Chapter 80: Bai Ye
“Scram, all of you! This madam here won’t bother being courteous to whoever dares prattle on with their irresponsible remarks!” Moon Song shoved the crowd aside as she stormed into her team’s designated assembly area. Her face was stony while she yelled at the onlookers.
The crowd very quickly scattered, but they still whispered to one another how terrible the hovercar was, laughing at it while taking great pleasure in its terrible build.
Beihai and Manjun, who were now sitting somewhere near the red hovercar, felt dejected. Manjun formed a fist and aggressively punched the hovercar’s hood. “D*mn! We followed every detail in the blueprints, so how did we end up making something lousy?”
“Who knows? Perhaps we’re really not suited to tinker with machines,” supposed Beihai, feeling quite frustrated.
Extreme racing hovercars were common in team races throughout the universe. Every normal racing hovercar’s outer shell, chassis, and engine was fixed, so there was no way to modify it.
However, there were other parts for the extreme racing hovercars, and it was common for racers to pick their favorite parts and assemble them as they wished.
Such a race would not just test a person’s ability to drive; more than that, it would test a person’s ability to assemble a racing hovercar and their ability to match its parts.
There were thousands of parts that could be used in an extreme racing hovercar, and the possible configurations from these thousands of parts were nearly endless.
Besides, every part could be fitted into different positions, which would in turn produce different effects in a racing hovercar’s performance.
Beihai and Manjun thought all they had to do was assemble a racing hovercar; they were wholly ignorant of how even the slightest change could affect the racing hovercar’s overall performance to a drastic degree.
Xia Fei could see that their assembly method was very crude and rudimentary; it was merely at the standard of a middle-schooler who had just been exposed to machinery.
For a middle-schooler level of racing hovercar to appear in a race of such a scale, it was only natural that everyone’s attention would be drawn to it and that it would receive ridicule and criticisms subsequently.
Xia Fei turned around and made eye-contact with Chen Dong, who shrugged helplessly. “I know how to fight, but I know nothing about such stuff.”
Circling around the racing hovercar a few times, Xia Fei discovered more than a hundred fatal mistakes in its assembly.
He thought at first that he could give Beihai and Manjun some advice, but the racing hovercar that they had assembled was too trashy that they needed to remove every part of it and start from scratch, so there was not even a need for advice.
“If there’s nothing else, Chen Dong and I will be going back first,” said Xia Fei.
Beihai quietly nodded, looking somewhat fatigued.
Moon Song waved them off glumly. She did not say a word, though it was apparent that even this strong girl had been dealt quite a heavy blow, visibly irritated.
Xia Fei threw a glance at Chen Dong and was just about to leave when they heard a commotion from outside the garage, then many female cadets from the training camp appeared out of nowhere.
Xia Fei was very curious about this. Motorsports like hovercar racing were naturally patronized by the male population, and not many women would show interest in it. Why, then, were there so many girls outside the garage right now?
A young man dressed in white stepped into the garage amid the girls’ cheering. His hair was meticulously combed and his pants neatly ironed with not a trace of creases.
With a bright smile on his face, this young man kept waving at everyone around him as he walked forward. He looked very personable.
Every smile he flashed would elicit exclamations from the bevy of women behind him as if he were a superstar about to go on stage.
“Who’s that?” asked Xia Fei.
“Bai Ye, the third prince of Leaping Tiger Mountain’s Bai clan,” answered Moon Song disgruntledly. “He’s also a cadet who got in through the back door, yet unlike us, he’s being warmly received, especially by the woman population in the training grounds.”
Xia Fei nodded. Bai Ye’s gestures made him look very much like a celebrity, so it was normal for the ladies to adore him.
“You’re a woman as well; why do I feel that you don’t really like him?” asked Xia Fei.
Moon Song was angry. “I like women; yours truly won’t even spare a glance in the direction of someone like him.”
With the arrival of these people in droves, the originally spacious garage was now crowded. Xia Fei and Chen Dong took several steps backward to make way and also to let these passionate fans and their idol pass by.
Xia Fei swept his gaze across the few racing hovercars neighboring theirs, and he realized that there were also quite a number of problems with them.
‘Strange… The quality of these racing hovercars isn’t good, either. Could it be that I was mistaken?’ Xia Fei muttered to himself.
Logically speaking, a place like Heaven Execution Training Camp where elites gathered should have plenty of people who knew how to assemble racing hovercars. The standard that this place ought to have should be very high, but why was it that, no matter how he looked, these racing hovercars all had a number of problems and were quite sloppily made.
“Could it be that I had unknowingly improved?” Xia Fei mulled on this.
He had spent several months hands-on learning the art of spaceship-building from Old Porter, who had even gifted him a journal containing detailed guidelines about the repairs and modifications from his lifelong experience when Xia Fei was leaving.
Xia Fei’s mechanics skills when he was in Old Porter’s factory were nothing special, or at least, he could easily see that the elderly mechanic and his four apprentices were much better than he was, so Xia Fei had always thought that his skills were below average.
