Chapter 203: Preaching the Dao

"That's not how my father taught it back then!" a certain scoundrel replied.

"What?" Hearing this kid actually dare to question him, the master instantly flew into a rage, raised his scabbard, and chased the scoundrel all over the yard, beating him.

After master and disciple had run two laps around the company entrance, the master's fury finally subsided a little: "Get over here! Got some nerve, huh, daring to talk back!"

Yang Er walked over with a bitter face.

Wei Yuan, instead of hitting him now, thought for a moment, then assumed a ready stance with legs apart, holding his blade straight forward: "Attack!"

Yang Er's eyes lit up at these words; he swung his wooden blade and hacked over. At the same moment, Wei Yuan used the same motion to hack at Yang Er's neck. The next instant, Yang Er's wooden blade stopped at Wei Yuan's chest, while Wei Yuan's sheathed Black Crocodile had already come to rest on Yang Er's neck.

"Again!" Wei Yuan's words were clipped and forceful.

Yang Er, hearing this, sidestepped and hacked down again. After repeating this several times, the further they went, the more often Yang Er got struck on the neck first.

"Know why you're always half a beat slow?" Twenty minutes later, the two sat panting on the steps at the entrance.

"My movements have extra bits."

With a smack, someone got another slap to the head: "If you knew, why were you still talking back earlier?"

"What is a battlefield? It's a place where blades draw blood and life or death is decided in an instant! It tolerates not the slightest superfluous movement."

Wei Yuan patiently lectured the scoundrel: "Movements must be simple and unadorned. Simplicity brings speed; in the blink of an eye, your foe is already clutching his throat and collapsing, while you seem as if you haven't moved at all — that's when you've reached mastery! This principle is the same as the bayonet drills we practice: the strike must be lightning fast, then quickly shift your center of gravity back to defend."

Yang Er thought it over, then pointed at the blade in Wei Yuan's hand: "I have a good blade. One fierce cleave and the opponent is finished."

"Heh heh." Wei Yuan shook his head, laughing: "You've probably seen too many plays of great heroes brawling in Hangzhou City, haven't you?"

"You're a soldier now. Your future opponents won't be those few great heroes." Wei Yuan raised his head and gazed at the distant night sky: "What we'll face in days to come — some fighting in formation, some ambushing and killing in dense forests, perhaps even mass brawls on the swaying bows of ships — in short, all of them will be formidable foes who don't care about life or death. You, with one fierce cleave… heh heh, before you can even pull your blade from the bone joint, someone else will have finished you off."

Looking at the young man lost in thought, Wei Yuan lightly patted his shoulder: "Forget all those street-performer tricks from your past. They're not meant for the battlefield."

Yang Er was a little sad: "Ah, my father said back then that when I got a bit older, he'd teach me the essence of the Yang Family Blade Technique! Too bad he passed away half a year later…"

Hearing this, Wei Yuan smiled bitterly and shook his head. He wouldn't tell Yang Er that the so-called ancestral "Yang Family Blade Technique" was actually fabricated. Because Yang Er still believed, even now, that he was a descendant who had inherited the mantle of the Blue-faced Beast Yang Zhi of Water Margin Mount Liang…

Back then, his street-performer foster father, seeing the birthmark on his face, had probably casually told a storybook tale to amuse him. Who would have thought that after all these years, the scoundrel still clung to it so stubbornly.

"…Let's go for a walk." Wei Yuan dropped the subject of Yang Er's foster father, stood up, and walked out of Shang Hall.

Taijiang on a summer night was bustling and clamorous. Standing here on Dayuan Island, one could faintly hear the noise drifting over from Chikan Street on the opposite shore. Walking along the brightly lit Pier District, Wei Yuan glanced at Yang Er beside him, who was hugging two blades, and asked with a smile: "Do you know what both your foster father and I saw in you?"

Yang Er shook his head blankly.

"Talent. You have one talent that is one in a million: exceptional motor nerves."

Yang Er remained blank, because he could not understand this term.

Wei Yuan no longer tried to explain, but told the scoundrel directly: "You just need to remember this: whether running, jumping, playing, walking, or practicing martial arts, you are always more at ease than others, your movements more nimble."

Yang Er understood this time. The scoundrel said excitedly: "No wonder the big beggar-catchers in Hangzhou City could never catch me — so it's one in a million!"

Wei Yuan shook his head and uttered another sentence the scoundrel couldn't understand: "You've been held back by the times. Otherwise, training from a young age, you'd have no problem making it as a point guard in the CBA someday."

"For now, just honestly learn the craft of killing and go stake your life on the battlefield. Kid, work hard — supermodel clubs will come sooner or later!"

Yang Er understood most of this sentence, so he nodded forcefully. The young man's mind wandered far; the next moment he grew excited again: "Then it's settled — I'll work hard at my craft, and this blade must be passed down to me!"

"You think this is some two-hundred-yuan Yangjiang knockoff?" Wei Yuan sneered: "Kid, this is custom-made by Cold Steel Company. The only one in the whole world. You want it? Wait till I close my eyes for good."

