Hypatia was very interested in the arrangement of aristocratic rooms. While waiting in the great hall, she picked up a tea bowl and took a sip. The initially bitter taste didn’t please her, but the tea’s returning sweetness brought her some delight.

Holding the tea bowl, she wandered around the hall. That enormous painting of a fierce tiger climbing a mountain in the central hall was most eye-catching. This was painted by Master Lishi to celebrate Yun Ye’s safe return, hoping he would walk an upward path in the future.

Actually, Yun Ye didn’t like ascending tigers—with their bulging bellies, they had no fierce momentum at all. Better were descending tigers, hungry bellies searching for food everywhere, eyes gleaming fiercely, ready to devour people—the bearing of a king of beasts.

Not painting it as a cat was already good—these were Lishi’s original words. With his mushy temperament, holding something in hand and kneading it a few times, it would look like a pig one moment, a dog the next, and sometimes even like a venomous snake. In the end, he’d always knead out a smiling nondescript creature. To paint tigers well, Lishi had actually run to the mountains and caught several tigers. The large tigers were too wild to tame, so he made them into tiger-skin rugs. The two small tigers were now kept at home as pets for his children.

The Eastern realist painting style earned Hypatia’s great admiration. In present-day Egypt, there were still occasionally several man-versus-beast battles. To make money, slave traders had refined this ancient art form, turning it into women fighting beasts. Whoever had unwanted female slaves, or women caught in adultery, would be sent in, deliberately dressed in female armor, holding swords. As long as they killed the lion in the arena, they could survive and would even receive a large sum of money.

Slave traders were all very trustworthy people. If they said they’d pay, they’d pay—absolutely no defaulting. However, no one had ever collected this money. Instead, the lions would leisurely spit out bones from their mouths, burp contentedly, and continue waiting for the next warrior to arrive…

If Hypatia hadn’t come to the East, she would very likely have needed to fight lions. So now seeing the majestic tiger, she always had a feeling of narrow escape from death.

The writing brush on Yun Ye’s desk was her great enemy. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t write beautiful square characters. So Hypatia’s quill pen became her only writing method. However, Yun Ye’s brush holder also contained several wooden sticks sharpened very sharp. She picked one up and wrote a few strokes on the spread raw rice paper—not good to use, very easy to puncture the paper. Shaking her head, she put it back down.

The books on the bookshelf weren’t of much use to her. Full of difficult and strange characters—not something Hypatia, who could only converse fluently, could understand. So she forcibly resisted looking at them.

“Some books you can still understand, just as I can understand your founding master’s manuscripts. Mathematics has very strong patterns. More than anything, it tests our logical thinking ability, not character recognition ability. Give you a cutting diagram, and I believe you can deduce the answer and patterns yourself. When you get to the academy, the library has many books you can read. No rush now. However, this set of ‘Elementary Arithmetic’ was written by me. You can take it to look over, get a preliminary understanding of the academy students’ level, to facilitate your teaching.”

Yun Ye walked to the bookshelf, took down two books and handed them to Hypatia. Immediately a maidservant brought Hypatia a leather bag and carefully placed the books inside. Hypatia was no longer unfamiliar with Eastern paper. Books made from lambskin and calfskin were heavy and foul-smelling, unlike the books here that emitted a rich ink fragrance. Hypatia could never smell enough of this scent.

Seeing Hypatia affectionately sniffing the books’ scent, Yun Ye decided not to tell her that the academy, to control the ink’s acidity and alkalinity, deliberately added some horse urine to it.

Wang Cai dragged the light carriage to the front courtyard by himself. The groom’s work was easy—just harness Wang Cai to the cart and he knew what to do himself. Seeing Yun Ye come out, he pawed his hooves, gave a low whinny, nudged him twice, meaning he had already waited impatiently and wanted to run wild on the small road.

Seeing her husband invite Hypatia onto the carriage, Xinyue felt uncomfortable all over. Especially when the barbarian woman lifted her leg to board the cart, her round bottom became even more voluptuous, raising deep worry in Xinyue’s heart.

The scenery on the stone-paved path made the young female scholar marvel endlessly. She kept lifting those soft willow branches, greatly anticipating the academy she was about to see. Her attendants had already been taken by the Yun family’s steward to her residence. Only one small girl remained at her side.

Rounding the mountain foot, a huge valley appeared before them. White waterfalls roared, a waterwheel stubbornly rotated. The paddle wheel kept turning under the water’s impact. On the huge rotating frame, countless bamboo tubes continuously sent clear water to a high wooden trough. The trough meandered, extending all the way to those beautiful buildings in the distance.

Women never had any resistance to beautiful things. Seeing the villas with green tiles and red walls, she grabbed Yun Ye’s arm and asked, “Generous Marquis, can I also live in those beautiful buildings? If you can satisfy my wish, I can give you a chance to pursue me.”

