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…