Chapter 37: Dashing Beyond Compare

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Whoever comes to an unfamiliar place will respect the customs and habits of its people.

And in the famous village of gunmakers, the greatest custom of all was testing firearms.

At first, Qin Jun had been extremely astonished when he saw it.

What he witnessed had seemed utterly outrageous, but he gradually grew accustomed to it, because what he himself did was even crazier.

He had made two sniper rifles, each worth five million.

He alternated between them every day, firing without pause. What did that say about his marksmanship?

Whenever Qin Jun thought of the sniper rifles, each worth five million at market price, his heart ached.

No one was buying the things he made! He had never imagined that the mercenaries would all be such paupers!

While Qin Jun was distracted, he suddenly felt his hands go slack. The rifle had been snatched away again.

Qin Feng was truly a professional. The moment he got his hands on the rifle, he pointed the barrel skyward, then lowered it, pressurized it, and pulled the trigger.

“At close range, the trajectory is fairly stable. The bullet deviation isn’t too great, and the tumbling at short distances shouldn’t be severe.”

Qin Jun could only listen to Qin Feng, who wore an utterly feverish expression.

He knew Qin Feng was right. The turtledove from earlier had not been far from the shattered pane of glass.

“At most, it deflects fifteen degrees. Within fifteen meters, that degree of deviation is acceptable, especially since you made the barrel by hand!”

Qin Feng was quite satisfied with the rifle in his hands.

He did not hurry to find another target. Instead, he loaded another round, lowered and pressurized the barrel, and pulled the trigger.

With a soft puff, he naturally hit nothing at all.

He loaded another round. This time, he moved farther away, standing perhaps twenty meters from the western wall.

He slowly took aim at a pane of glass in the wall and pulled the trigger.

With a bang, a pane beside it shattered.

Qin Feng quickly loaded another round, pressurized the rifle, and fired. This time, however, he had shifted the barrel slightly.

With a sharp crack, the pane he had originally aimed at shattered.

“Hit it. At twenty meters, the bullet’s tumbling is fairly mild—still within a controllable range.”

Qin Feng turned around and held out his hand. “Bullets. I’ll test them a few more times for you. You certainly can’t hit the target right now anyway.”

“Second Brother, you know this is for hunting. I need to test how it feels to fire!” Qin Jun said helplessly.

Qin Feng gave a sly chuckle. “Now that the rifle is finished, shouldn’t you prepare more ammunition? Hurry up and make some bullets!”

As he spoke, Qin Feng reached out and snatched them away. He had had his eye on those bullets for quite some time.

After successfully fishing more than a dozen rounds from Qin Jun’s pocket, Qin Feng sighed instead.

“That’s all? This isn’t nearly enough. Hurry up and make more.”

Qin Jun was speechless. Where had his normally steady second brother gone?

Where had the second brother who had once possessed the noble virtue of yielding the larger share to others gone?

“Get moving. Make more. Oh, and your craftsmanship seems decent enough. Why didn’t you make it self-loading? Use your head a little!”

Furious, Qin Jun turned and walked away. His second brother had unquestionably been replaced by someone else.

After Qin Jun left, Qin Feng let out a triumphant laugh.

And when he stepped out of the house and began testing the rifle’s range and degree of deflection, his pride only grew greater.

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By then, some villagers had already eaten breakfast and were preparing to head out to work. Naturally, they all saw Qin Feng carrying a long rifle.

The rifle was simply too eye-catching. Not a single person had ever seen anything like it.

There were not many former soldiers in the village, but almost every able-bodied adult man had served in the militia.

In the past, they had undergone at least two months of training every year. During every harvest season, in all four seasons, they had also been required to patrol and stand guard.

Thus, few of the village men did not know how to use a gun, and they had all seen the various firearms kept in the commune’s armed forces office.

Yet none of them had ever seen a rifle like the one in Qin Feng’s hands.

Compared with the Type 38 rifle, the Chiang Kai-shek rifle, the old tube rifle, and the others, this gun was simply too beautiful.

Even a Type 56 semi-automatic looked like an ugly duckling beside it!

“Damn, what kind of gun is that?”

“Qin Feng, did you buy it? Or borrow it?”

“Let me try it!”

“I saw it first. I’m trying it!”

“Stop fighting over it. Anyone can tell this gun is valuable. If you damage it, even if we sold everything you own, you couldn’t afford to pay for it.”

“Qin Feng, is this a new gun? Why does it look a little strange?”