“Go trick a ghost! Hypatia would marry? And give me a chance to pursue you? Even if I pursued you until I was eighty, the chance would still just be a chance. From how you’re grabbing my sleeve, you don’t have even the slightest favorable impression of men. Even an excellent man like me, you’re barely tolerating. Other men probably wouldn’t get a second glance from you until they died. But rest assured, your residence is in Building Nineteen, three stories up and down. Inside there’s a washroom, water flows to your rooftop by itself, very convenient to use. If you don’t want to cook yourself—forget it, your meals aren’t fit for human consumption. Like pig slop. Eating too many beans makes you fart. You’d better eat at the academy dining hall. Experience Chinese cuisine—not bad at all.”

“Nonsense! Have you seen Egyptian delicacies? Cooked apples, cream soup, roasted lamb, fried kale—which one isn’t delicious? Great Tang’s food isn’t necessarily tasty either—just extravagantly throwing in spices.”

“What you ate was the food of Great Tang’s poorest commoners. Having a chicken leg to gnaw on counts as New Year celebration. Poor scholar, you haven’t eaten lunch yet, right? I’ll treat you to the most ordinary academy lunch. Be careful not to eat your tongue along with it.”

Hypatia was only twenty-three this year. She’d always been well-protected by her attendants, never suffered much hardship, and still maintained a young girl’s innocent and playful nature. Hearing Yun Ye say this, longing still unconsciously showed in her eyes.

Hypatia marveled endlessly at the academy’s magnificence, constantly saying only the Athenian temple could compare with it. This gave Yun Ye deeper recognition of this woman’s character flaws—namely stubbornness and refusing to admit mistakes even unto death.

“Besides a few broken pillars and some broken statues, what does the Athenian temple have? At most you can mention sturdiness—it’s always been used as a treasury. You compare it to my academy—you’re insulting me. Besides, the Athenian temple isn’t even Egyptian. Stop using it to pad your numbers.”

“You’re very familiar with us. Why have I never known of your existence?”

“I’m a marquis of Great Tang, commander of a fleet, creator of the world’s greatest academy. Knowing those trivial matters about you is appropriate. You’re just a little girl shut up in a room. Not knowing is natural.”

Hypatia became furious. Her mouth began jabbering in her native language again, some crystalline saliva even spraying on Yun Ye’s face. Yun Ye raised his sleeve to block. After she finally calmed down, he discovered Wang Cai had already pulled them to the academy’s main gate.

“Wang Cai, this is the main gate. We need to go in and out through the side gate. How did you forget?” Yun Ye slapped Wang Cai’s bottom. The extremely unwilling Wang Cai had no choice but to continue toward the side gate.

“Last night I learned some etiquette from Yao Niang. Only honored guests can walk through the main gate. Am I not noble enough? Why can’t I, as a professor, walk through the main gate? This is discrimination, disrespect for Western scholarship! Stop! We’re going in through the main gate.”

Yun Ye sighed and had to let Wang Cai stop. Otherwise this stubborn woman would jump off the carriage. If she wanted to seek suffering, let her.

Yun Ye sat in the shed in front of the main gate waiting for Hypatia to come out. This wouldn’t take much time—the time it takes to drink a cup of tea would be enough.

Sure enough, scratching her head in frustration, Hypatia entered from the right and came out from the left. Returning before Yun Ye, she said angrily, “Who put a labyrinth at the main gate? Is there a man-eating Minotaur inside?”

“The bastard you’re talking about is me. This thing is the product of two people making a bet. Right now the labyrinth is static. I haven’t had them activate the mechanisms, otherwise you’d already be a corpse by now, dragged out by servants and buried under the flower trees.” Yun Ye shamelessly mocked Hypatia. This woman always had a high-and-mighty air. If she couldn’t learn humility, how could she enter the academy as a teacher? You must know that Master Li Gang, Yushan, Yuanzhang, Lishi, Jinzhu—which of these teachers wasn’t a grandmaster? Working with a woman, she must have a nearly perfect character.

“Has anyone walked through? I mean without any prior knowledge.”

Yun Ye pointed at his own nose. “This humble one did it—the time of one incense stick. You’d better forget it. I don’t plan to have you sleep outside. That would be immoral for a lady.”

“Why can you walk through but I can’t? Here are just some simple geometric changes. If they don’t move, I’ll always find the correct path. Just now I already found some clues. Give me some time and I’ll definitely walk in through the main gate myself. Oh right, if I walk in, what kind of reception will there be?”

“The academy’s great bell will ring twelve times. All the academy’s teachers and students will come congratulate the birth of a new awesome person. If you want, this is the fastest way for you to break into the academy circle.”

“Then I’ll solve this puzzle. Prepare some food for me. This labyrinth has some difficulty.”

Yun Ye sent the gate guards to get food from the dining hall. He lay down on the long bench under the shed and said to Hypatia, “Food will come soon, including drinks. I’ll sleep first. If you can’t solve it, tell me and we’ll enter through the side gate.”