479: Chapter 478 The old man couldn't figure out the abacus, the scholar smiled and pointed to the discrepancy in the accounts.

"Snap." The chipped white porcelain wine cup was slammed onto the uneven elm wood tabletop with a touch of unreasonable force.

Zhou Wannian said the words, "Put this on my tab," with full confidence, without even stuttering.

The Old Shopkeeper, sitting at the other end of the long bench, froze mid-air with half a salted peanut held in his fingers, ready to be popped into his mouth upon hearing this. His eyes, etched with countless deep furrows by the passage of time, slowly rolled up from the chipped wine cup to fixate intently on Zhou Wannian's handsome face, which was written over with shamelessness.

A sound like a leaking, broken bellows wheezed from the Old Shopkeeper's throat. He tossed the half-peanut back into the coarse porcelain dish, wiped his hands vigorously on his greasy apron, and pushed himself up from the table.

"Put it on your tab? Your skin is thicker than the defensive bricks at the city gate!" The Old Shopkeeper was so angry his beard bristled and his eyes widened, his thin, withered finger trembling as he pointed at Zhou Wannian.

"The money for the pot of warm wine you bought on credit the winter before last still hasn't been paid back. Last month, you owed another half a string of coins. Today, with the dregs of the old wine and this dish of salted peanuts, you just open your mouth and say 'put it on the tab' as if it's nothing? Do you think my shop is in a mud pit, and my capital was blown in by the wind?"

Zhou Wannian had long since cultivated an impenetrable defense against this daily baptism of spittle.

He didn't even look up at the Old Shopkeeper's flushed, angry face, merely pulling his arm resting on the table slightly inward and settling into a lazier posture against the cold back of his chair. His long, slender fingers gripped the handle of the coarse pottery wine flagon, and he tilted his wrist slightly.

The amber wine flowed from the spout, drawing a crystal-clear thread in the air that landed accurately into the chipped white porcelain cup. Steam, accompanied by the rich scent of caramelized wine lees, swirled upward, casting a hazy white mist over Zhou Wannian's eyes and brows.

"Whether there's one more entry or one less in your ledger won't stop you from snoring at night."

Zhou Wannian stared at the ripples gently swaying in the wine cup, his voice lazy, imbued with the lethargy of one who has eaten and drunk his fill. "At worst, when spring comes next year, I'll go to the back mountain and chop two more loads of firewood to fill up that woodshed in your backyard."

"To hell with your two loads of firewood!" The Old Shopkeeper was clearly infuriated, turning and limping toward the counter, his grumbling and cursing echoing in the dim shop.

"With those thin arms and legs of yours, you'd be panting for half a day just splitting two blocks of wood. If I relied on you for firewood to pay your debts, my old bones would have frozen stiff in bed long ago. I can't rely on you, not even a little bit. You're just a debt-collecting living ancestor; I must have owed you in my past life..."

The Old Shopkeeper grumbled as he walked behind the greasy wooden counter. From a dusty drawer beneath the counter, he groped for the stub of a red candle that had nearly burned to the end. After lighting it with a fire starter, he stuck it onto a small iron dish at the edge of the counter. The dim yellow candlelight flickered, illuminating the Old Shopkeeper's face, which was covered in age spots, and the old, tattered ledger in front of him, its paper yellowed and edges curled.

No one knew how many years this ledger had been flipped through; the original blue cloth on the cover had been worn shiny, and the four corners even revealed the coarse yellow paper used for backing.

The Old Shopkeeper reached into the depths of the drawer again to pull out a bald writing brush, poured a drop of clean water into the inkstone beside him, which had dried to a thin layer of ink skin, and began to grind it slowly. The friction between the ink stick and the inkstone made a rustling sound.

This sound, mixed with the crisp patter of the endless spring rain outside hitting the bluestone slabs and the plop of water dripping from the eaves into puddles in the distance, wove together into a tune without any melody, yet filled with the depth of life.

Zhou Wannian lifted the wine cup and took a light sip. The warm wine slid over the root of his tongue, bringing a hint of slight spiciness followed by a lingering sweetness. He narrowed his eyes, his gaze passing through the dim shop and landing on the thin, withered figure grinding ink behind the counter.

