Chapter 57 I Seem to Have Forgotten Something

"Mingfei, you're here." After ensuring Gao Mi was taken for treatment and confirming he was out of danger, Guderian returned with a relieved mind to look for Lu Mingfei. He knew the boy must have accumulated a mountain of questions.

Right on cue, he also had a stomach full of questions he wanted to ask.

However, as he drew closer, he noticed someone lying on the ground. "Huh? Why is Ye Sheng passed out, and why is his mouth covered in so much blood?"

"Oh, I offered him a piece of spicy shredded snack just now. I suppose his constitution is too weak to handle the stimulation, so he suffered from oral ulcers and coughed up blood," Lu Mingfei said, pointing to an empty packaging bag on the ground.

"Well, that's certainly a massive volume of bleeding." Upon catching sight of the bold characters reading "Extremely Spicy," Guderian felt a sympathetic, dull ache in his lower regions.

Just as he was about to step forward to check if Ye Sheng was alright, Lu Mingfei handed over his Walther PPK first:

"Professor Guderian, your gun. It dropped on the ground earlier and seems broken."

The single-track-minded Guderian immediately forgot all about Ye Sheng upon hearing this. He took the gun and inspected it carefully, only to find it was a minor issue.

The connecting rod had slipped loose, preventing the trigger from pulling. It was a simple fix.

Tucking the weapon back into its holster, his old, wrinkled face lit up with an investigative zeal that rivaled a teenage boy hunting for adult imagery. He stepped forward, gripped Lu Mingfei's shoulders, and said excitedly:

"Mingfei, how on earth did you practice your marksmanship? I could hardly believe my eyes just now—you actually managed to handle this gun."

Guderian knew better than anyone just how brutal the weapons modified by the Equipment Department were. Even he could only manage to control the muzzle on the first shot; every subsequent bullet went wherever fate decided.

With Lu Mingfei's scrawny little physique, the recoil of the PPK was no different from trying to hold back a rampaging, crazed bull. Yet, he had managed to keep the muzzle steady without it drifting, and his accuracy was so perverted that every single shot was a headshot.

At least a sniper rifle had a scope, but a pistol relied entirely on feel!

While Kassel College did have a student council president who dual-wielded Desert Eagles and could similarly ignore recoil, that guy was a massive powerhouse whose upper arms were thick enough to run horses and whose chest could crush flies!

More importantly, that guy had been playing with guns since childhood and underwent professional training to achieve such god-tier marksmanship, whereas Lu Mingfei, aside from the ten shots fired during military training, had never even touched a toy gun at a shooting gallery.

Could someone really become a god-tier marksman just by practicing in video games?

To this, Lu Mingfei's explanation was:

"Well, I just went with the feeling.

At such a close range, I felt like I should hit, and the bullet just happened to hit."

It was a bit perfunctory, a bit idealistic, and didn't quite fit his persona as a materialist fighter.

But now dragons and superpowers had both crawled out of the woodwork, so who gave a damn about materialism anymore?

He couldn't possibly bite on a cigarette, gaze up at a forty-five-degree angle, and say, "Back in the day, I single-handedly fought my way from Spain all the way to Germany, then launched a lightning war on Poland, broke into Russia, and crossed the entire Eurasian continent. After going through countless hardships, I finally managed to run back from Siberia..."

Huh?

Wait!

What on earth was I doing running all over Europe back then?

Lu Mingfei, who had been reminiscing about the glorious years of yore, suddenly froze, standing stock-still as if someone had pressed the pause button.

Aside from playing matches, chasing his wife, and seeing friends, it seemed he had another very important matter in Europe.

For the sake of that matter, our boy hadn't shown his face in public for an entire year, hadn't participated in any StarCraft tournaments, and had even dragged Old Tang down into abandoning his advanced studies...

Yet, why on earth had he made that decision?

Why did he have zero recollection of it?

Lu Mingfei suddenly realized something extremely serious—so serious it bordered on terrifying—

His memory seemed to be malfunctioning, and in a major way!

