Xia Xiqing quickly did the math and immediately understood, but before he could speak, Zhou Ziheng, who was still looking at the computer screen, beat him to it.
“This is the number of four-leaf roses, right?”
Xia Xiqing crossed out the question mark on the draft with his pen and wrote a number at the end of the equal sign—1634.
No, how did he do that?
“That’s right.” He raised his eyebrows in surprise and looked at Zhou Ziheng. “You knew it was the number of four-leaf roses without calculating it?” He wasn’t a physics major, so how could he be so good at mental arithmetic?
Zhou Ziheng pointed to the computer. “Look at the roses on this page.”
Shang Sirui, who was naturally bad at math, followed Zhou Ziheng in looking at the computer screen and also noticed the secret. “Oh! All the roses here are copied and pasted, and they all look the same, with only four leaves. No wonder it felt off.” Soon, his delicate face showed a puzzled expression again. “But… what is the number of four-leaf roses?”
Xia Xiqing pointed to the formula on the draft paper. “It’s written very clearly here. Look, the four-digit number 1634. When you add up the fourth powers of each digit, the sum equals 1634 itself. That’s what a four-leaf rose number is. It’s basically a four-digit self-power number.”
Shang Sirui nodded, seeming to understand but not quite, and seeing that the two of them already knew the type of number, he suddenly became excited. “Then the last two digits are also four-leaf rose numbers, right? Can we fill them in now?”
This kid was too optimistic. Xia Xiqing felt a headache coming on. He unconsciously twirled his pen and gave a direct negative answer, “I can’t.” After saying that, he stopped twirling his pen and looked at Zhou Ziheng. “Do you know which four-digit numbers are four-leaf rose numbers?”
Zhou Ziheng shook his head. “I only know three.”
He studied physics, not mathematics. Probably only mathematicians who have nothing better to do than study numbers every day would know.
Who would bother to remember this? Xia Xiqing sighed. Whenever he encountered something that required patience, he became very restless, tapping the tip of his pen on the paper. “So what do we do now? Brute force?”
“Brute force until the show ends?” Zhou Ziheng mocked himself without mercy, “The brute force method doesn’t work in this situation, does it?”
Xia Xiqing laughed, tucking his long bangs behind his ear. “Anyway, this is something that can’t be calculated by hand, so whether you understand it or not doesn’t matter at all.”
“If I had known this show would be so mentally taxing, I would have had my agent cancel it long ago, hahaha.” Shang Sirui was a very outgoing person, placing his hand on Xia Xiqing’s shoulder and laughing so hard his teeth were showing, with no trace of an idol’s dignity. “After all, I’m the ‘dumb guy’ character.”
This kid was too funny. Xia Xiqing was always gentle in love, and over time it had become a habit. He turned his face toward Shang Sirui and smiled as he corrected his definition of himself, “Correction. Even if I am, I’m a dumb beauty.”
“Oh~~” Shang Sui wrapped his arms around his neck, the two of them leaning in close. “But I think you’re more beautiful than me, hahaha…”
Watching the two of them leaning on each other, Zhou Ziheng felt a chill run down his spine. On one hand, he felt even more contempt for Xia Xiqing, but on the other hand, he was a bit worried about Shang Sui, this carefree fool.
The expression and tone Xia Xiqing used when speaking to him earlier were, in Zhou Ziheng’s eyes, borderline flirtatious. Xia Xiqing was simply toxic; his eyes seemed to drip honey when he spoke, smiling brightly no matter who he was addressing.
Could it be that she had taken a liking to Shang Siru? This thought startled him as well. Zhou Ziheng furrowed his brow, cleared his throat, and diverted everyone’s attention. “I think we must have missed some important clue. The production team wouldn’t make things so difficult for the guests. It’s basically impossible to do that.”
Xia Xiqing nodded in agreement. The production team wouldn’t make things difficult for the guests, especially Shang Siru, the original player in this room. This room was much easier than the previous one, so they must have missed an important detail, causing the clues to break off.