The Old Shopkeeper finished grinding the ink, licked the tip of the bald brush against the edge of the inkstone, and then made a crooked entry in the ledger. After finishing, he put down the brush and gripped the well-worn, glossy abacus on the counter with both hands. Balancing the accounts was the one daily chore this old wine shopkeeper never failed to perform.

"Click-clack... clatter." His withered fingers nimbly flicked the abacus beads. He had performed this set of movements his entire life; he could find the position of every bead with his eyes closed. The crisp sound of wooden beads colliding immediately filled the air of the shop.

Zhou Wannian leaned against the chair back, eyes closed, his fingers tapping on the tabletop in time with the rhythm of the abacus, neither too light nor too heavy. For someone who had carried the Great Perfection Space Law and once had the Absolute Mass of the Universe operating within him, his sensory perception had long since surpassed the limits of a Mortal. He didn't need to look; just by hearing the frequency of the abacus beads colliding and the variations in the pitch of the sounds, he could clearly reconstruct every number the Old Shopkeeper was calculating in his mind.

"The seventh day, Li from the street corner bought two taels of salt, paid three wen..." The Old Shopkeeper mumbled the text from the accounts indistinctly as he worked the abacus. His voice was somewhat hoarse, like a leaky, broken gong.

"Old Zhang from the east of the city brought half a basket of rotten sweet potatoes to trade for half a jar of cloudy wine. I counted the sweet potatoes as five wen, and the cost of the cloudy wine is six wen... That Old Zhang, he hasn't paid off the two wen he owed last time."

The abacus beads were pushed up and down, making a hurried and trivial sound. The Old Shopkeeper's brow gradually tightened. His few sparse white eyebrows twisted together like two knotted blades of withered grass. His hand movements slowed down. "Click... clack." The sound of the beads colliding was no longer fluid, but instead revealed a sense of stagnation.

"Not right, not right, how can this not match?" The Old Shopkeeper stopped his fingers and pushed the abacus upward with force. The entire row of beads clattered back to the bottom with a loud rattle. He picked up the bald brush and tapped the shaft against the yellowed pages of the ledger.

"This account brought in thirteen wen, sold three catties of sorghum liquor which cost eight wen, and added two wen worth of coarse salt. No matter how you calculate it, there should be a balance of three wen left. But..." The Old Shopkeeper put down the brush and pulled open the drawer used for storing money under the counter. A dull clinking sound came from inside as a few copper coins collided. "But there are only two large coins left in this drawer in total. Where did that one wen go?"

Just for the sake of that one wen discrepancy, the Old Shopkeeper became anxious. He cleared the abacus again, widened his dim, aged eyes, leaned closer to the flickering candlelight, and almost pressed his nose against the moldy ledger, checking the accounts again word by word.

"Zhao Si from the west of the city, owes three wen for wine. Wang Mazi, traded an iron knife to settle the account..." The sound of the abacus rang out again; this time, the sound became heavy, carrying a stubborn refusal to admit defeat. After finishing once, the Old Shopkeeper looked at the numbers on the abacus, then glanced at the copper coins in the drawer. His face, already full of wrinkles, was now scrunched up like a bitter melon. Still one wen short.

This was actually a hopelessly messy account. The income and expenses in this wine shop had never been clear. Some neighbors brought vegetables grown in their own plots to trade for wine, while others brought small dried fish caught in the river to settle their debts. The prices of these things were high today and low tomorrow, all depending on the Old Shopkeeper's estimation. What was recorded in the ledger was also haphazard, sometimes using copper coins for counting, sometimes drawing a circle to represent a string of cash, and sometimes even drawing an unintelligible symbol to represent that a family owed a piglet. This kind of account would give even an immortal a headache.

But the Old Shopkeeper refused to believe it. For this old man of the streets who treated his shop like his lifeline and valued copper coins more than the heavens, being one wen short was like having a piece of flesh cut alive from his heart. Even if it was pouring rain outside today, and even if there wasn't a ghost of a shadow in the shop, he still had to find out where that one wen went.

