He knew full well that as long as he could break through, avenging would no longer just be a distance dream. That was because he knew that the Cheng’s already had a martial emperor, and he was just an elder.

  By then, he would have a shot of avenging even without the backing of the entire Cheng’s.

  When he was fleeing, all he thought about was the survival of his family and never about avenging. Now the he has settled down at the Cheng’s and watching happy family day in and day out, he couldn’t help but think about his murdered family members.

  The seething desire to avenge ate at him. He wanted to breakthrough as quickly as possible no matter what.

  Unfortunately, the more he rushed, the more he was stuck at the bottleneck.

  But with the items in his hand, he trusted that he had a very good shot at it.

  Sure enough, a strong qi of a martial emperor shot into the sky that night. Everybody knew what that signified and said congratulatory words to the elder.

  The Elder finally let out a smile of relief and laughed out loud with his grandson in his arms.

  Cheng Xiao Xiao, who has had way too much free late as of late, was finally grabbed into the accounting room by the very busy Zhou Jinjiang. With the exception of Zhou Jinjiang, the Elder was there as well.

  Looking at their very troubled faces, Cheng Xiao Xiao asked dubiously, “Elder, Uncle Zhou, what happened? Did something steal our ledgers?”


  “Xiao Xiao, you must be kidding. Who dare to steal from the Cheng’s?”


  Zhou Jinjiang wasn’t sure if he should laugh or cry from her tease. He pointed at the stack of ledgers on the table and said, “These are our books that we have been using to recording all our monthly activities. They were such a nightmare. Can you help us audit them?”


  “Me? Audit them? Uncle Zhou, Elder, you got this. Why do you need me to audit?”


  Cheng Xiao Xiao walked over to the chair and took a seat. She casually picked up one of them and opened it up. There were chalked full of words. She frowned immediately, this is not a ledger, this is a full-length novel! She looked up and asked, “This is how you do ledgers?”


  “Of course, this is the only way!”


  “Well, how else would you do it?”


  The two were baffled upon hearing her question and raised questions of their own.

  “Ugh…”


  She put down the ledger that she was reading and said helplessly, “I can’t audit these ledgers the way they are. Why don’t I teach you a different way of doing ledgers!”


  “Another way?”


  “There are other ways?”


  “Of course there is!” Cheng Xiao Xiao didn’t bother saying more but grabbed over a piece of white paper and started writing down Arabic numerals from 1 to 100.

  Once she was done, the two looked at the odd-looking numbers and surprised and dumbfounded. But once Cheng Xiao Xiao explained the numbers to them, they immediately realized how using those numbers would be much less cumbersome.

  They were both smart people and quickly memorized all 100 of the numbers.1

  She then went on to teach them about addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, the multiplication table, and to do basic calculations using these numbers. These were the most basic and fundamental, so it only took the two of them a few hours to learn.

  “Alright, once you can do the ledger using these numbers, I will return to audit them!”


  Cheng Xiao Xiao had been talking for quite a while by now and was started to get tired. She had taught them basic accounting and that was not a problem to them. As she was leaving, she said, “What you had before were not ledger, they were cryptically-written books! One could die trying to decipher it, let alone auditing them!”


  The two exchanged a look when they heard her words and not sure what to make out of it. Everybody did their ledger that way!

  Leaving the accounting room, Cheng Xiao Xiao ran into someone else who was looking for her.

  ___

  Translator:

  1. Why 100? 0 – 9 should be all they need to learn… :S