Chapter 145: Reason May Not Matter, but Interests Always Do!

Chapter 145: Reason May Not Matter, but Interests Always Do!

With Li Maoren’s gun suddenly leveled at him, Wu Chen’s expression did not change. If anything, he was quietly pleased.

This was precisely where he had wanted things to go—or rather, where he had steered them. There was a reason the pistol had ended up in the middle of the coffee table instead of on the side nearer to him. Wu Chen had put it there himself.

Had the gun been on his side, Li Maoren could not have snatched it up in one motion. He would certainly have chosen another approach.

A thousand years in the loop. He had been trapped repeating a single day, yet memory, experience, knowledge—everything belonging to the mind—had never been reset. In effect Wu Chen was a man carrying more than a thousand years of life behind him. So even a figure of Li Maoren’s standing, once he began talking with Wu Chen, would inevitably find himself drawn into Wu Chen’s rhythm.

Li Maoren held the gun with formidable presence, his face fierce.

Wu Chen smiled at the muzzle.

“You really are a family,” he said, mildly. “Ruobing and Atai both did this once. Ruobing didn’t trust me at first either, and even now Atai still carries his doubts about me somewhere inside. Why bother, Uncle? You know perfectly well that before I put the gun down, I didn’t chamber a round.”

Wu Chen knew Li Maoren was not the Li Ruobing or the Li Ruotai of those earlier moments.

When Li Ruobing pointed a gun at him, she really might have pulled the trigger.

Li Ruotai even more so. With that temper of his, if Li Ruobing had not stopped him…

Li Maoren was different.

He was only trying to frighten him. Even with a round chambered, he would not have fired.

There was an old saying that the older a man got, the smaller his courage grew. Not entirely accurate, but the principle behind it was sound.

Take the sixteen- and seventeen-year-old street punks. They were the most vicious of all, because they were young and hot-blooded and gave no thought to consequences. Anger them enough and it made no difference who stood across from them—they would draw a blade. For some so-called brotherhood, they would even be willing to go down together with the other side.

Ask any man who had actually climbed to the top of that world, past thirty now, to look back on what he had done in his teens, and most would think themselves complete idiots.

There had clearly been better ways to settle some of it, and back then they had picked the stupidest one available and nearly gotten themselves killed.

Li Maoren was certainly not short of nerve. If he truly wanted Wu Chen dead, he could arrange it afterward without lifting a finger himself, and it would be done cleanly.

More to the point, before he had worked out exactly what Wu Chen was, a man as mature as Li Maoren—accustomed to weighing the larger picture—would never act rashly. Had he been as impulsive as his son Li Ruotai, then all those years of living would have been wasted on him.

Hearing that no round was chambered, Li Maoren drew his hand back. Pistol in his right hand, he seized the slide with his left and racked it hard.

The movement was fast.

But the instant it was done, his expression shifted.

The sound was wrong.

The slide had not sprung back into place.

Because the magazine was empty.

And Li Maoren distinctly remembered that when Wu Chen reassembled the pistol, just before seating the magazine, he had loaded one round into it—one-handed, no less.

Wu Chen watched the change come over his face, then flicked his hand.

Clack!

The round that should have been inside the gun landed on the coffee table. The five rounds there became six again.

No magic trick. Before driving the magazine home, Wu Chen had simply pressed the round back out and palmed it. His hands were too fast, and the angle had favored him. Li Maoren had watched the entire process and had not caught it.

“Uncle, now you’re just making this dull,” Wu Chen said, smiling, once the round was on…