"Clatter." The abacus was pushed flat again. The Old Shopkeeper irritably grabbed at his head. His already sparse white hair was pulled into a mess, like an emptied bird's nest perched on his head. "Strange. Could it be that stray calico cat ran in yesterday and snatched the copper coin to use as a toy?" He grumbled and cursed, bent over, and began searching in the dark corner under the counter. He moved aside a few empty wine jars and patted at the dust on the floor. After searching for a long time, he found nothing but a handful of dust and a few mouse droppings.

The Old Shopkeeper stood up straight, panting heavily, his hands supporting the edge of the counter, his chest heaving violently. He picked up the ledger and turned to the previous page. "Was the account not recorded clearly the day before yesterday?" He began to backtrack. Calculating one entry after another, checking one by one. The sound of the abacus rang and stopped, stopped and rang again in the wine shop. A layer of fine sweat even broke out on the Old Shopkeeper's forehead. In this cold, rainy early spring weather, he had been forced into a sweat of anxiety.

He began to scratch his ears and cheeks, his left hand tugging at his beard, his right hand flicking the abacus fiercely, with such force that several times the beads jumped out of the wooden frame's tracks. "Not right! Still not right! Butcher Zhang's pig offal traded for five wen that day, but I spent two wen on firewood, this coming and going..." The old man's voice carried a trembling note of exasperation.

Zhou Wannian sat on the long bench by the window, holding a freshly peeled salted peanut in his hand. His gaze was as calm as water, watching the thin, withered old man behind the counter who was spinning in circles, even starting to pull out his own hair, over a mere one-wen discrepancy. The wind outside the window, carrying cold rain, blew in, stirring the hair at Zhou Wannian's temples.

His thoughts, following this cold wind, inadvertently drifted away for a moment. Crossing that endless dimensional barrier, penetrating that thick, dead sea of stars. In Zhou Wannian's mind, there emerged the depths of the Taiwu Ancestral Court, that vast, cold Absolute Truth Realm constructed from countless glowing geometric matrices.

In the center of that dead, silent steel jungle, there had once existed a creation called Li Changge. Li Changge. That being, who was once human, later, in pursuit of the ultimate truth of the Universe, had Fused his own Divine Soul with machinery, becoming a super-mainbrain capable of calculating the operating constants of the entire multidimensional Universe.

Zhou Wannian remembered very clearly. That half-human, half-mechanical monster possessed a quantum brain capable of processing billions of trillions of data points in a single breath, and deducing the birth and death processes of tens of millions of galaxies. It used the most precise mathematical models to measure the Universe, and cold, icy rules to obliterate all variables.

In Li Changge's calculations, not even a deviation of a tiny particle could be tolerated. It viewed life as a pathogen of the Universe's entropy increase, and regarded all emotions and impulses as trash that interfered with its calculations. It had calculated the exhaustion of the galaxies, calculated the collapse of the Law, and even calculated the fate of the Universe to nurture Zhou Wannian, this singularity seed, for its own salvation.

That was a perfect, impeccable Peak of computing power. That was the Universe's greatest masterpiece, created after pursuing extreme rationality and discarding all sensibility. But. What was the result?

That super-mainbrain capable of calculating the fate of the Universe, when faced with a yawn Zhou Wannian threw out casually, and the trace of unreasonable Absolute Mass frenzy he released. Its computing matrix instantly overloaded. Those formulas it thought were perfect were torn to shreds, and those glowing modules representing the Absolute Truth, amidst a piercing sound of alarms, burst one after another.

Li Changge had calculated the macroscopic fate clearly, but could not calculate the burning sensation when a mouthful of hot wine was swallowed down the throat, could not calculate the shamelessness and casualness contained in that yawning action. It died. It died in that cold underground, turning into a pile of rusted scrap iron, not even leaving a trace of the warmth that would prove it had existed. That was high-and-mighty calculation, a dead end after stripping away the smoke and fire of life.

Thoughts returned. Zhou Wannian blinked his eyes, his gaze refocusing on the dim, damp shop in front of him, which exuded the smell of wine lees. He watched the Old Shopkeeper, who was pushing the abacus with a clattering noise and cursing under his breath because he had miscalculated the accounts. The Old Shopkeeper couldn't even calculate the income and expenditure of a single wen.

