Early in the morning, before the sun had risen over the top of the city wall in the far distance, a young man with glowing red hands and a small winged tiger could be seen practicing claw techniques in a courtyard. Wherever the young man's hands swept, the falling snow would melt. This young man was Jin Shu, who had been practicing the Phoenix Claw technique. It was also the reason that his hands were glowing red. At the Qi Gathering Realm, the Phoenix Claw technique made the practitioner's hands generate high heat. At the Core Forging Realm, it could emit a Phoenix-shaped claw formed from Qi.
Jin Shu stopped his practicing and sat down at a table off to the side. Su Bing stepped forward from behind him and offered a towel to wipe his sweat. "Phew, thank you."
"I think that I've mastered the Phoenix Claw technique at the Qi Gathering Realm. It said in the scroll that my hands would glow a deep crimson. Did it look right to you, Su Bing?" Jin Shu wiped his sweat and asked Su Bing her thoughts.
Su Bing nodded. "It seems you've indeed mastered the technique, Young Master Jin."
Jin Shu huffed. "I thought I asked you to stop calling me Young Master all the time. I don't like it, so please just call me Jin Shu."
Su Bing shook her head in denial. "It is my duty as your maid to serve you as my Master. And you've already denied me from calling you Master, so me calling you Young Master is the only concession I'm willing to make."
Jin Shu turned to look Su Bing in the eyes, which were quite striking compared to her plain face, and with a smug smile on his face, said, "Since you're my maid, I order you to stop calling me Young Master."
Su Bing's eyes widened in surprise, and she gave a flustered response. "What? B-but, I'm a maid. I have to. Can I at least add 'Sir'?"
Jin Shu shook his head. "Nope, just Jin Shu."
Su Bing crouched down in the corner, mumbling to herself. "First he won't let me call him Master, now he won't let me call him Young Master. Doesn't he know that saying 'Master' is the essence of a maid? All the other maids are going to make fun of me again."
As Jin Shu was watching Su Bing draw circles in the corner, Yin'er jumped up onto the table. "Dada, when we go adbentuwe?"
He petted Yin'er's head and replied, "We'll go on an adventure when we reach the Core Forging Realm. So be a good girl and wait just a little longer, okay?"
Yin'er purred in satisfaction. "Okie!"
Su Bing stood up from the corner and asked Jin Shu how long it would take him to reach Core Forging. He thought for a moment before replying, "Hmm... it should only take one more year until I break through. Normally, it would take me a year and a half; however, since I have my connection with Yin'er, and she's in a constant state of cultivation on account of the fact that she is a Demonic Beast and they can cultivate without needing to meditate like us humans, then that time can be shortened by about five or six months. So, yeah, about a year."
Su Bing gave Jin Shu a flabbergasted look. "You're going to break through to the Core Forging Realm at the age of eighteen!?"
Jin Shu nodded nonchalantly. "It seems that way."
"What kind of monster is he?" Su Bing said silently under her breath.
Jin Shu sighed and stood up. "Haa! Okay, now that I've mastered the first stage of the Phoenix Claw technique, it's time for me to work on a couple of projects that I've put off for the last year."
He patted Yin'er on the head and told her to stay here and play with Su Bing.
---
Jin Shu entered one of his family's private forges. He took his gun out from the inside of his robes, unloaded the magazine, and set them down on the worktable. Jin Shu arranged a few tools on the worktable along with his gun. "It's time for my mad scientist arc. Let's start with trying to make Living Metal bullets."
Jin Shu grabbed a knife from the worktable and cut his palm, allowing his silver blood to drip into a bowl he had prepared. He had to make a few extra cuts in his hand before the bowl was full, as his wound kept healing after a few seconds. The Living Metal in his blood and bones not only increased his cultivation speed, but it also increased his healing. "My wounds heal so fast, I wonder if the Living Metal can even regenerate missing limbs. Hopefully, I never have to find that out."
He took the bowl of silver blood and poured it into a mold he had prepared a few weeks prior. The mold was for the bullet casing he was preparing to make. After a few minutes, the silver blood had solidified without needing any extra forging, which was quite convenient as it cut out some tedious extra steps. Next, he filled the bowl again, but only halfway this time, and poured it into a separate mold for the bullet itself.
He took the casings out of the mold as he waited for the bullets to finish solidifying. He then grabbed a small inscribing tool and began inscribing runes inside the casing. As he had no way of making a primer and gunpowder, he decided to try and replace them with runes: a Qi Circulation Rune for the primer, which he inscribed on the outside of the casing, and finally an Explosion Rune on the inside of the casing to replace the gunpowder. As he didn't want to blow his gun up and potentially his hand with it, he used the smallest amount of Qi possible when inscribing the Qi Circulation Rune; the strength of runes was determined by how much Qi was injected into them during the inscribing process. He left the Explosion Rune dormant, meaning he used no Qi when inscribing it. After he was finished making about seven casings, which was enough for one magazine, he wiped the sweat from his brow and set his tools down. "Phew, this is more exhausting than I thought it would be."
Jin Shu took a moment to circulate the Qi in his body before continuing onto the bullets. He took the bullets out of their mold and began inscribing runes on them. "The last time I used a bullet, it barely broke the skin on a Qi Gathering Realm Demonic Beast. So this time, I'm going to give them some runes and hopefully increase their power."