Xia Fei became more and more curious as he thought about it. “My standard is below average, yet why is it that these racing hovercars were assembled even worse than what I could probably do?”
With that thought in mind, he decided to take the long route out in order to examine every racing hovercar in the venue.
Bai Ye had passed by Moon Song just then. He very politely bowed to her with a pleasant smile hanging on his lips.
A girl beside him could not resist the allure of Bai Ye’s smile and shrieked, almost fainting on the spot. On the contrary, Moon Song pretended to have not seen his gesture of goodwill and purposely turned her face in another direction. With a huff, she did not bother with his presence.
Moon Song ignoring him made Bai Ye feel very embarrassed. The smile slid off his face, then he shook his head as he chuckled wryly. He proceeded toward his team’s allocated area, which was not too far away.
He took off his coat and handed it to an ever-present servant, elegantly rolling up his sleeves before he pulled out a small pair of universal modification pliers. This simple action alone elicited quite a few shrieks and drew applause from the ladies in general, their faces flushed with delight as they danced on the balls of their feet.
The male cadets in the garage felt very disgruntled over the appearance of Bai Ye and his group of fans; all of them eyed him coldly, their gazes unfriendly.
In the end, even the instructors who were tasked with monitoring the garage could not stand it anymore, feeling that Bai Ye was being far too ostentatious, so they stepped in themselves to corral the fanatical girls out of the venue.
However, these groupies refused to leave, blocking the entrance of the garage as they chanted Bai Ye’s name.
The garage was huge, enough to fit three hundred racing hovercars at once. Xia Fei carefully examined each racing hovercar, and the more he saw, the more he felt that they had plenty of problems, and the situation was not quite the same as he pictured.
‘Did I overestimate the race or were the standards set for this race not very high in the first place?’ Xia Fei rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
Xia Fei remained doubtful as he made his way back to the area allocated to his team. He picked up a pair of universal modification pliers and weighed it in his hand a couple of times, his eyes affixed on that red extreme racing hovercar.
Without even realizing it, Xia Fei had already completely devoted his thoughts toward the race, and the noises around him had gradually grown distant until his mind automatically filtered them out to leave focused and free from any distractions.
A good mechanic could simulate everything in their mind several times before they acted, searching for any flaws or potential missteps until they found the most suitable and effective plan in the end.
Xia Fei sat down on the ground, lightly hitting it with the universal modification pliers in his hand, like a meditating monk knocking on a Chinese temple block.
The pupil of his eyes gleamed a little. Firm, resolute, serious, and somber.
Chen Dong was the first to notice Xia Fei’s unusual behavior. He was very familiar with this look, for the two of them had shared this same visage back when they were giving it their all at that fight in the Crisis grade assessment.
He knew that, when Xia Fei looked like this, he was going all out, but… He was not fighting right now, so what had made him become serious?
Moon Song pursed her lips as she spoke. “Crazy Xia, what are you doing? Have you really gone crazy for real?”
Xia Fei was in deep thought, so he of course did not hear the girl’s question. He continued to repeat his actions in mind, completely ignoring Moon Song.
Moon Song stood up angrily. “Hey, Crazy Xia, yours truly is speaking to you!”
Chen Dong reached out to stop Moon Song, his expression severe. “Don’t disturb him. He’s doing some serious thinking right now.”
Moon Song sat back in her chair, disgruntled. Her eyes fixed on Xia Fei, and she noticed that he was really behaving differently. Seeing him so engrossed in what he was doing not only made him hard to hate, but he was also giving off this inexplicable sense of captivation.
On the other side, Bai Ye was wielding his tool as he worked on modifying the racing hovercar. It had to be said that, though Bai Ye looked like he was a milksop, he was actually very skilled when it came to machinery.
He moved with elegance and measured deliberation. Right now, he resembled an embroidery expert, whose nimble fingers danced across a silk scarf, making bright and vivid flower patterns blossom one after another on it.
Actually, Bai Ye did not like extreme racing at all. He felt that it was a crazy and savage sport that someone as elegant as himself should not take part in. Besides, assembling racing hovercars would only dirty his hands, and he could not stand that.
He had participated in this race solely for one person, yet this particular woman did not even wish to meet his eyes.
The people in the garage soon began to take note of Bai Ye, and they crowded around to watch him assemble his hovercar.
Bai Ye was a very skilled assembler, and every part was put in place by him rather appropriately. Even the wisest extreme racing hovercar assembler could not find fault in his work; Bai Ye appeared to be far better than any of them in terms of his choice of parts and installation technique.
Slowly, gasps could be heard from the people around Bai Ye, and this made him rather pleased. He loved being the center of attention, and the more people paid attention to him, the happier he felt.
As the number of people gathered increased, it eventually seemed as if all the participants were spectating Bai Ye’s work as they openly discussed his incredible skills in assembling hovercars.
It was around this time that, in another area not too far from Bai Ye, the composed Xia Fei started moving.
Comments