His head, filled with oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, and neighborhood gossip, could not deduce the trajectory of a meteor, nor could it understand what the collapse of a dimension was. The greatest calculation of his life was merely how to add two extra scoops of water when selling wine without being discovered by customers, and how to buy three wen worth of vegetables for two wen. This was a clumsy, rough, and even somewhat laughable calculation. But, the Old Shopkeeper was alive.

He lived in this market town full of mud and stagnant water, getting sweaty over a one-penny mistake, and worrying when there was no business on a spring day. His ledger was full of smudges and ink blots, and his abacus beads were covered in grease.

But beneath that grease, there was genuine vitality pulsing.

"Clatter! Clang!"

The Old Shopkeeper completely broke down.

He grabbed both sides of the abacus and shook it violently. The beads collided chaotically in the wooden frame, making a mess of noise.

He threw the abacus on the counter and his body collapsed like a deflated ball onto the old rattan chair cushioned with old bricks.

"I'm done. I can't figure this out. In this world, even a single penny bullies an old man like me, acting like I'm blind."

The Old Shopkeeper covered his face, his rough palms rubbing his withered cheeks, his voice filled with deep exhaustion and frustration.

"If this one penny doesn't match up, I won't be able to close my eyes tonight. How many bowls of cheap wine do I have to sell to earn back this one penny? Heaven is blind, just picking on a poor man like me..."

Zhou Wannian's fingers, holding a peanut, stopped.

He looked at the Old Shopkeeper's devastated expression, the corners of his mouth pulling up into a slightly helpless arc.

He knew.

If the accounts didn't match today, this stubborn old man would sit behind this chilly counter all night, flipping that broken ledger until it fell apart.

Zhou Wannian shook his head.

He didn't use any Divine Ability.

He didn't need to release the Absolute Mass capable of crushing the starry sky, nor did he need to operate any immortal Dharma Eye that could see through all illusions.

His brain was originally the most unreasonable container in this Universe. To use a Divine Soul capable of bearing that unlimited Absolute Mass to process a crappy ledger of a dozen pages was ten thousand times more exaggerated than using a butcher's knife to slaughter a chicken.

Just now, while the old man was flipping through the ledger and mumbling about expenses and income, those numbers, the circled and crossed-out symbols, the vague village slang, had all followed the sound and been engraved into Zhou Wannian's mind without missing a word.

In the blink of an eye, these chaotic accounts automatically arranged themselves in Zhou Wannian's mind, revealing a clear thread. Income, expenses, credit, mortgages. The ins and outs of every penny were as clear as pebbles at the bottom of a clear stream.

Zhou Wannian tossed the half-peanut into his mouth.

"Crunch," he bit through the crisp peanut skin.

He picked up the coarse pottery wine pot on the table and slowly refilled his chipped wine cup. The sound of the liquid flowing was exceptionally clear in the quiet shop.

"Old man."

Zhou Wannian put down the wine pot, leaned forward, his arms resting on the uneven tabletop.

His voice was plain, not raised, as casual as chatting about what was for dinner tonight.

"Stop wailing there. At your age, that mournful face is unsightly."

The Old Shopkeeper was already annoyed. Hearing this, he suddenly lifted his head, his dim old eyes glaring fiercely.

"Stop talking nonsense here! What does a freeloader like you know! You can't even count the beads on this abacus, yet you dare to mock me!"

The Old Shopkeeper grabbed the greasy rag, making a move to throw it at Zhou Wannian.

"Let me see that ledger."

Zhou Wannian ignored the old man's flailing and continued in that slow tone.

"Flip back two pages. The fourth day. Late afternoon."

The rag in the Old Shopkeeper's hand stopped in mid-air. He paused, a flash of suspicion in his eyes, but still half-believing, he turned his head to look at the open ledger on the counter.

"The fourth? What about the fourth?"

The Old Shopkeeper muttered, extending his withered fingers to flip past the ink-stained pages, finding the record for the fourth. It was a page covered in dense, fly-head-sized characters and a few black blobs—a messy account.

"Look at the line in the middle."

