Chapter 190: Chapter 122: Strength 3.0, Precision is Elegance

By the time the Rolls-Royce dropped Li Wei off at home, he was still trying to wrap his head around just how large a seventy or eighty-thousand-acre estate was.

"Goddamn," Li Wei muttered, grinning as he stared at the roughly 300-square-kilometer figure on his phone’s calculator. "What’s the difference between that and being a local emperor?"

A family owning a 300-square-kilometer private estate just one or two hours’ drive from the capital... Li Wei still couldn’t quite picture what that would look like.

The gate guard watched Li Wei pass through the corridor, lost in thought, a hint of resentment creeping into his eyes.

He had been waiting for days, but Don Quixote still hadn’t shown up.

He dearly missed that crazy Knight and was itching to go on patrol with him in the inner city.

Of course, that was all contingent on his nephew being willing to give him a tip.

Li Wei didn’t notice the guard’s resentful gaze. He walked straight through the corridor and went home.

Lily and Don Quixote were sound asleep, so Li Wei returned to his own room.

Looking at the faintly glowing 0.1 free attribute points and his 2.9 Strength on the panel, Li Wei took a deep breath.

’System, assign points!’

[Strength 2.9] -> [Strength 3.0]

A strange, icy sensation traveled from his brain, through his nerves and spine, and spread to every limb. He felt as if a switch had been flipped inside his body.

It was an esoteric, almost mystical feeling. Li Wei suddenly couldn’t feel his own muscles, yet he could still control them with perfect precision.

He collapsed to the floor like a rubber man, then shot back up as if he’d been instantly inflated.

He looked at a crumpled ball of paper on his desk and suddenly wanted to throw it into the trash can.

Li Wei started walking toward the desk.

His bedroom was over 40 square meters, and it took more than ten steps to get from the door to the desk.

On the first step, he moved like a Parkinson’s patient, but by the third, he could walk normally again.

After five steps, he had regained full control of his body, allowing him to reach the desk and grab the wad of paper.

Just as Li Wei was about to turn, a layout of the room suddenly appeared in his mind.

"If I remember correctly," he murmured to himself, "the trash can is right by my bed."

Without even turning, he casually tossed it over his shoulder, his back still to the trash can.

The ball of paper flew in a perfect arc and landed, without the slightest deviation, right in the center of the can.

Only then did Li Wei look at his attribute panel.

[Stage Mission: Reach 3.0 in three attributes. Complete.]

[Free Attribute Points +0.3]

[Strength, Agility, and Constitution have reached 3.0. Knight: Bronze Body (Extraordinary) is evolving...]

[Knight: Silver Body (Extraordinary) 2/4] -> [Knight: Silver Body (Extraordinary) 3/4]

[Skill Acquired: Predestined Trajectory]

[Predestined Trajectory: Storms cannot divert the arrow of fate, nor can darkness obscure the path of truth.]

[Skill Description: Your intent becomes the result. As long as the target is within your line of sight, memory, or perception, all checks are considered a guaranteed hit.]

’Predestined Trajectory?’

Li Wei sat on the edge of his bed, carefully considering the new skill.

"A guaranteed hit?" he muttered. "Is this another causality-based skill? Like Wall-Walking?"

He looked at the pen holder on his desk, got up, grabbed a handful of ballpoint pens from it, and walked to the door, standing seven or eight meters away with his back to the desk.

Taking a deep breath, he recalled the pen holder’s position and began tossing the pens behind him, one by one, without ever looking back.

"THWACK!" "THWACK!" "THWACK!"

The sounds of the pens landing in the holder echoed in the room. When his hands were empty, he turned to look.

Every single pen was resting securely in the holder.

...

「The next day」

Li Wei returned to school and went to the athletic field again.

Although the early morning sun had pierced through the clouds, it only cast a blinding, cold glare off the snow, offering no warmth.

Only the running track in the middle had been hastily cleared, revealing the dark red rubber surface.

Li Wei stood on the end line of the football field’s end zone, casually weighing a baseball in his hand. His breath condensed into thick white clouds in front of him before being quickly dispersed by the cold wind.

"That’s 100 yards, Li Wei! A full 100 yards!"

Craig stood on the sidelines, bundled in a heavy down jacket and huddled like a quail. His hands were red with cold, but he held his phone steady, the camera aimed at Li Wei in the distance. "I know you’re strong, but in this weather, your joints aren’t warmed up yet. What if you pull something..."

"It’s fine, Craig," Li Wei shouted back. "Trust me."

He looked at the goalpost crossbar at the other end of the field, 100 yards (91.44 meters) away.

It was a yellow metal bar.

Li Wei weighed the baseball in his hand, stepped back with his right foot, and suddenly engaged his core. With a Strength of 3.0, his body became like a fully drawn bow.

There was no need to calculate wind speed, humidity, or the angle of his arm like a professional pitcher. The moment the intent to ’hit the crossbar’ formed in his mind, an invisible, inevitable causal line already connected the ball in his hand to the metal bar a hundred yards away.

[Predestined Trajectory] activated.

Li Wei’s right arm, which he had been preparing to throw with, made minuscule adjustments under the skill’s guidance—his wrist turned inward by a negligible degree, his shoulder dropped a fraction, and his release angle lifted slightly to compensate for gravity.

The sensation was bizarre, as if his body had a will of its own, forcibly correcting any potential "errors" he might have made.

None of this required any thought from Li Wei. All he had to do was think, ’I want to hit that crossbar.’

His brain issued the command "hit the crossbar," and his body automatically determined the one and only solution required to achieve that result.

The baseball left his hand.

