Chapter 207: Training That Serves Multiple Ends

“That is Nostradamus’s interpretation of the prophecy,” Smith said. “A figure from the East, carrying a mysterious force, who will save your life. Whether that refers to Mr. Sawai Takeji or to Mr. Su Jie remains to be seen.”

“Given what we’ve just observed,” Larry said, “I think it’s Mr. Su Jie.” He paused, his mind already moving in a different direction. “I know tarot divination has its own logic. I’ve heard that the East has comparable disciplines — reading a person’s face and features to project their future. Find me someone who practices that art. I want to study it in parallel — see whether the underlying patterns can be drawn into an AI-based predictive model.”

“Understood, sir,” Smith said.

“From now on, when I go out, Su Jie is all I need beside me.” Larry was still turning over what he had witnessed. “He neutralized a man of Sawai’s level in an instant. It’s almost incomprehensible. This is what Eastern gongfu actually produces?”

*****

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

In a private training room, Su Jie held a handful of steel pellets. He flicked them out with his fingers — eight of them in a single second, each one finding a glass beer bottle. The bottles exploded one after another into powder.

The implication was clear: at that velocity, a pellet hitting a human body would not stop at the surface.

Then a low droning filled the room.

Several flies had been released into the space.

They scattered in every direction — erratic, invisible almost, impossible to track.

A flash of cold light. Several needles left Su Jie’s hand. The flies dropped to the floor.

Thrown weapons. He was training with them now.

The terms of his new position were comfortable: he was on call when Larry left the building, and otherwise had the training room to himself. Whatever he needed for his daily practice or nutrition, he submitted a request to Cass and it was approved without delay.

The conditions were exceptional.

His movements were being recorded, naturally — that had been written into the contract. 

The data flowed continuously to Larry’s laboratory.

*****

In another city, a vast life sciences facility hummed with activity. Banks of computers ran without pause, screens scrolling with numbers that researchers logged and debated. Others were bent over experiments at their benches.

Compared to Uncle Mang’s analysis setup, this laboratory operated at a different scale entirely — instruments and equipment that most institutions couldn’t justify, staffed by a concentration of serious scientific talent.

This was one of the research ventures Larry’s group had funded. It did not generate revenue. It consumed it — at a rate, according to outside estimates, of over a billion US dollars annually. Only someone at Larry’s level of wealth could sustain that kind of burn and consider it reasonable. To him, money was a number. He moved it where the problems were interesting.

Su Jie’s training data arrived in real time, and the response in the laboratory was immediate.

“Mary — have you looked at this dataset? Speed, precision, reaction time — all of it is off the human scale by a significant margin. I’d suspect we were looking at a machine if I hadn’t been told otherwise.”

“If I hadn’t seen the source confirmed, I’d have said the same. These numbers don’t read as human.”

“If we could only get blood and tissue samples—”

“They’re in transit. Everyone get ready — the boss has set up a dedicated research fund for this subject. Additional budget incoming.”

“I have a feeling this data is going to break something open for us.”

The laboratory’s pace picked up. Everyone moved with a particular kind of energy.

Su Jie was unaware of any of this.

He continued his practice, deepening his thrown-weapon work.

Releasing a thrown weapon was itself an act of force generation — a complete cycle of storing and expelling energy, which made it excellent conditioning. And in a real encounter, a thrown weapon’s speed, power, and lethality exceeded unarmed striking by a wide margin.

Against ten attackers, empty-handed, he might need thirty or forty seconds to end the situation. With thrown weapons, several seconds — possibly fewer. The difference in efficiency was enormous.

His running speed topped out around nine-plus seconds for a hundred meters. A thrown weapon covered the same distance in one or two.

Gu Yang favored toothpicks as his weapon of choice — practical for close quarters, but aerodynamically limited; beyond five paces they lost accuracy and couldn’t reliably penetrate skin regardless of the force behind them.

Switch to an iron nail, and with Su Jie’s hand strength, it could punch through bone.

While practicing with toothpicks, he found himself thinking about the “toothpick crossbows” that had briefly been popular among children back home — small devices that could pierce an aluminum can at close range. They had eventually been confiscated and banned from sale.

Under Gu Yang’s instruction, Su Jie had learned to see everything around him as a potential thrown weapon: chopsticks, books, a single sheet of paper, a small stone, a nail, a fountain pen, a ballpoint pen — all of them instruments of harm in the right hands.

Odell’s hundred-plus hours of instructional video had included several hours on exactly this.