Yang Er only understood that this blade was not for him. Drawing the Black Crocodile in his arms out just a sliver, he gazed enviously at the streamlined edge and the serrations on the spine. The scoundrel was very dejected: "How am I supposed to kill enemies in battle with this wooden blade?"

"Hmm, right now your first two cuts are passable, but once your movements multiply, flaws appear. Train well. Once your movements are steady and you dare to kill, I'll go to the Steel Plant and have someone lathe a blade for you." Wei Yuan looked at the scoundrel with amusement: "Do you dare to kill?"

The scoundrel answered honestly: "With a gun, I can. With a blade, I can't say for sure."

"Heh heh, that's not your fault." Wei Yuan patted his head affectionately: "Not slippery, not timid — you'd have died long ago in some stinking gutter in Hangzhou City. Take it slow. Sooner or later, we'll correct this timid habit of yours."

No matter the era, rising above others demands more effort and sweat than the next person. Yang Er the scoundrel, a gifted beggar, was now walking just such a path. Though deep in his heart he still somewhat resisted this fate, everything had long been decided and could not be changed.

Wei Yuan and Yang Er strolled for a long time that night. Yet what they never expected was that such leisurely evenings would not come again for a very long time to come.

The next day at noon, intelligence came from across the strait: Zheng Zhilong had arrived in Fuzhou.

From that moment on, all regular troops of the Crossing Faction, regardless of army or navy, uniformly entered a state of combat readiness.

On the Navy side, counting the newly commissioned destroyer with hull number 303, the Crossing Faction now possessed three vessels capable of conducting high-speed naval warfare.

At present, these three destroyers were in the midst of intense drills and equipment testing.

In consideration of the imminent real combat, the armament of the three destroyers had been further enhanced.

First was the gunfire. The deck, which originally held only two naval-type Napoleon cannons, had now been rearranged: one Napoleon 12-pounder was installed at the bow and one at the stern, with two 8-pounders installed amidships.

On land, the practiced rate of fire for a Napoleon cannon was four rounds per minute. On a heaving deck, two to three rounds were permissible. Even so, the two 12-pounder broadside guns could still maintain continuous fire within a thousand meters, posing an immense threat to the Zheng Clan's blessing ships. If both sides closed to within five hundred meters, then with the addition of the 6-pounders, luck would become the enemy's sole condition for survival.

These past two days, what the three destroyers were testing in the open sea off Dayuan was not only their armament, but also their propulsion systems.

Throughout the Ming dynasty, although coal was not the mainstream fuel in the south, it still held a certain share in daily life. In Fujian during the Ming, although the metallurgical industry mainly used charcoal, various earthen kilns — including some brick kilns and porcelain kilns, especially those near coal-producing counties like Longyan — still used coal in no small amount.

After receiving Xiong Wencan's secret summon pacification not long ago, Dayuan had successively received no fewer than ten shipments of coal vessels. And the coal, totaling eight hundred tons, was not sent to the Kiln District for burning, but was instead entirely processed into gasification coke.

Gasification coke is different from the metallurgical coke used specifically for ironmaking and steelmaking. Metallurgical coke requires specialized high-temperature smelting to enhance its cohesiveness and hardness while reducing its sulfur content.

Gasification coke, however, has far fewer requirements: this type of coke has low lump size and strength, making it unsuitable for blast furnace smelting, but its gasification reactivity is good and its ash content is low — it is a type of coke made specifically for producing coal gas.

Right now, what was loaded in the bottom holds of the three destroyers was gasification coke.

The amount of coal gas that gasification coke can provide far exceeds that of wood. If the Transmigrators wanted their ships to intercept and kill across the sea without suffering from insufficient power at critical moments, then the best method was to use this expensive fuel.

Apart from the Navy's preparations, these past two days all regular Army soldiers — in reality, the First Army Battalion, numbering only three hundred men in total — had also been sent aboard the ships in rotation to conduct acclimatization training. The subjects included shooting, repelling boarding, close combat, and island search operations.

On the day of departure, the Army would assign fifty soldiers in the best condition to each destroyer to assist in combat.

Of course, at the very end of all combat preparations, naturally, various later-generation weapons used to safeguard the base were indispensable — the reinforced stern cabin had now become a signature structure of a certain faction's vessels. Because the instruments inside the cabin and the machine gun nest on its roof were both fundamental to how the Transmigrators made their way in this world.

On the matter of eliminating Zheng Zhilong, it could be said that all factions were ideologically highly unified and willing to pay the price for it. So what was the price? The price was the two fingers Xia Xianze had held up long ago at the Zheng Clan Analysis Meeting.

When a certain someone, spittle flying, declared, "This man must be eliminated early," his fingers were forming a "V" shape.

The "V" shape not only represents victory, it also represents two — meaning two crates of import goods.

This was, to date, the greatest price the Crossing Faction was willing to pay to kill a single person. And the Military, which had divided up the quota for these two crates of goods, knew very well in their hearts that such a good opportunity would never come again. It must be understood that, apart from some single-use RPGs, RDX, and similar killing devices, the rest of the weapons under the banner of eliminating Zheng were mostly reusable — such as machine guns and sniper rifles.

The fangs had been sharpened to a razor's edge; now they only awaited the signal from the opposite shore!