Chapter 142: There Are Six Bullets in the Gun

Chapter 142: There Are Six Bullets in the Gun

Li Maoren’s reaction, and Li Ruobing’s, were both exactly what Wu Chen had expected.

“That’s right. I know guns.” Wu Chen kept that extraordinarily unruffled smile. “Guns are interesting. You have a son and a daughter, Uncle, so you’ll understand—boys are certainly more taken with guns than girls are. Wouldn’t you say?”

Of course Li Maoren understood. That was not remotely the point.

“You’ve had access to guns?” Li Maoren asked directly, eyes narrowing.

“The internet is so developed now. If firearms interest you, the internet is enough. The basic principles aren’t complicated. And if you go looking on foreign sites, you can even find blueprints for some of them.” Wu Chen smiled faintly. He seemed to have sealed the line of inquiry off completely, and Li Ruobing let out a quiet breath.

Then Wu Chen changed tack. “Though I have handled a gun, in fact. A pistol. I made it myself, in my teens. Not a real one, of course—more of a model. It wasn’t metal; I even shaped the trigger out of wood by hand. But the parts and the internal structure should all have been right. I’d say I know guns fairly well…”

Li Ruobing felt the strangeness of that answer with perfect clarity.

It was as though Wu Chen had misspoken, patched the hole with the explanation that he had studied them online—and then immediately gone back and emphasized that he knew guns extremely well, that he had even hand-carved a pistol model. As though he were deliberately making trouble for himself all over again.

Taken as a whole, mentioning firearms among his hobbies had not been a slip at all. It had been deliberate. Otherwise, having covered himself, he should have stopped talking.

But why?

Li Maoren went on watching him through narrowed eyes.

He too felt that something was off. He was looking at Wu Chen from the premise that the young man was his daughter’s fake boyfriend, hunting for a flaw. His whole angle of vision was suspicion.

Learned it online? Knew guns well?

Wu Chen’s logic held. Plenty of people learned about firearms that way. So-called gun enthusiasts were everywhere online; a single search turned up no end of forums on the subject, military forums among them.

Some veteran enthusiasts could recite the specifications of practically every common model from memory.

But Wu Chen had also said he had made a pistol model with his own hands. Model or not, he had dared claim every component was correct. That still lay inside the bounds of reason—it was only a model, and he had said nothing about precision—and yet somehow it felt like too much.

It was strange.

Li Maoren was silent a moment, then turned to his son. “Atai. Are you carrying a gun?”

Li Maoren himself was not in the habit of carrying one. Not for lack of access; he simply had no need. The bodyguards who had come with him were armed, but all of them were outside.

“Uh… Dad…” Li Ruotai’s expression turned odd.

Why did he suddenly want a gun?

Li Ruobing looked uneasy as well. For an instant she seemed to imagine something appalling—then immediately dismissed it. Impossible. Her father was a normal man, not a madman.

“Are you carrying one?” Li Maoren asked again.

“I am…” Li Ruotai reached behind his waist and drew out a pistol.

Li Maoren gestured to his son again, this time tilting his head toward Wu Chen: give it to him.

At that Li Ruotai relaxed instead. He stepped forward, set the pistol on the coffee table, and slid it across.

Wu Chen put out a hand and stopped it.

“Do you recognize this gun, Xiao Wu? Tell me about it,” Li Maoren said.

Wu Chen had known this was coming.

He had shown Li Maoren a “flaw” on purpose, and he had chosen firearms because he knew how deeply Li Maoren understood them. Li Maoren had served in the military as a young man. Under the family’s original design for him he was to have risen through a military career, but certain events at the time made the family revise their arrangements.

Times had changed…

In the early 2000s he transferred out of the military at the rank of major and became deputy director of a military factory under a centrally administered state-owned defense enterprise…

By now Li Maoren had been promoted and reassigned several times. He had left the defense industry many years ago and moved on to other central state-owned enterprises. But those early years had left him with a deep fondness for firearms that persisted to this day, and his time in the defense sector had given him an understanding of guns far beyond that of an ordinary man—beyond that of most soldiers.

Guns could now be counted among his hobbies.

And precisely because his background gave him that knowledge, it would be easier for him to find flaws in Wu Chen from this direction.

Wu Chen picked up Li Ruotai’s pistol, held it in his hand, and smiled at Li Maoren. “Type 92. The project was launched in ninety-four to replace the Type 54. There’s a police version and a military version. The police version is nine-millimeter and completed design finalization in ninety-eight. Atai’s is the military version, 5.8mm, which wasn’t finalized until 2000…”

Speaking casually, he looked the gun over, then raised his eyes again. “The two versions weigh the same with an empty magazine—seven hundred sixty grams—but the military version is a size smaller: two millimeters shorter overall, four millimeters lower. The police version uses a rotating-barrel locking mechanism; Atai’s military version uses a rotating-barrel semi-blowback action. The latter has less recoil and better accuracy. The former sits better in the hand and points more naturally…”

He sounded exactly like a veteran enthusiast, the figures coming without a pause.

And none of it was secret. All of it could be found online.

Li Ruobing was puzzled.

Was Wu Chen simply trying to leave her father with the impression that he was a serious gun enthusiast?

Why?

Did he know her father liked guns and want to find a shared interest, something to close the distance?

No. That was not Wu Chen. And building rapport that way would have been useless anyway.

So what was he doing?

Before she could work it out, Wu Chen did something that overturned several of her guesses—something that could fairly be called terrifying.

Gun in hand, he bounced it lightly a few times and smiled faintly. “At this weight, if I’m not mistaken, there should be six rounds in it.” With that he dropped the magazine, held it in one hand, and pressed down with his thumb, again and again.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

One round after another popped from the top of the magazine and dropped onto the coffee table with a crisp little sound.

Exactly six.

All six lay on the table.

The magazine was empty.

There really had been six rounds inside.

“I guessed right,” Wu Chen said, smiling again.

The room went utterly silent.

Li Ruobing and Li Ruotai both stared at him, astonished and lost.

To judge the number of rounds in a gun accurately by hefting its weight took more than knowledge of the weapon’s specifications. It took astonishing tactile sensitivity, a feel for weight in the hand of extraordinary precision. And beyond that, it took someone who handled guns constantly—for years, and the same model at that.

Even a soldier with ten years behind him would struggle to name the exact number of rounds from the weight in his hand. This required more than familiarity. It required talent.

And the way Wu Chen had stripped the magazine one-handed was so textbook-perfect that it all but proved the point outright: Wu Chen had not merely handled real guns. He had been handling them for a very long time.

What on earth was he trying to do?

Blow his own cover?