And the mechanics of throwing, despite their apparent simplicity, were anything but. Each release was a complete expression of trained force — more complex and technically demanding than throwing a punch. Ancient archers who could draw a heavy bow were considered extraordinary physical specimens, and many elite practitioners throughout history had used heavy bow-drawing as their primary method of developing full-body coordinated strength.

After several hours of thrown-weapon training, Su Jie contacted Cass with a new request.

She read the message with curiosity, arranged everything, and brought him to the room used for the third stage of his original assessment.

Several large men stood in front of him.

Their guns were leveled at him. Live ammunition, chambered, ready.

“Su Jie,” Cass said — she had done her best to accommodate the request, but her discomfort was visible. “This is your requested training: have them shoot at you, and knock the weapons from their hands with steel pellets or coins in the instant before they fire?” She paused. “I should mention — these are rubber rounds, but a direct hit still leaves significant marks.”

“That’s fine. We start with rubber, and finish with live rounds.” Su Jie showed no hesitation. These resources were available to him and he intended to use them completely. Back home, this kind of training environment simply didn’t exist.

“If you’re confident — then we begin.” Cass gave the order.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

In the instant each man’s trigger finger moved, the steel pellets left Su Jie’s hand. Every gun clattered to the floor.

The force of each pellet was sufficient that no grip could hold against it.

What Su Jie was developing was perception — the ability to read the precise micro-state of a person in front of him, the accumulation of tiny signals in posture and muscle tension that preceded the moment of firing.

Through repetition, that perception sharpened.

There was also a physical dimension: facing a loaded weapon elevated the nervous system into a heightened state that caused jing, qi, and shen to crystallize and refine in ways ordinary training didn’t produce.

It had been the experience of the battlefield — facing sustained live fire — that had completed his transition into the Realm of the Living Dead and laid the foundation for everything that followed. That exposure had been brief and not replicable on demand. The opportunity to train this quality daily, in a controlled setting, was one he had every reason to take.

At the same time, the effect on Larry’s security personnel was not lost on him. To them, watching Su Jie work, he was becoming something that operated outside normal parameters entirely. The word deity was the shape the feeling took in their minds, though none of them would have said it plainly.

And beyond all of this: every session produced data. That data went to Larry’s life sciences team. Under the contract terms, the findings came back to Su Jie as well. Larry was, in effect, funding Su Jie’s own self-study. And the payments for the data itself were accumulating in his account with each session — a meaningful sum by any normal measure.

In this respect, Su Jie was getting the better of the deal. In another sense, so was Larry — data of this quality had never before been purchasable at any price. Even the most secretive organizations protected it absolutely.

*****

In the days that followed, Su Jie devoted the bulk of each day to live-fire practice. Men with loaded weapons, trained on him, instructed to shoot. He knocked the guns from their hands with thrown pellets, or moved around the shots. Round by round, the calibration became finer.

Within a few days, he could feel the change. In the second before the trigger was pulled, he was reading the shooter’s internal state — estimating the trajectory, projecting where the round would travel, calculating whether it would ricochet and to what angle, then choosing his response. He was getting it right.

The sensation was extraordinary in its subtlety — it came without warning, in fractions of a moment, a thread of perception barely there. Catch it and you lived. Miss it and you didn’t.

That was what a life hanging by a thread actually meant.

And holding that thread was the whole practice.

*****

The intelligence on his training sessions made its way back to Larry.

Cass briefed him in his office — walked him through what Su Jie had been doing day by day, the progression of the training. The billionaire’s expression moved through several degrees of astonishment.

“I pushed hard for this man, sir,” Cass said, with quiet satisfaction. “I’m glad we didn’t pass him over.”

She had watched Su Jie’s weight in Larry’s estimation grow with every new data point.

“The analysis is clear,” said a researcher in a white coat standing at the other end of the office, presenting findings directly to Larry. “After just a few days of this training, he is measurably stronger than before — reaction time, agility, speed, and force output all show significant improvement. The laboratory’s conclusion is unambiguous: no performance-enhancing substances, no joint or skeletal modification of any kind. What we’re seeing is purely psychological in origin — changes in mental state producing coordinated endocrine responses, stimulating the cortical systems that govern physical execution—”

He paused, choosing his words.

“The pattern is consistent with our earlier theoretical models of human potential. It validates a large portion of our previous experimental work. The evidence is now solid: targeted cultivation of psychological quality produces physical gains that far exceed what conventional physical training alone can achieve.”

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