Chapter 1015: Inverted Eight

“Look!” Qijiajing said with a grin. “I told you so! This character only has one pronunciation, ‘bin’.”

Qixia didn’t know how to explain the situation and could only silently nod.

In any case, the pronunciation of “bin” was relatively easy to guess. If they encountered other obscure characters next, it would truly be a gamble.

Although Dilong had mentioned in the “rules” that writing homophonic characters was to prevent both teams from using obscure characters, Qixia spent a long time reasoning and felt it was nearly impossible to form twenty-eight characters without using obscure ones.

Qixia lowered his head and looked again at the character “bing” in his hand. Logically speaking, this wasn’t the best time to form characters, since he had too few characters in hand. But since the opposing team had already launched an attack, he had no choice but to take one step at a time and see how things went.

He picked up the character “bing”—specifically, it consisted of “qiu” and “ba,” with the “ba” character welded together as a single unit that couldn’t be separated.

Qixia first placed the “qiu” on the platform, earning one point, and then placed the “ba” alone. Unfortunately, “ba” was a single unit and couldn’t be further used to form “ping” and “pang,” which would have earned two more points.

In this way, Qixia’s team scored a total of seven points: “bing,” “mu,” “mu,” “xiang,” “bin,” “qiu,” and “ba.” They were still twenty-one characters short of the target twenty-eight.

In that case… could the remaining radicals in his hand form other characters?

Qixia experimented by placing several possible combinations onto the Fenghuang Xianshu Platform, but soon discovered that not every combination could be recognized by the screen.

After trying several possibilities, a strange character once again caught their attention. The screen clearly displayed:

“Primitive character ‘ba’ received. Please write a homophonic character.”

“This…” Qijiajing was stunned again. “Is this character pronounced ‘pa’ or ‘ba’?”

After hearing this, Qixia felt that Qijiajing had indeed raised a worthy question.

Although the character “ba” was pronounced “ba,” in many common characters, “ba” would change its pronunciation when combined with other radicals—for instance, “pa zhu” (to crouch) or “ba shou” (pickpocket).

However, the character “ba” could also be pronounced “ba,” as in “ba kai” (to open something roughly), and was commonly used in onomatopoeia like “ba” (as in a gunshot).

Other than that, Qixia couldn’t think of any other common characters containing “ba.” At present, he could recall two characters each for both pronunciations, “pa” and “ba.”

“We’ll just have to take a gamble…” Qixia said.

He stretched out his hand, thought for several seconds, and then wrote the homophonic character “ba” on the screen.

—”Creation successful.”

A total of eight points.

“Phew…” Qixia exhaled deeply, shaking his head. “Honestly, I really don’t like this reckless feeling—it’s no different from being an ordinary gambler.”

“No worries, buddy!” Qijiajing patted Qixia’s shoulder. “Scoring points is good enough!”

Qixia nodded and continued looking at the scattered radicals in his hand. He had already considered many combinations, yet somehow felt something was missing.

Why were there so few characters they could form?

“There’s still one more character you can form,” Qijiajing pointed at the radicals in Qixia’s hand. “This one and this one—they can form a character together.”

Qixia looked down. Qijiajing’s finger was pointing at “mu” and “ba.”

“These two…?”

“Exactly,” Qijiajing nodded. “This is the character for ‘shell,’ ‘bei.’ Buddy, how could you overlook such a simple character? Classic case of missing something obvious right under your nose!”

“This…” Qixia furrowed his brow slightly. Naturally, he knew what character Qijiajing was referring to. It wasn’t a case of missing something obvious, but rather a direction he had never considered before.

Traditional characters…?

“Bei…” Qixia rubbed his chin. Regardless of whether it could be formed or not, he could at least give it a try.

So he chose to place “mu” and “ba” together, one on top of the other.

The screen flickered for a moment and displayed a line of text they had never seen before—

“Character ‘bei’ received. This character does not count toward the current game score. Please create again.”

“Eh…?” Seeing this, Qijiajing tapped the screen with his hand. “Oops, buddy, it seems like the screen doesn’t recognize this character! It doesn’t even know ‘bei’!”

“It’s probably not that the screen doesn’t recognize it…” Qixia said. “If you think carefully, the characters Dilong initially gave us already omitted traditional forms. ‘che’ was simplified to ‘che,’ ‘ma’ was simplified to ‘ma.’ Therefore, traditional characters probably don’t count toward scoring. At least ‘bei’ won’t count.”

Qijiajing was silent for a long time before slowly saying, “Is this game specifically targeting me…?”

Qixia knew that this game was targeting not just Qijiajing, but all the “participants.” If traditional and simplified characters could be used interchangeably, their chances of winning would increase.

But now…

“Wait a second…” Qixia looked at the scattered characters on the screen, his eyes flickering slightly. “I might have been too fixated on the concept of radicals and components. When Cangjie originally created these characters… how could he have been limited by such concepts…”

With this thought, Qixia reached out and picked up the character “ba.”

He gently moved his fingers, rotating the small metal character “ba” 180 degrees and placing it on the Fenghuang Xianshu Platform, forming an “inverted ba.” Under Qijiajing’s confused gaze, he then placed the character “mu” beneath the inverted “ba.”

“Eh…?” Qijiajing looked confused. “What is this…?”

“There’s no other way to get enough characters…” Qixia murmured softly. “No wonder I felt like there weren’t enough characters to use…”

This time, the screen flickered for even longer than before. After a few seconds, a line of red text appeared:

“Primitive character ‘mi’ received. Please write a homophonic character.”

After seeing this, Qijiajing was stunned for a while before exclaiming in astonishment, “Oh my… I can’t believe this! You actually managed to form ‘mi’… Buddy, you’re really something!”

“I should have thought of this earlier…” Qixia said. “Now we can form more characters.”

Qijiajing stared at the screen for a while before realizing something was off. “Buddy… you… do you know the homophonic characters for ‘mi’?”

“‘Mi’…?”

After hearing this, Qixia rubbed his chin. The most commonly used character for this pronunciation was naturally “mi” itself, but obviously writing “mi” again wouldn’t count.

“I got it,” Qixia raised his eyebrows, stretched out his hand, and tapped on the screen.

His sharp, knife-like handwriting swept across the screen, leaving behind a bright red character—

“Mi.”

“…” Qijiajing looked at it slightly stunned. “Buddy, you sure know a lot…”

—”Creation successful.”

A total of nine points.