Chapter 143: Blow His Cover! Then Do It Again! There Had to Be Something Seriously Wrong!

Chapter 143: Blow His Cover! Then Do It Again! There Had to Be Something Seriously Wrong!

Wu Chen was blowing his own cover deliberately.

First he said he knew guns, and supplied an “airtight” reason for it. Whether the reason was believed did not matter in the slightest. What mattered was that a reason existed. That was enough. It was a species of sophistry: belief or doubt was beside the point; what counted was that an explanation was on the table.

Wu Chen had never intended Li Maoren to believe a word of it.

In fact you could put it the other way round.

Wu Chen wanted Li Maoren to suspect him. He was inviting it.

And he meant to blow his cover more blatantly still.

Silence hung over the room. Li Maoren’s expression was plainly wrong, but wrong in a different way from his children’s, because he understood firearms far better than either of them. He had a genuine military background, and he had also held a frontline leadership post at a military factory.

So he knew, better than anyone in the room, that Wu Chen was lying.

And then—

Wu Chen looked the pistol over again and asked, “Mind if I take it apart?” He seemed intensely curious about the internals of a real weapon, as though he wanted to see whether they matched what he knew.

He did not wait for an answer. He began stripping the gun at once.

He worked the slide, removed the slide-stop lever, took off the slide, drew out the recoil spring, lifted out the firing pin. Each component went onto the coffee table as it came free, and his hands moved fast, deeply practiced, without a moment of hesitation or catch.

Having field-stripped the pistol, he began reassembling it without pause. Putting a gun back together is normally slower than taking it apart, because every part must seat correctly, but Wu Chen was just as quick. Once the slide was drawn back into place he picked up a round, swept up the magazine in the same motion, snapped the round into it one-handed, then flicked his wrist and drove the magazine home.

Smack.

He set the reassembled pistol down in the middle of the coffee table.

Done.

“Interesting,” he said, looking straight at Li Maoren with a smile.

Li Maoren looked back at him without expression. From the instant Wu Chen began stripping the gun he had watched with perfect calm as the young man took the pistol apart and put it back together. He could estimate the whole process at under twenty seconds.

That was already the level of a firearms specialist in a SWAT unit.

Even in the army it would take an outstanding veteran of several years, the instructor sort, to manage something in that neighborhood. In that neighborhood—Li Maoren would not have dared claim faster than Wu Chen.

He himself had once been able to strip and reassemble a pistol at that speed. Not now. He was older, and his hands had gone out of practice.

Li Maoren had been an elite soldier from the day he enlisted.

He had gone in carrying the honor of his family on his back. He had to excel. The pressure to rise was enormous, and it came not from the army but from his own clan: by a certain age he had to hold a certain post at a certain rank.

The family’s support was one half of it. Had he not been capable himself, no amount of backing would have sufficed.

Which was precisely why he understood so well. He even began to wonder whether Wu Chen had come out of one of the top special forces units. Only a place like that produced an elite this young.

But—

He had looked into Wu Chen’s background. All of it.

He knew Wu Chen truly was ordinary. Just out of university. Never a day in uniform.

By every piece of intelligence they had, there was no possible way Wu Chen could know firearms this well.

Guns were sensitive and singular enough to begin with—never mind that this Type 92 was the military version.

There was something seriously wrong with Wu Chen.

Li Maoren was certain of it.

And that was exactly Wu Chen’s aim.

All of them—Li Ruobing, Li Ruotai, Li Maoren himself—had fallen into the same trap of reasoning. Li Maoren believed Wu Chen was performing, playacting, concealing his flaws because he did not want to be exposed as the daughter’s fake boyfriend. Li Ruobing, for her part, was terrified her father would conclude exactly that. Which was why she dreaded Wu Chen making a mistake and handing her father the opening to attack and expose them.

The great error running through all of it was this: who said that something being wrong with him made him a fake boyfriend?

The reality was precisely the reverse.

If Wu Chen truly were an ordinary man doing as Li Ruobing arranged, then he would be the fake one. Li Maoren would never believe him genuine, because his daughter could not possibly take an interest in an ordinary man.

So Wu Chen exposed the problem with himself—and enlarged it deliberately, until it became inexplicable, until it could not be believed at all.

That was the crux of it. The problem had to be enormous.

“It seems you’ve been around guns a good few years, Xiao Wu,” Li Maoren said at last, holding his eyes without expression. The words plainly carried a second meaning.

“A fair while. It started in my teens, before middle school even. The first time I looked it up online…” Wu Chen answered, smiling. He was all but telling Li Maoren outright: I’m lying to you.

But Wu Chen’s method was shamelessly effective. He would simply say he had learned it online. Unreasonable? Then, sorry—let’s say I’m a genius. Does that do?

He did not even need to say it. Li Maoren would not ask. He knew that if Wu Chen did not want to explain, he could brush the matter aside.

And by now Li Maoren suspected that Wu Chen had a background deep, complicated, and profoundly hidden—one that even the Li family could not uncover in any short span of time. Nothing else could account for this.

With Li Maoren’s intelligence, it was not hard for him to grasp that Wu Chen was showing him all of it on purpose.

“It seems you really are quite something, Xiao Wu.”

“You’re too kind, Uncle. A few hobbies, that’s all.” Still smiling, Wu Chen raised a hand and, as though from habit, laid it on Li Ruobing’s leg, giving her knee a light squeeze while holding Li Maoren’s gaze. “Then again, if your daughter was going to take a liking to me, I’d need something out of the ordinary about me. Wouldn’t you say, Uncle?”

Only when he said it did Li Ruobing suddenly understand what he had been doing.

He had demolished, outright, the possibility that she had brought in someone to put on an act.

But—

He had created an enormous new problem.

A man of unknown origin, apparently possessed of some extraordinary hidden background, was involved with the eldest granddaughter of the Li family’s senior branch. And was it merely involvement? To what end?

That problem was Wu Chen’s own.

“That explains it. I was wondering, just now.” Li Maoren’s face and voice had not changed. He glanced at Li Ruobing, then back at Wu Chen. “Ruobing has always had high standards. She won’t look twice at an ordinary man. So proud that even her own father gets headaches from it… You really are unexpected, Xiao Wu.”

“I do all right. Ruobing and I fell in love at first sight,” Wu Chen said with a smile.

Like hell. Love at first sight.

“Uncle, how would it be if the two of us talked alone?” Wu Chen proposed suddenly.

Li Ruobing’s expression tightened, and Li Ruotai’s with it.

Li Maoren’s did not change. He went on looking at Wu Chen without expression. After three seconds of silence he said, “All right.”