“Yeah! I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I’ve been to the county seat, and even the department store there doesn’t sell this kind of gun!”

“Ha! I’ve even been to the provincial capital. I didn’t see anything like it in the department stores there either!”

“Let me have a look. There’s something odd about it.”

“It is a little strange. Why does it look as though it was made by hand?”

“Don’t talk nonsense. Who could make a gun like this?”

...

No matter what the others said, Qin Feng remained silent.

Naturally, he was not about to let them snatch the rifle away.

He did not mind letting them look at it, but touching it was out of the question.

As for Qin Feng himself, he ran his hands over the rifle, assembled from all-steel components, and found it satisfying in every way.

A gun needed this kind of rugged beauty.

After all, it was a tool for taking life. What was the point of making its exterior gaudy and ornate?

Therefore, the crude, simplified sniper-style air rifle that Qin Jun considered unfit for display was, in Qin Feng’s eyes, imposing, domineering, and devastatingly handsome!

“Qin Feng, what are you standing there daydreaming about? Do you really think we’re going to steal your gun?”

“That’s right. Where did this rifle come from? How much would one cost?”

“It must be expensive. I’ve never even seen this kind of gun. And look at the material—it’s solid steel!”

“Let me see. I really haven’t seen anything like this before. How much does a new Type 56 semi-automatic cost these days?”

“A new one? Probably several hundred.”

“Don’t ask me. I couldn’t afford one anyway!”

At that moment, Qin Feng spoke up. “I don’t know how much it costs. Stop blocking the road. I’m going to test the rifle. It’s not that I’m stingy and unwilling to let you try it—I simply don’t have many bullets!”

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Hearing this, Qin Jun turned and went back into the workshop.

Apart from the fact that wind blew through it from every direction, the workshop had no real drawbacks—though, admittedly, it did not even have a chair.

Qin Jun found the bullets he had cast earlier. They all needed to be polished.

He found several files and gathered up the bullets, intending to return to his room.

There was no coal in the furnace, and the fire had long since gone out. The bedroom would be warmer.

As soon as he stepped outside, Qin Jun saw his mother entering the courtyard with his two older sisters, laughing and chatting about something.

One look at the baskets hanging from their arms told him that each contained half a basket of coal.

It seemed they had had a good haul. His mother, in particular, was even clutching a bundle of blasting wire.

It was essentially iron wire coated in insulating varnish, used by underground coal miners to set up blasting lines.

After helping his mother and sisters dump all the coal in the corner by the wall, Qin Jun picked up the bundle of blasting wire.

It had come a little late, since he already had money now.

“What are you looking at? Little Jun, is there something you need to discuss with your sister?”

Qin Jun looked up and saw the bright, lovely face of his eldest sister.

Girls of eighteen or nineteen were all at the age when their eyes shone brightly, their skin glowed with health, and their bodies were sturdy and strong.

It was also the age when they cared most about their appearance, always finding ways to dress themselves up.

But in an era of scarcity, the most they could manage was a red ribbon for their hair.

Girls like these wore no makeup and had no beauty filters. They could work barefoot in the fields.

If one had to find something to praise, perhaps it would be their tall, graceful figures.

From head to toe, every line of their bodies was perfect. They were as lovely as white poplar trees.

It was an innocent age, when even people’s faces bore an unmistakable simplicity.

His two sisters were typical country girls. They were not plain—in fact, they could even be called delicate and refined, a rare quality in the countryside.

Both sisters had fine names. The eldest was Qin Yingchun, a name given to her by their grandmother.

Beginning with Qin Jun’s generation, the men of the Qin family were all given two-character names. That had been their grandmother’s decision.

As for why the older generation had three-character names, it was because their grandmother had not yet been in charge of the household back then.

It was said that during the Song Dynasty, two-character names signified nobility, and only aristocrats were given such names.

No one knew who had told her that, but Qin Jun’s grandmother firmly believed it.

Thus, all the children born afterward were given two-character names.

Even those who had originally been given three-character names were renamed!

Of course, girls were an exception. That was why the eldest was called Qin Yingchun, while the second was called Qin Fengchun.

They had their grandmother to thank for that. Otherwise, they would surely have ended up with names like Big Flower and Second Flower, or Little Girl and Second Girl.

Qin Jun had been back for nearly a month, yet he had rarely seen his two sisters.

Only today, beneath the sunlight, did he finally have the chance to study their faces carefully.

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