But he didn’t like this kind of thing that required brute force to solve, calculating one by one, repeating it thousands of times. This kind of low-level work no longer needed to be done by humans. Thinking of this, he couldn’t help but laugh. “If only my nephew were here. Things like the number of four-leaf roses and daffodils are classic introductory programming examples for them. They’ve programmed them so many times, they might have already memorized these numbers.” ”
“Wow, your nephew? How old is your nephew that he’s already learning programming? Your whole family must be geniuses…” Shang Sirui still had his arm around Xia Xiqing, half his body leaning on him.
As soon as he finished speaking, Xia Xiqing suddenly snapped out of it. He turned his head to glance at Zhou Ziheng, who was sitting in his chair, and noticed that Zhou Ziheng had also lifted his eyes to look at him. A strange kind of tacit understanding began to form between the two of them.
Zhou Ziheng moved the mouse, closed the initial interface, and began examining the computer desktop and some folders.
Xia Xiqing muttered to himself, “This way, we won’t find it… There must be a path…” He then walked back to the trash bin.
“Hey, hey, hey, where are you going?”
“There might be a clue.”
He flipped through the neatly organized scraps of paper one by one. Some had irrelevant notes, others were drawings by children, until he came across one with just a single line of text.
As he had expected, it was a path to a file on the computer.
“It’s under the D drive.” Xia Xiqing brought the paper to Zhou Ziheng, who entered the path according to the line of text. Sure enough, in a deeply hidden folder, they found an executable file named “rose.” After running it, three numbers appeared directly on the black screen.
[1634 8208 9474]
Zhou Ziheng leaned back in his chair, his long legs cramped, so he spread them to either side of the round table. His hands were in the pockets of his jacket, and he furrowed his brow as he carefully sorted through the current clues.
Zhou Ziheng’s logic was clear: “We now have two four-digit numbers. Based on the previous room, it is highly likely that they are the password for something. However, we have not found any items that require a password to open, which means that there is a missing clue here.”
Zhou Ziheng’s voice was deep, with a beautiful resonance, which made Xia Xiqing unconsciously think of the bells of Giotto’s Bell Tower in Florence and the sunset at the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.
When he walked past there with his easel, the heavy bells struck his heart valve one by one, making his whole body tingle, as if he had been electrocuted.
“Hm?”
The other person asked in confusion, and Xia Xiqing snapped out of his reverie of Florence’s sunset, seeing Zhou Ziheng looking at him with a puzzled expression. He asked again, “What do you think?”
Xia Xiqing nodded, though he hadn’t heard what Zhou Ziheng had said earlier, he could guess it was probably related to the current chain of clues. “That’s right, our current goal is to find the missing piece.” He flipped through the clues Shang Sirui had found earlier, and there was only one palm-sized memo left that hadn’t been checked. He flipped through it roughly.
Shang Siru, who had been looking around restlessly, said from the side, “I found this by the pillow just now. I flipped through it for a long time but couldn’t find anything useful. It’s just random notes about things like which day to attend a meeting or pick up the kids. There’s also some messy handwriting from the child on this memo.”
The child’s handwriting?
Xia Xiqing sensed something was off. He flipped through it again and indeed, the memo contained not only the room owner’s handwriting but also the handwriting of someone solving a four-leaf rose math problem. However, the content was nothing more than messages to his father, some expressing a desire to go on a trip with him, others about attending parent-teacher meetings.
He flipped through it again, but there was still nothing worth pondering.
What was wrong?
Xia Xiqing put down the notebook, propped his forehead with his hand, and lowered his head in thought. Zhou Ziheng reached out and took the notebook, flipped through it, and suddenly said, “Is a page missing here?”
“Is that so?” Xia Xiqing looked up; he hadn’t noticed. Zhou Ziheng flipped open a page of the memo and indeed found jagged edges where it had been torn out.
“So the trash can earlier…” Xia Xiqing suddenly remembered that there was indeed a piece of scrap paper the same size as the memo, written in the handwriting of that teenager!
He walked over, knelt down on one knee, and found the piece of paper. Although Shang Sirui still didn’t understand the situation, he followed suit and leaned in close to Xia Xiqing to read the message written on the torn memo.
“Dad, the fountain pen you gave me fell under the bed, but I can’t reach it. Can you help me find it?”