Zhou Wannian picked up the chipped wine cup, swirled it under his nose, smelling the rising aroma of the wine.

"Late afternoon on the fourth, Butcher Zhang from the alley entrance brought a set of unwashed pig intestines, saying he wanted to use them to pay off the wine debt he owed. You originally said those innards were worth five pennies, but Butcher Zhang wouldn't have it, insisting they were worth six. You two argued at the shop entrance for half an hour, right?"

The Old Shopkeeper blinked.

He recalled that there was indeed such an incident on the afternoon of the fourth. That guy Butcher Zhang had a pair of bull eyes, his voice like thunder when he roared, and to get one more penny of credit, he nearly smashed the counter to pieces.

"Yes, that happened," the Old Shopkeeper replied grumpily.

"And then what? Later, I got a headache from his noise, and the innards smelled too strong, so I accepted my bad luck and settled the debt at six pennies. I remember this account!"

"You do remember."

Zhou Wannian took a sip of warm wine, a smile on his lips.

"But when you were recording the account, your hand was shaking with anger. You crossed out the six pennies Butcher Zhang owed, counting it as a balanced account."

"And then?"

The Old Shopkeeper widened his eyes, not seeing a problem.

"Then," Zhou Wannian drew a circle on the elm tabletop with his finger. "When you turned to record the warehouse accounts, you recorded that set of pig intestines as purchased miscellaneous goods. When estimating the price, your mind was still angry at Butcher Zhang, so you just recorded it as five pennies in the income column, sticking to what you originally insisted."

The Old Shopkeeper froze.

He stiffly lowered his head, eyes locked on the record in the ledger marked with a pig head symbol.

The candle flame flickered.

"Expense: Balanced Butcher Zhang's wine debt, six pennies."

Two lines down.

"Income: Received one set of offal, valued at five pennies."

The Old Shopkeeper's breathing suddenly became rapid.

His mind, which had spent a lifetime rolling in copper coins, instantly made the connection. Balancing the account wiped out the six-penny debt, meaning the wine shop recovered six pennies of value. But when entering the pig intestines into the warehouse as income, it was only recorded as five pennies of value.

Back and forth.

In between, a one-penny difference was created!

This wasn't a missing penny from the drawer; it was him being so angry that he recorded the same transaction as two different numbers in the ledger, creating a one-penny hole out of thin air!

The wine shop suddenly fell silent.

Only the rustling sound of the fine spring rain outside hitting the bluestone slabs remained.

The Old Shopkeeper stood behind the counter, the hand holding the dirty rag slowly lowering. On his wrinkled face, the expression went from doubt, to shock, to sudden realization.

Various emotions intertwined, making his old face look quite spectacular.

He looked down at the ledger, then up at Zhou Wannian, who was sitting by the window in the distance, slowly peeling salted peanuts.

"This..."

The Old Shopkeeper opened his mouth, his withered lips trembling twice, but he didn't squeeze out a word for a long time.

He couldn't understand it no matter what.

This poor scholar who only knew how to sit in the shop to hide from the rain all day, who even had to buy wine on credit, was a full two zhang away from the counter. The words in that ledger, even he himself needed reading glasses to see clearly when he was close.

How did this kid see this messy account so clearly from so far away? Moreover, that was an account from a few days ago, this scholar wasn't even in the shop, how did he know the price details of his argument with Butcher Zhang that day so clearly? Could this sour scholar have grown a pair of clairvoyant eyes and all-hearing ears?

The Old Shopkeeper muttered in his heart. But his stubborn nature made him absolutely refuse to admit in front of a junior who owed him wine money that he was blind and miscalculated the accounts.

"Ahem..."

The Old Shopkeeper coughed twice to cover his embarrassment.

He picked up the bald brush, dipped it heavily into a large lump of ink in the inkstone. Then, next to "valued at five pennies," he heavily drew a cross, with such force that it almost poked through the yellowing paper.

He crookedly added a "six pennies" next to it.

After changing it, the Old Shopkeeper picked up the abacus again, his fingers flying as he re-calculated the accounts.

"Clatter-clatter—"

This time, the abacus sound was incredibly smooth, without any sluggish pauses.

