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 the table. “Trying to frighten me didn’t work the first time. Do you really think it’ll work the second?”

Li Maoren’s color changed.

He could guess when Wu Chen had extracted the round. But that kind of technique—back when Li Maoren was in the army, there had not been more than a handful of men in the entire military region who could do it.

It was not that only a handful could have learned it.

It was that nobody would bother.

What sort of person needed that degree of absolute mastery over a firearm? Even State Security personnel had no use for it. There was little practical combat value in it.

Naturally Li Maoren did not suspect Wu Chen of being with State Security. He had no military history, and his age did not fit. Far too young.

But Li Maoren’s estimate of just how extraordinary Wu Chen’s background might be climbed another level.

Smack!

Li Maoren slapped the gun back down in the middle of the coffee table, sat, leaned back, and regarded Wu Chen through narrowed eyes, his face empty of expression.

“Young man. I don’t care for talking in circles. Since we’re speaking alone, let’s put it all on the table. You’re dating my daughter. What do you want?”

“What else would I want?” Wu Chen laughed, as though Li Maoren had asked something whose answer he already knew. “I like your daughter. I want to sleep with her. I want her to bear my children… Do you see a problem with that, Uncle?”

The words were extraordinarily offensive—and Wu Chen kept saying Uncle, which only made them worse.

It was almost as though he meant to sicken him.

Li Maoren understood by now that Wu Chen was not afraid of him and did not even hold him in any particular respect as an elder. He kept up the Uncle probably only for his daughter’s sake, to spare her feelings.

Li Maoren even had the peculiar sense that whatever verbal respect this young man granted him, he was granting on his daughter’s account.

“You think I’ll believe that?” Li Maoren asked heavily.

He did not linger on the offense. It was not the point—merely bait laid down to stir him up.

“Believe it or don’t.” Wu Chen smiled again and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re dating my daughter, and you think my attitude doesn’t matter?” There was heat in Li Maoren’s voice now.

“Do you actually care about your daughter?” Wu Chen returned. “All you care about is the family’s interests. You know perfectly well what sort of man Ding Ruilong is, and you still want to force Ruobing to marry him so the two families can be joined. Aren’t you afraid that one day Ruobing loses her temper, pulls a gun, and puts a bullet in him?”

“Young man!” Li Maoren came forward off the sofa, leaning in, his stare weighted with authority. “Are you lecturing me?”

“Uncle.” Wu Chen leaned in as well and met his eyes. He was still smiling, but there was no give in him at all. “This isn’t a lecture. I’ve always preferred to reason things out. You don’t have to be reasonable, Uncle—but surely you have to care about interests?”

That amounted to an insult.

Li Maoren’s face darkened. Apart from his own daughter, it had been a very long time since any young person dared speak to him this way.

“Uncle, a man as obsessive as Ding Ruilong—however capable he is, if he can’t govern his own emotions, how long do you think he’ll live?” Wu Chen went on. Without waiting for an answer, he smiled. “I don’t think he has long. And not only him. The more Old Master Ding indulges him, the faster he dies. Not only Ding Ruilong—the Ding family itself won’t last.”

Li Maoren naturally did not believe a word of it, nor did he take it in. He was glaring, darkly, and about to answer, when Wu Chen suddenly straightened and sat back.

“Uncle, do you remember Dong Yuantao?”

Li Maoren went still.

The man Wu Chen had raised out of nowhere had never amounted to anything. To Li Maoren he was simply a junior from another family, a boy who had achieved nothing and had been dead for years. Drowned, supposedly, swimming in a river.

He had not expected Wu Chen to know the name at all.

Dong Yuantao had been dead more than ten years. Even Li Ruobing and Li Ruotai might not remember the business; they had been in primary and middle school at the time. And the Dong family then had been nothing like the power it was now. Its rise had come only in recent years, once the family’s number-one figure reached a sufficiently high position.

“You certainly know a great deal,” Li Maoren said darkly, his tone sharp, because the anger in him had not gone anywhere. “Why bring him up all of a sudden?”

“He died. In his final year of high school.”

“Of course I know he died. He drowned!”

“No.” Wu Chen looked straight at him, his tone serious. “Ding Ruilong killed him.”