For the sake of harmony in the family, and even more for his father's standing at home, Lucas left the battlefield outright!
When Lucas found Benny, Benny asked him in surprise, "You're out of seclusion?"
Lucas nodded at him, then asked, "Will you go get Windsor?"
Benny asked Lucas suspiciously, "Why don't you go yourself?"
Lucas rubbed his nose awkwardly. Naturally, he could not say that if he went himself, he was afraid Windsor's father would beat him up. After all, he had spoken ill of her father in front of Windsor before. He just did not know whether Windsor had told her father about it, though Lucas reckoned she had.
Otherwise, why had things gone that way the last time, when it had clearly been their first meeting? He had never offended her father, Wilson, anywhere else. He simply could not understand why that sanctimonious old man disliked him so much!
Unfortunately, it was only later, when his own sweet, lively daughter brought a callow youth before him, that Lucas understood the reason.
Any old father who saw his darling daughter holding on to some brat he did not know would feel an instinctive dislike. To an old father's mind, no brat was allowed to steal away his precious girl. Unless that little bastard was better than him-but unfortunately, by then Lucas had already become a Sovereign. So he looked down all the more on the little bastard who stole his daughter away from his side!
So Lucas was still somewhat afraid of seeing Windsor's father now, and he asked Benny, "Would you rather get Windsor or Eric?"
Benny thought it over, then told Lucas, "Then I'll go get Windsor."
"All right. Meet at my house afterward."
Benny nodded, then went to find Windsor. Lucas went to Eric's house, and after finding him, brought him back to his own home. When the two of them arrived, they discovered that Benny had already brought Windsor there!
When Windsor saw Lucas come in, she ran straight up to him. Taking his hand, she asked, "You haven't come out for three whole months. How did it go?"
Lucas looked at his mother, who was watching him affectionately, and his father, whose expression practically said that his son was the best. He gave an awkward cough, then said, "All right, I succeeded."
Windsor had been excited because she had not seen Lucas in so long, which was why she had boldly stepped forward and taken his hand. Now that she realized Lucas's parents were both there, her face visibly reddened.
She instinctively tried to pull her hand out of Lucas's grasp. Lucas's body was now twelve years old, too. In this dangerous world, people generally matured early. Many girls married at twelve or thirteen, so Lucas openly tightened his grip on her hand.
Windsor tried to pull away, but when she found she could not, she looked up at Lucas. Then she happily let him hold her hand, while thinking, How embarrassing! Lucas's parents noticed.
Lucas coughed, drawing everyone's attention back to himself, then asked Benny to go to his room and fetch the meridian diagram and the flesh-and-muscle diagram he had drawn during his last dissection.
Lucas hung up the diagrams, then had Windsor, his parents, and the others sit directly in front of them. He pointed to the front-view diagram of the muscles and bones he had drawn and began explaining. Given the limitations of their current conditions, the diagrams were still rather crude, nothing like the clearly detailed diagrams available to medical students in later times.
Fortunately, Lucas's parents, Windsor, and the others were cultivators themselves and had naturally received instruction on related subjects. Although it might not have been as systematic as this, they could still understand some of it by drawing on what they already knew.
Even so, Lucas spent an entire afternoon explaining the muscle diagram before he barely managed to give them a general understanding. That evening, everyone went home.
The next morning, his three young friends gathered at Lucas's house again. This time, Lucas explained the muscle diagram from the back. During his explanation, he used the Tai Chi he had taught Benny and Windsor as an example, giving them a rough understanding of where they generated force when using martial techniques! Lucas spent three days teaching them about the muscle diagrams before they understood. The acupoint and meridian diagrams that came next proved more difficult, and it took seven days for them to absorb all the information.
Even then, they sometimes mixed up certain acupoints, and Lucas spent another week getting them to memorize everything.
That day, Windsor returned home as usual, only to find her father blocking her way back to her room. He asked, "Did you go see him?"
Windsor nodded, and her father said somewhat angrily, "Didn't I tell you to spend less time with him? Why won't you listen?"
Since Lucas had already held her hand in front of his parents, Windsor had grown a little bolder. She told her father, "I like him."
Wilson grew angry and snapped, "You!"
At that moment, Windsor's mother appeared beside her father and said, "Let it go. If our daughter likes him, let her go."
Wilson said to his wife, "What would a woman like you know?"
In the end, he looked at the determination in his daughter's eyes, angrily flicked his sleeve, and told the mother and daughter, "Hmph! I'm washing my hands of this."
Windsor's mother walked over and stroked her daughter's head, telling her gently, "Your father loves you, too. You don't realize how much he cares about saving face."
"Back when they were young, Lucas's father, Abuda, always had the edge over him. So he compared himself with Abuda in everything. When you were born, he even happily told your tiny little self that his daughter would definitely be cuter than Abuda's son."
"So naturally, he rather disliked Abuda's son, Lucas. Later, although what you saw was him getting angry because your cultivation wasn't progressing as quickly as Lucas's, what you didn't know was that whenever he mentioned you out of your sight, he smiled more happily than anyone!"
"Even after your little brother was born the year before last, you were still his favorite. Last time, when he heard from the people of the tribe that you had gone outside the tribe's territory, he immediately put your brother down and ran out after you, terrified that you might get hurt or be in danger."
"So you need to understand your father!"
Before this, Windsor had still been a little angry with her father for always forcing things on her. But now that she had learned the truth from her mother, she finally understood that her father's love was always so understated yet so fervent.
Naturally, Windsor did not know that there was a kind of creature in this world called a doting father, much less that the person she liked now was the same sort of man as her own old father.
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