Pushing the last bead, the Old Shopkeeper looked at the final balance shown on the abacus, then pulled open the drawer to look at the two lonely copper coins inside.

The numbers matched. Not a single bit off.

The foul air that had been stuck in his chest, making him restless, instantly vanished with the crisp sound of the abacus beads.

The Old Shopkeeper breathed out a long sigh of relief, his whole body seeming to have had its bones removed, collapsing softly into the old rattan chair behind the counter.

He reached out to wipe the fine sweat from his forehead and glanced at Zhou Wannian.

Zhou Wannian was still sitting at that uneven table, holding the wine cup, his expression calm, as if the error he just pointed out, which had troubled the Old Shopkeeper all night, was as insignificant as casually saying "The rain is quite heavy today."

The Old Shopkeeper shifted awkwardly, the rattan chair creaking.

He couldn't bring himself to praise him loudly, so he just turned his head to the side, looking at the wine jars piled in the corner, his mouth moving.

"Blind cat meets a dead mouse..."

The Old Shopkeeper lowered his voice, as if talking to himself.

"Who knows which day he was hiding at the wall base eavesdropping, pretending to be some living immortal here. I've been keeping this ledger for thirty years, occasionally taking a nap and miscalculating an entry is only natural. Do I need a sour scholar like you to meddle?"

While muttering, his hands weren't idle. The Old Shopkeeper pulled open another drawer under the counter and took out a small paper package. Opening it, inside were a few pieces of maltose that had become damp and soft. This was what he kept for his own life-saving when he got dizzy from low blood sugar.

He picked out a slightly harder one, held it in his hand, hesitated. Then he took another one.

The Old Shopkeeper stood up, clutching the two pieces of maltose, and shuffled over to Zhou Wannian's table.

"Slap."

He patted the two pieces of maltose onto the uneven tabletop in front of Zhou Wannian.

"Eating peanuts alone is too salty, eat some candy to cushion it."

The Old Shopkeeper still kept that sour face, his tone stiff, his eyes wandering everywhere but looking at Zhou Wannian.

"Don't think that just because you pointed out the mistake in the ledger, that half-a-string-of-cash debt can be written off. What needs to be paid still needs to be paid, not a single penny less!"

After speaking, as if afraid that Zhou Wannian would go back on his word or mock him, he turned sharply and hurriedly limped back behind the counter, sitting down again. He picked up the rag and started fiercely wiping the abacus that had already been polished shiny. While wiping, he was still whispering.

"This sour scholar, his head is actually quite bright. If he went to take an exam to be an accountant, he wouldn't end up unable to afford a meal of wine..."

Zhou Wannian looked at the two pieces of damp, soft maltose on the tabletop, stained with a little paper scrap.

He stretched out his slender fingers, picked up one, tore off the remaining bit of candy wrapper, and put it in his mouth.

The maltose was sticky, with a rich, cloying sweetness, and a hint of slight sourness caused by the dampness.

It didn't taste very good; compared to the immortal fruits condensed from pure Law in the Taiwu Ancestral Court, this was simply a mud ball.

But Zhou Wannian chewed it very seriously.

The sweetness spread on the tip of his tongue, diluting the spiciness of the yellow wine and the saltiness of the peanuts.

He picked up the chipped white porcelain wine cup, facing the cold wind blowing from outside the door carrying the smell of rain, and raised his cup to the awkward old man behind the counter from afar.

"Good account."

Zhou Wannian swallowed the maltose and softly uttered two words.

This wasn't about the Old Shopkeeper's ability to calculate.

He was saying that this messy, worldly account, mixed with philistinism, arguments, confusion, and a touch of stubbornness and soft-heartedness... was calculated truly well.

This was the real living account, the living pulse that had begun to beat again after this world had experienced those cold and rigid Universe fates.

Zhou Wannian tilted his head back and drank the remaining warm wine in the cup, along with all the trivialities of the Mortal world, into his throat.

Outside the door, the fine spring rain was still falling.

The rain hit the blue tiles, making a rustling sound, as if accompanying a long, endless market ditty for this dilapidated wine shop that had regained its vitality.