He started with a Sharpness Rune to increase their penetration power. They would hopefully become a more powerful version of his past life's FMJ bullet.
Next, he inscribed an Intermediate Wind Rune to increase the speed of the bullet, and finally, a Qi Circulation Rune to increase the power of the other two runes. "That's all the runes I can fit on the bullet. I can only make the runes so small without affecting them. Not to mention I'm out of Qi now."
Jin Shu placed his tools down and picked up the bullet to examine it. As he looked it over, the runes on the metal all of a sudden morphed and disappeared. "What the hell? Where'd my runes go?"
He set down that bullet and picked up another. The runes on that bullet were missing as well. He picked up a casing and looked it over, only to discover that the runes had disappeared from them as well. "What the hell!?"
He attempted to inject Qi into the bullet to see what would happen. When his Qi entered the bullet, the runes reappeared. "Well, that's bizarre. I wonder if I can inscribe another rune over the top of them when they disappear?"
Jin Shu rested for a few minutes to let his Qi recover enough so that he could inscribe a new rune.
He chose to inscribe an Intermediate Flame Rune over the place where the Sharpness Rune was previously. After he finished inscribing the rune, he waited a few seconds for it to disappear, then he injected his Qi into the bullet. The runes resurfaced. However, in the place where the Flame and Sharpness runes should have been, there was instead a strange rune that looked like a mix of the two. The Flame Rune still seemed to be working as flames were being emitted by the bullet. To test the Sharpness Rune, he pressed the tip of his finger against the tip of the bullet. It poked a hole in his finger, so it seemed that both runes were still in effect. "Ahaha! This Living Metal just keeps getting better and better! At first, I thought that the Living Metal transforming me was going to be a bad thing, but this thing just keeps surprising me."
"Alright, now I need a way to activate the bullet when I fire the gun. I believe if I inscribe a Qi Circulation Rune on the gun's hammer, it should be able to transfer my Qi to the bullet casing, thus activating the Qi Circulation Rune on the casing, which in turn should activate the Explosion Rune, thus firing the bullet."
Jin Shu quickly fieldstripped his pistol. In his past life, Jin Shu held the record for fastest time to disassemble almost every modern handheld weapon. The gun he reincarnated with was a military issue M1911, so it was quite easy to disassemble quickly. With the hammer now exposed, he inscribed a Qi Circulation Rune on it and proceeded to reassemble his pistol.
Jin Shu set up a six-inch-thick block of steel to test the power of his newly improved bullets. He took aim at the block, being careful of the angle of his shot so that the bullet was less likely to ricochet. "Ah! I should have put a Silence Rune on the casing to mute the explosion. I guess I'll do that next time. Well, let's get ready for a bang."
Jin Shu slowly pressed the trigger down.
BOOM!!
Jin Shu, not expecting such a loud explosion, looked down at his hands dazedly. The pistol was gone, along with his right hand and the pointer and middle fingers of his left hand. "Aha! Aha! Where is my hand!? Aaaah! Fuuck! My! Hand!!"
Silver blood was pouring out of the place where his hand should have been, pooling on the floor of the forge. It took him a few moments to register the pain, and when he finally did, it was mind-numbing.
He quickly looked around for something to staunch the bleeding. He found a leather strip on the worktable behind him. As he scrambled over and attempted to pick it up with the three fingers on his left hand, the blood abruptly stopped flowing. He looked down to see what was going on and was shocked to see the blood that had spilled on the floor was climbing up his legs, quickly reaching his hands and flowing back into the wounds, forming the shape of his hand and fingers, except made from silver blood instead of skin. "I take back what I said earlier. I don't know whether this Living Metal is a blessing or a curse. On the one hand—aha, no pun intended—the Living Metal has made me immensely stronger. However, this shit right here is just a bit too creepy."
The skin on his right arm and left hand began to wriggle and reform over the silver hand and fingers. After the skin fully reformed, he cautiously flexed his hands; everything felt normal.
Jin Shu plopped down on the floor and began contemplating what had just happened.
---
An hour had passed since his hand was blown off. A maid had come to check on him since she had heard the explosion; he reassured her that everything was fine, then went back to sitting in silence for a while. Soon, he came to terms with what happened and his transformation into something alien, or at least less than human. He accepted it quite easily, actually. He was mainly just thinking about his next course of action.
First of all, he needed to rebuild his pistol. Although he was now in a cultivation world—a world of swords and fists—he had never trained in other weapons in either of his lives, and the gun felt the safest and most comfortable for him. He looked around to see if he could find anything left of his pistol to salvage. As he walked by the steel block he shot at earlier, he noticed a hole in it. "Well, at least I know that the bullet worked, and it looks like it went completely through the steel. That's even better than I imagined. A normal 9mm bullet fired from a 1911 wouldn't be able to penetrate more than an inch of steel."
As he was examining the steel block, he noticed something behind it. It was a partially destroyed M1911. All that was left of it was the magazine inside the magazine housing, along with the trigger and trigger guard. The entire top half of the gun was missing. At this point, he might as well just rebuild an entirely new gun. "Hmm... Should I make a new M1911 or something else?"