Making a slingshot

The first lesson was physics. The physics teacher, Kuang Haihan, was also the director of academic affairs. Unlike full-time administrators at key municipal and provincial secondary schools, anyone who became principal or director of student affairs at the town's junior high needed not only some connections in the education commission's school district, but also solid teaching skills...

Physics began in the second year of junior high, with the basic principles of mechanics. The third year covered electromagnetism...

Qin An was very interested in third-year physics. He remembered that after learning about circuits, he had begun taking apart every electrical appliance at home-the television, washing machine, radio, even the electricity meter and light bulbs...

He had been annoyed that the dormitory building's main meter kept tripping and its fuse kept blowing. Once he understood how fuses worked, he had replaced the fuse wire with iron wire, causing a small fire. Although there had been no major losses, Qin Huai and Li Qin had spent an entire week apologizing to people, and Qin An had been beaten half to death...

Qin An had always felt that the knowledge taught in junior and senior high school was the true essence of a well-rounded education... as long as there were no exams...

With that basic knowledge of circuits, Qin An had been able to repair televisions, refrigerators, microwaves, and the like in the years that followed, so long as their circuit boards were not badly damaged...

Kuang Haihan was a tall, thin, middle-aged man, about the same age as Qin An's father, Qin Huai. Although his lessons were excellent, after briefly flipping through a few pages, Qin An felt there was no need to listen...

A single lesson generally only covered those few pages...

Qin An took out a sheet of white paper and a pencil and began writing and sketching...

Sun Sun glanced over from time to time. At first, she thought Qin An was slacking off again, but when she saw him labeling angles, vector lines, and coordinates, as well as writing down a pile of formulas, realization dawned on her. He was reviewing second-year mechanics...

After class ended, Qin An still did not put down his pencil, but some structural shapes had been added to his originally simple drawing. It no longer looked like a mechanics diagram...

"What have you been drawing all lesson...?" Although Sun Sun disliked Qin An doing strange things in class, she was curious after all...

"I'm going to make a slingshot. The kind with limitless power that never misses..." Qin An hunched over his desk, concentrating as though he were doing something quite remarkable...

Sun Sun slapped her forehead. Qin An was beyond saving, and she had actually thought he was reviewing mechanics...

Although Qin An had bluffed Tu Gang that morning, he did not think he could bluff him again the next time they met...

The greatest difference between adults and minors was not physical strength. Rather, once adults became part of society, they always had some social resources that allowed them to handle many crises and gave them greater confidence; when they sensed danger and could not resolve it independently, they were at a loss...

Minors were different. There were few problems they could solve independently, and it was difficult for them to harness social resources for their own use...

Although a thug like Tu Gang was only fifteen, the mechanics at his family's garage amounted to social resources he could use. That was the real reason the other children feared him...

Having gone from being an adult to being a minor, Qin An constantly felt a sense of danger at losing control of the social resources he was accustomed to. For a thirteen-year-old child, carrying a dagger would not be much use, and sometimes it could bring even greater danger...

Qin An decided to make a slingshot. Most people regarded slingshots as children's toys, but serious enthusiasts knew that with a powerful compound slingshot driven by eight strands of rubber tubing, a little practice, and the stability and accuracy of the compound design, hitting a ten-centimeter-wide object fifty meters away with a steel ball one centimeter in diameter was not particularly difficult...

At closer range, a ball fired from an eight-strand compound slingshot could easily pierce an adult's palm...

Slingshots could inflict considerable damage, but as long as they did not hit vulnerable areas such as the eyes, the chances of causing disability or death were very low, while they could still serve as a deterrent. That was why Qin An had chosen to make a slingshot for self-defense...

After drawing out the structure of a compound slingshot, Qin An realized that making one was far too difficult with his current capabilities. Even if he managed to cobble one together, it would hardly deliver the stability and accuracy of a compound slingshot...

It looked as though he could only make an ordinary slingshot. With suitable materials and sufficiently resilient rubber bands, it would still be quite powerful, but its accuracy and stability would fall far short of a compound slingshot's...

Qin An was an old hand with slingshots. As long as he became familiar with it and practiced more, he could make up for its shortcomings in accuracy and stability through proficiency...

After hurriedly finishing lunch, Qin An ran out of school. An old man surnamed Liu lived on the hill behind the school. He had no children and had always lived alone, until more than a decade later, when Liu the Old Man suddenly became rich. His net worth was said to have reached seven figures, and he had even married a virgin...

The source of Liu the Old Man's sudden wealth was the huanghuali tree in his courtyard, along with a square huanghuali dining table that seated eight...

As Qin An remembered it, mature huanghuali timber suitable for furniture cost over 6,000 yuan per kilogram. Some special huanghuali boards even fetched more than 20,000 yuan per kilogram, reaching twenty million yuan per tonne...

After speculation drove up huanghuali prices, Liu the Old Man struck it rich overnight, and Qingshan Town became a lively place. Thieves climbed onto the roofs of some ancestral homes, removed the tiles, and sawed away their huanghuali beams. Other people's ancestral graves were dug up and their huanghuali coffins stolen. The craziest case involved a clerk in the town government office, who sawed off a section of huanghuali stair railing in the government office building...

Of course, Qin An had not come running to Liu the Old Man's house to steal his dining table. He only wanted a forked branch...

"Grandpa Liu, I'd like to take a forked branch from your tree..." Seeing Liu the Old Man sitting in the courtyard weaving a bamboo basket, Qin An asked openly...

"What do you want that for?" Liu the Old Man looked up. He did not know Qin An, but he could guess that he was a student at the nearby town junior high...

"To make a slingshot..." Qin An chuckled...

"Kids these days just won't study properly... Go ahead. That old tree's been around for quite a while. Its wood's hard enough, so it'll do for a slingshot..." Liu the Old Man remarked casually. It was no big deal...

Qin An picked up Liu the Old Man's saw and climbed the huanghuali tree, whose trunk was already nearly half a meter in diameter...

Huanghuali trees were easy to plant and keep alive, but extremely slow to yield usable timber. Growing to thirty centimeters in diameter took nearly a thousand years. Qin An could not even guess how old this huanghuali tree was...

Qin An selected the forked branch best suited to making a slingshot, sawed it off, and began smoothing it with Liu the Old Man's tools...

Qin An was delighted. What was a compound slingshot compared to this? This was the finest of the fine-a slingshot made from thousand-year-old huanghuali wood. Calling it a work of art would be no exaggeration...