Spear Training
Si Ming watched Ying Zhou, who had become completely absorbed in playing, repeating the same thing over and over without finding it dull and even forgetting to eat. He could not help marveling that the makeshift way he had come up with to brush him off had actually worked wonders.
On closer thought, though, it was not entirely without reason.
Young people were especially impatient and found it hard to settle down and hone a skill. On the other hand, they were enthusiastic about things that were easy to pick up and offered rapid progress. That was why games like CrossFire and League of Legends from the Great Penguin Empire had swept through his previous life.
Drums, an instrument for unleashing passion, suited Ying Zhou's temperament to begin with. On top of that, he could clearly feel himself improving, and the sense of achievement fascinated him. He did not even realize a faint smile had appeared on his face. It was an experience he had never had since his earliest clear memories.
Si Ming watched Ying Zhou, sweat flying as he played with abandon, utterly immersed in the fun. He simply could not connect the youth brimming with vigor before him to the gloomy, violent figure from the day before yesterday, who had radiated negativity and growled about killing someone.
Two famous sayings suddenly came to mind-
There were no students who could not be taught, only teachers who did not know how to teach.
If a child lived with criticism, he learned to condemn; if a child lived with hostility, he learned to fight; if a child lived with friendship, he would discover that the world was actually full of sunshine.
The latter was full of idealism, while the former displayed a fearless spirit. Even Kongzi, faced with his student Zai Yu sleeping in broad daylight, could only lament, "Rotten wood cannot be carved, and a wall of dung cannot be plastered."
Si Ming stroked his chin and pondered. "At this rate, do I really have to put together a band? If I'm going to do it seriously, I can't just grab anyone to fill the spots. Going by the standard four-person lineup, I still need to find a comic type and a quiet type."
The so-called classic four-person lineup was a tried-and-true formula popularly believed to guarantee a hit. It had originated in the great masterpiece Journey to the West. The four personality types were the serious type, the energetic type, the comic type, and the quiet type, corresponding to Tang Sanzang, Sun Wukong, Bajie, and Sha Seng.
Additional traits could be added to those four basic personalities. For example, the serious type could be paired with snark, the comic type with a natural airhead personality, and the quiet type with the emotionless, expressionless, and silent traits. But their fundamental roles remained unchanged.
A team made up of characters with those four personalities was bound to become a huge hit. The formula had influenced countless outstanding works that came afterward, its influence even spreading beyond novels into manga, animation, and other fields. In once wildly popular works such as Heavy Sound Girls and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, a look at the characters showed that they all fit the roles.
Some might say that those two anime clearly had five important characters!
But it was perfectly normal for the four heavenly kings to number five. They should not forget that the four pilgrims seeking scriptures also had a white dragon horse. And since Tang Sanzang rode the white dragon horse, the fifth character was bound to be close to the serious type.
Si Ming had originally thought Ying Zhou belonged to the quiet type, but after seeing his passionate performance, he felt that the guy was clearly an energetic type in hiding.
"Where am I going to find the other two?"
Si Ming was still wondering where he could find people to talk into joining when he heard a burst of hurried footsteps outside the door, accompanied by tuneless humming. Yao Bilian opened the door and walked in, her face glowing with delight.
"Kid Si, I came to ask you about someone... What are you two doing in here? Did you get all these drums to learn how to beat off?"
Yao Bilian looked suspiciously at Ying Zhou and Si Ming, as though finding it incredible that the two could stay together on friendly terms.
But she was not a suspicious person by nature. She soon put it out of her mind and turned her attention to something else.
"Ying Zhou, you brat, you're actually going to play music too? Hahaha, it doesn't suit you at all! It's as weird as salty tofu pudding. Are you trying to make enough noise to kill everyone who hates you?"
Yao Bilian clutched her stomach and laughed, paying no heed as Ying Zhou's expression grew uglier and uglier.
"...She's the textbook example of an incompetent educator. Uh, in a way, she counts as a comic type too. Should I bring her into the band?"
Si Ming promptly shot the idea down. For no other reason than that this woman's mental age was practically past its expiration date.