It felt as though he had forgotten something!

He had forgotten something whose level of importance rivaled that of a wife and children!

Yet, prior to this moment, he hadn't realized at all that a piece of his memory was missing!

It felt as though someone had carved out a massive chunk of his brain and stuffed it with foam filler.

A glancing look revealed nothing out of the ordinary, but a deep excavation would immediately expose that something was wrong!

Who the hell was still using such a cliché and outdated transmigration trope?!

"Ah!"

Just as Lu Mingfei was racking his brains to recall what exactly he had forgotten, Guderian on the side suddenly let out a weird shriek, grabbing Lu Mingfei's shoulders and shaking him violently:

"Hitting the target accurately just by feeling... Could your Spirit of Words be Judgment?!"

"That must be it! You awakened five years ago, and ever since then, you've displayed a shooting talent that can almost be described as transcendent. It has to be Judgment!"

This scatterbrained old man completely failed to notice that Lu Mingfei was deep in thought and continued to grab his shoulders and shake him hard:

"My god, this is an extremely rare Spirit of Words! It has appeared fewer than double-digit times in recorded history!"

At this point, he seemed to suddenly snap back to reality regarding what he had just blurted out. He looked up and peered around nervously like a startled rabbit. Finding that no one was paying attention to them, he let out a long sigh of relief.

Then he lowered his voice to a pitch only the two of them could hear and said:

"Mingfei, you must never tell anyone else what I just told you.

No matter who it is... Uh, I mean, except for the principal, you must not tell a single soul."

Spirits of Words were the most crucial trump cards for people like them. Once a trump card was exposed, they might as well be walking around naked in front of their enemies. Therefore, Kassel College kept strict archives on students' Spirits of Words.

Aside from their academic advisors and the principal, no one else had the authority to view them; even the Disciplinary Committee had to file an official application report to check them.

Shaken out of his daze by Guderian's violent rattling, Lu Mingfei finally recovered from his momentary abstraction.

Realizing there was new intelligence to be gathered, he temporarily pushed his missing memories aside—he wouldn't be able to figure them out right away anyway, and right now was hardly the best time to be spacing out.

He pushed Guderian's hands away and frowned. "Spirit of Words? Is that what you call the superpowers you master after your bloodline awakens?"

If he remembered correctly, the term "Spirit of Words" originated in Japan.

Ancient Japanese believed that language possessed mysterious power; if one could invoke a monster's true name, they could gain the ability to control and enslave it.

It was similar to the process western demon hunters used to hunt and banish evil demons—when holy water and crucifixes failed, they would decipher the demon's true name and eradicate it or drive it back to hell.

"Yes, we half-bloods..." Guderian was about to nod, but his neck suddenly seemed welded in place as he stammered:

"Y-You, how do you know about bloodline awakening and Spirits of Words?"

Lu Mingfei pointed a finger at the corpse-like figure of Ye Sheng lying on the ground. "He told me."

"Impossible! Ye Sheng is one of the Executioner's trump cards; he has long since memorized the Executioner's discipline and confidentiality regulations inside and out. How could he possibly tell you these things?!"

Guderian assumed Lu Mingfei was toying with him, but the latter merely chuckled softly. Like a magician pulling off a trick, he produced a Colt M1911 pistol from behind his back and pressed the muzzle directly between the fourth and fifth ribs on the left side of Guderian's chest:

"Just like this!"

Guderian: ∑(OДO；)

"Wait, Mingfei, don't be impulsive!"

Having witnessed Lu Mingfei's terrifying marksmanship—scoring headshots in pitch darkness—the little German old man would sooner believe that Mustache had just been resurrected to play WarCraft 3 and appointed him as a field marshal than believe Lu Mingfei would miss at point-blank range.

He raised both hands without a second thought and chose surrender: "Mingfei, let's talk this out. Whatever you want to know, I'll tell you everything! There's no need to resort to violence!"