The ball didn’t travel in a straight line that defied physics, but in an extremely flat, precisely calculated parabola.

"CLANG—!!!"

The crisp, resounding clang of metal on metal exploded across the empty campus.

A hundred yards away, the baseball struck the exact center of the crossbar and even bounced high into the air from the residual spin.

"Fack!" Craig exclaimed, his mouth falling open as he stared at his screen. "How did you do that? A direct hit on the first throw?"

"Just lucky, I guess," Li Wei said, shaking his arm out. "I’ll try a few more times."

After a few more tries with several different types of balls, Li Wei began to get a feel for how [Predestined Trajectory] worked in the real world.

Within his throwing range, the skill [Predestined Trajectory] would help him by directly correcting for all conditions and adjusting his angle to ensure a perfect hit.

However, if he tried to exceed the limits of his current strength—for example, trying to throw a football over 120 yards—[Predestined Trajectory] would automatically fail.

"Damn it," Li Wei muttered to himself. "My strength is still too low."

Taking his phone back from Craig, he watched the replay while looking at his attribute panel:

[Strength: 3.0]

[Spirit: 1.6]

[Agility: 3.0]

[Constitution: 3.0]

[Free Attribute Points: 0.3]

[Skills]: [Eloquent], [Frenzy], [Stealth], [Knight Fighting Art (Passive)], [Wall-Walking], [Predestined Trajectory]

[Knight: Silver Body (Extraordinary) 3/4]

[Equipment]: [Ring of Smooth Success]

Since he couldn’t increase the other three attributes, Li Wei could only dump the remaining 0.3 attribute points into Spirit.

[Spirit 1.6] -> [Spirit 1.9]

His mind instantly cleared, and the slight drowsiness from alternating between the cold sports field and the warm indoors vanished completely.

Li Wei looked down at the copy of *Principles of Microeconomics* he was halfway through. It was one of the core textbooks on the reading list for the Yale School of Management he had found.

When his Spirit was at 1.6, he had still found it somewhat difficult to self-study this tome filled with obscure terminology, complex supply-and-demand curves, and calculus derivations—though he didn’t know that his learning pace was already considered fast at the Yale School of Management.

Last night, while studying the decomposition of substitution and income effects in the Slutsky equation, he had to stop and work through the derivation three times on scratch paper before he could barely grasp the logical loop.

But now that he had raised his Spirit by 0.3 to 1.9, he found it easy to enter a flow state. His learning efficiency and ability increased dramatically, and his memory, which hadn’t improved in a long time, was further enhanced.

He randomly flipped to a page on the Fisher separation theorem, studied it for a few seconds, then closed his eyes to recall the details.

Every label on the accompanying graph’s axes was imprinted in his mind like a high-definition photograph. Unless he actively tried to forget it, this ’photo’ seemed like it would stay in his memory for a long time.

He was now looking forward to seeing the expressions on the faces of the School of Management professors when he met them after his Spirit reached 3.0.

「A few days later」

The Chinese New Year was just around the corner.

Don Quixote and Lily were incredibly excited about it and started planning with Li Wei how to celebrate a week in advance.

"Let’s do hot pot, then!" Li Wei said after a moment’s thought. "We can check out the Whole Foods nearby."

Unlike the Chinese-owned fresh food markets near Sunset Park that Li Wei remembered, Whole Foods specifically catered to high-income earners and white-collar professionals.

Soft, warm lighting illuminated stacks of fruits and vegetables arranged like works of art. The air was filled with the aroma of freshly ground coffee and baked bread, with none of the fishy, raw smell of a typical seafood section.

Most of the shoppers around them wore cashmere coats, elegantly pushing their carts down wide aisles as they selected expensive products labeled "Non-GMO," "Organic," and "Locally Sourced from Farm."

Li Wei stood before the refrigerated meat counter, gazing at the cuts of Japanese A5 Wagyu, its marbling as intricate as marble.

"$149.99 USD a pound," Lily exclaimed from beside him. "That’s so expensive."

It was indeed expensive. Li Wei thought back to his days of pinching pennies at discount supermarkets, which were always filled with the clamor of shouted sales and jostling crowds.

The floors were always wet, a mixture of puddles and trampled vegetable leaves.

"We’re getting it," he said, grabbing two cuts of the Wagyu without a second glance. "I’m going to see for myself what’s so great about this Japanese Wagyu in a hot pot."

A beautifully packaged box of organic arugula, complete with paper lining and decorative green leaves, was priced at 12.99 US Dollars for a mere 5 ounces (about 100g).

Li Wei bought that too.

’If I’ve decided to stop living a hard life, I might as well go all the way.’

Alaskan king crab—grabbed one. Gillardeau oysters from France—two boxes. Vintage champagne, and even organic black truffle soy sauce for the hot pot dipping sauce. Li Wei grabbed whatever caught his eye, completely ignoring the value for money.

Li Wei forced himself not to look at the prices, repeating in his mind that it was for the Chinese New Year, which only comes once a year.

When they stood at the checkout counter, the long receipt resembled a white khata.

In the end, including sales tax, the total came to 5,643 USD.

After paying, Li Wei carefully checked the receipt, only to realize that the total was less than 0.3% of his account balance.

His slight apprehension immediately vanished, and he even felt a little happy about his small indulgence.

The three of them returned home, laden with bags of all sizes.

As they passed through the corridor, the gate guard shot another resentful look at Don Quixote before speaking up:

"Mr. Li Wei, someone sent several packages for you. The security guard at the gate left them with me. They’re from Chinatown."

"Chinatown?" Li Wei asked, looking at the pile of sealed bags and boxes at the front desk. "Are they from Lin Daohang?"

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