Yao Bilian's gaze sharpened, and she glared at Si Ming. "I get the feeling you're thinking something very rude."
"Nothing of the sort. You're imagining things. By the way, didn't you say you came to ask me about someone?"
Si Ming wiped away his cold sweat. Apparently, even a comic-type character possessed a woman's sixth sense.
"Forget it. I'm in a good mood today, so I won't hold it against you."
Yao Bilian spun around, sat down on a nearby chair, and crossed her legs. "I went to a matchmaking event today," she said happily. "I thought I'd run into another misshapen melon or split jujube, but those people at the Marriage Bureau have finally evolved from apes into humans. They set me up with a golden-turtle son-in-law. He's handsome, his family has money, and his cultivation is high. You could say he's flawless. More importantly, he's already completely smitten with my charms."
"Who exactly are you talking about? Do I know him?"
"You should. Anyway, he said he knew you. His name is Jiang Zhengtai."
Chapter 27: Spear Training
At the Mohist Knight Guard base's training grounds, twelve shots rang out-bang, bang, bang-and five of the ten targets fell.
Si Ming was quite dissatisfied with the result. "I can't even hit a stationary target half the time," he complained. "Does your luck stat really drop when you become a lancer?"
Complaints aside, he knew perfectly well that such accuracy was already quite good for a beginner. After all, he had martial skills to draw on, making it easier for him to improve than an ordinary person. Besides, this gun was not that kind of spear, so there was no reason for him to suffer the lancer's curse. He was simply very dissatisfied with it himself, especially since he had a protection mission in two days.
"Looks like my talent can't work on weapons out of thin air. I need a corresponding technique to go with it. It's just like giving me an unfamiliar instrument: I can only stare at it helplessly. But as long as I have a copy of Introduction to Techniques, I can pick it up quickly. So the priority right now is-changing class to archer."
He therefore went to the techniques department and took a martial arts manual under the staff's supervision. After bringing it back to the training grounds, he flipped through it on the spot.
The Falling Star Archery Art was rumored to be a Foundation Establishment martial art of the Moon Bow Grotto-Heaven, a major sect on the Divine Continent of the Central Land. Si Ming skipped the section on moves and read only the methods for aiming and locking onto a target.
The Sea Continent currently had no corresponding martial arts for guns. No one knew whether to classify firearms under archery or hidden weapons, but however they were classified, there was no doubt that guns were ranged weapons. Their methods of aiming were bound to have something in common with bows and arrows.
After reading the relevant sections, Si Ming closed his eyes and meditated where he stood for a while, digesting and absorbing the martial knowledge. Then he loaded fresh bullets and fired again at the targets, which had been set back up.
Bang, bang, bang...
The targets fell one after another. The first three shots barely hit their targets, landing far from the vital points. The middle four gradually drew closer to those points, but they were inconsistent and still off the mark. By the final three shots, every one hit the bullseye.
"Perfect!"
Si Ming instinctively blew on the muzzle, hoping to strike a cool pose, only to discover helplessly that the psionic revolver produced no smoke at all because it did not use gunpowder for propulsion.
He sighed deeply and remarked from the bottom of his heart, "I never expected using True Qi as a power source to have this drawback. From now on, the world will have one fewer classic pose, leaving an irreparable loss in the history of warfare."
He shook his head and ejected the magazine fitted into the grip. The psionic revolver looked like a classic revolver, but its actual workings were worlds apart. It was like hanging up a sheep's head while selling dog meat.
A revolver used a rotating cylinder to separate the barrel from the chambers and prevent bullets from jamming, and the cylinder had to be taken out for reloading. The psionic revolver's cylinder, however, could not be removed at all. Its chamber and barrel were one piece, and it was loaded with a standard magazine. He had no idea what the Mohist School's scientists had been thinking, insisting on giving a pistol that did not use the revolver principle at all that shape. Yet its cylinder really did rotate when it fired, and he had no idea what kind of mechanism it used.
"Let's try the bullets I specially modified."
Si Ming carefully loaded fresh bullets into the magazine. He called them specially modified, but all he had actually done was carve a cross into each bullet's tip and remove the jacket there, exposing part of the lead core.