A pen?
Zhou Ziheng walked over, knelt down, and checked under the bed. However, the bed seemed to be solid, with wooden panels on all sides, leaving no space underneath.
Xia Xiqing tapped on the wooden surface.
It’s not solid.
As he stood up, he noticed a camera mounted at the foot of the bed, confirming his suspicions. “We need to move this bed.”
“Are you serious?” Shang Sirui was skeptical. “No, I mean, could there be other clues? A pen seems… And there’s so much information in the memo…”
Zhou Ziheng shook his head and asked, “Is this piece of paper in the memo?”
After hearing his question, Shang Sirui crossed his arms and thought for a moment. “If I were to tear it out… there could be many reasons, like it’s useless, but I feel like the entire notebook is useless… or maybe I don’t want others to see it…?” He suddenly understood Zhou Ziheng’s meaning and snapped his fingers at him. “He doesn’t want others to see it!”
Zhou Ziheng smiled with an expression that said, “You finally get it.”
Xia Xiqing was lifting one side of the bed by himself, about to ask for help, but he found that the bed, despite its size, was surprisingly light, and he could lift half of it on his own.
It was indeed a prop…
The three of them moved the bed aside without much effort. There were no marbles under the bed, only a box. To be precise, it was a safe with two rows of password columns, each requiring four digits.
There was a rose on top of the box, with four small leaves still attached to the stem.
“Wow, I feel like I’ve accidentally been protected by two kings,” Shang Sirui said excitedly as he picked up the box and entered the password according to the answer calculated by the computer earlier. With two clicks, the safe opened.
Xia Xiqing smiled helplessly. Wasn’t this like a bronze player accidentally entering a king’s game?
Zhou Ziheng watched his smile from the side, which was almost like he was doting on Shang Siru. Could he really have fallen for Siru?
A complete misunderstanding.
“The key!” Shang Siru was so excited that he immediately took out the key, not caring about anything else. “Finally, we can get out of this room.”
Xia Xiqing noticed there was a document folder inside the box. He opened it and found a property transfer authorization form. His expression turned cold as he set the folder aside.
Zhou Ziheng leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, observing Xia Xiqing’s expression. This was his favorite thing to do as an actor. He found it strange that Xia Xiqing hadn’t been able to hide his expression earlier, given how cautious he usually was.
“Is there anything else inside?” Zhou Ziheng asked.
Actually, there was. Xia Xiqing examined the password box, which contained an empty medical record folder. “It seems stuck to the box,” he said, having exerted considerable force but failing to remove it. “It’s just an empty shell; there’s no medical record inside, no name, and no age.”
Shang Sui looked at it puzzledly, not particularly interested. For him, leaving this room meant completing his task. He took the key and inserted it directly into the lock on his own door. “The key fits; it can turn!”
Xia Xiqing smiled lightly, lazily glancing at Zhou Ziheng, their gazes meeting once more.
Even inside the door, it’s uncertain, let alone outside.
Author’s note: Science popularization: [Four-leaf rose number]
This number with a beautiful name is actually a “self-power number.” As the name suggests, self-power refers to the sum of the nth powers of each digit (units, tens, etc.) of this n-digit number being equal to the number itself.
For example, when n=3 (i.e., a three-digit self-power number), 1x1x1 5x5x5 3x3x3=153, and this 153 is the three-digit self-power number. However, the name “self-power number” sounds… too mathematical, so it has some cute nicknames, the most famous of which is the self-power number of a three-digit number—the narcissus number.
This is quite interesting. You might wonder, with so many kinds of flowers, why choose the narcissus? This goes back to an ancient Greek myth. The river god and the nymph gave birth to a peerlessly beautiful young man named Narcissus. All the nymphs fell in love with him, and the most beautiful one was particularly captivated by his tragic fate. The moon goddess punished him by casting a curse on him, causing him to fall in love only with himself. One day, he came to the riverbank and saw his reflection. The curse took effect. He died by the river, and narcissus flowers bloomed along the riverbank.
Therefore, the narcissus flower symbolizes narcissism. A three-digit self-power number is also called a narcissus number.
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