Chapter 287 - 177: If You’re Unconvinced, Come at Me
He wore no goggles or earplugs. He simply raised the pistol, aiming its dark, gaping muzzle straight at the palm of his outstretched left hand.
He took a deep breath and, without hesitation, pulled the trigger.
BANG!
A deafening gunshot echoed throughout the enclosed firing range.
The immense kinetic energy of the bullet only made Li Wei’s left hand jerk back slightly. He opened his hand and looked at his palm.
There was no gaping, bloody wound, no hole torn through his flesh.
On the skin of his palm, tough as old tree bark, there was only a slightly reddened, coin-sized mark. A copper slug, completely deformed as if flattened by a sledgehammer, smoldered with a wisp of smoke before clattering to the ground.
"That stings a bit, like being struck with a whip," Li Wei said, shaking his hand and assessing the sensation. "But it didn’t break the skin. Looks like a 9mm pistol is nothing more than a high-end massager for me now."
"And what’s more..." He picked up the smoldering slug with his bare hand. "With the Body of Silver active, I barely feel the heat. It’s just like touching warm water."
’Is this a trait of a Dragon Blood Knight? If I ever fall on hard times, I can always get a job as a firefighter,’ he thought, rather uninspired.
"Time to bring out the big guns," he said. His gaze skipped over a row of handguns and locked onto a semi-automatic rifle. ’I should be able to take a rifle round now.’
He took down an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, chambered for standard 5.56mm rounds.
A pistol round’s kinetic energy is typically between 400 and 600 joules, whereas a 5.56mm round delivers over 1,700 joules—nearly three times the power.
"Let’s try this."
Steeling himself, Li Wei picked up the AR-15 and chambered a round.
For safety’s sake, he avoided a delicate area like his palm, which was full of small bones and joints. Instead, he pressed the muzzle against the large muscle on the outside of his left thigh. It was the thickest muscle on his body; even if the test failed, the bullet wouldn’t hit a major artery or bone.
The muzzle was less than five centimeters from his thigh.
BANG!
A sharper, tearing crack echoed through the room.
"Hssst—" Li Wei sucked in a sharp breath. ’Feels like when someone brutally twisted my ribs, back before I got the system.’ "That stings a little..."
He immediately looked down.
A large hole had been blasted through the fabric on his outer thigh. On the exposed skin, a deep indentation had formed, and the surrounding tissue was already bruising from the immense impact.
But still, it hadn’t penetrated.
The 5.56mm rifle round had completely disintegrated on impact, leaving behind nothing but a smear of fragmented metal.
Li Wei took a deep breath and scraped the fragments off his skin. He then watched as the bruise and indentation on his leg began to slowly fade, the healing visible to the naked eye.
Since the 5.56mm round couldn’t penetrate his skin, there was probably no need to test a 7.62mm.
All told, Li Wei had spent over 3 million USD on this secret base.
But being able to safely test his powers like this made it all worth it.
Li Wei casually picked up a brick. He didn’t break it with a sharp, accelerated chop like a street performer.
Instead, he simply gripped it at both ends and, with a casual twist of his wrists, snapped it in half as easily as if it were a cardboard toilet paper roll.
「Time flew by. Another week passed in the blink of an eye, and the calendar turned to the end of September.」
For Li Wei, it was just another routine week of attending classes, playing sports, harvesting attributes, and experimenting with Anya in various positions, styles, and locations.
For Chen Haisheng, however, it marked a pivotal moment in his life: the championship match of the New York Golden Gloves amateur boxing tournament.
As fate would have it, his opponent—the biggest obstacle on his path to becoming a professional fighter—was none other than the Black boxer, Marcos, who had knocked him out cold and left him utterly defenseless just one month prior.
This time, Li Wei wasn’t at ringside. Instead, he wore a baseball cap and sat discreetly in the back rows of the audience.
Despite Li Wei’s special training, Chen Haisheng was still struggling.
The turning point came at the end of the third round. At the cost of a nasty cut over his left eye, Chen Haisheng seized an opening in the defense of Marcos—who outweighed him by more than twenty pounds—as the bigger man began to tire. He threw a piercing straight right, a punch loaded with all the humiliation and sweat of the past month, and it landed squarely on Marcos’s chin.
Marcos didn’t even have time to grunt before he crashed, stiff as a board, to the canvas.
The referee finished the count. Chen Haisheng had indisputably won the revenge match, reclaiming the championship title that was rightfully his.
[Mission: The Eight Knightly Virtues · Valor—Complete]
[To challenge a stronger foe is the definition of valor. With your help, Knight’s Squire Chen Haisheng has conquered his inner demons and reclaimed the honor he sought.]
[Mission Reward: Free Attribute Points +0.2]
Another 0.2 attribute points in the bank. Li Wei stood up, his face impassive, but inwardly he was ecstatic. He quietly left the venue.
...
「Late that night, in a car heading from the boxing gym back to Chinatown.」
Chen Haisheng, with adhesive bandages on his face and the corner of one eye swollen high, sat side-by-side with Lin Daohang in the corner of the LX600.
"You fought well today. You really got your own back," Lin Daohang said, handing him a bottle of water. "Once you’ve officially won this amateur championship, our chamber of commerce will pay to get you a good professional agent. Then you can officially turn pro. As for Mr. Li... I’ll go talk to him. I’ll figure out how to negotiate it."