivers. Could he apply this method to these stars?
Jing Jiu had told Tong Yan that even he could not calculate every variation in this game of Go, let alone in this expanse of stars.
He had also told Tong Yan that cultivators pursued the impossible, but could impossible things truly be accomplished?
This expanse of stars was, of course, countless times more complex than the structure formed by those black and white stones, or the grains of sand in the porcelain plate.
The region of human activity alone already contained at least tens of thousands of stars. If the scope expanded to the entire Local Group, how complex would this game become?
Supercomputers really were of little help in solving this problem. As Zeng Ju had said, the final judgment might still come down to an intuitive judgment bordering on mysticism.
Could Tong Yan really have been right?
That could wait until he managed