Chapter 342 — A Chance Encounter on the Road
Years of Heartflutter · Page 3 of 5
"All right, Zhiyun, you're basically ready now. As long as you can throw the knife, accuracy doesn't matter—I'll handle everything. Now let's begin the live drill." Yang Ce placed an apple on his head and spoke to Lin Yanhe.
"Huh? Starting now?" Lin Yanhe was clearly still a little afraid.
"Starting now. You use me as the target. Come, Mengyan, you set the example first." Yang Ce beckoned to Chen Shutang.
Chen Shutang had no choice. She knew that if she did not make a start, with Lin Yanhe's temperament the girl might drag things out indefinitely—and time was short. The less practice one had, the more likely something would go wrong once they were truly on stage. Better to practice solidly at home than to make a mistake then.
Gritting her teeth, she picked up a knife and said to Yang Ce, "All right, then I'm going to throw..."
"Mm, go ahead." Yang Ce shrugged. "Relax a little. I'll be fine."
Chen Shutang did not dare be careless. She deliberately threw the knife a little high, afraid of striking Yang Ce. Even so, after she let it fly she could not help clenching her heart tight. She knew perfectly well that at that height it could not hurt Yang Ce, yet she still felt a flutter of dread, watching without blinking the knife she had thrown.
Yang Ce watched the direction the knife came from and felt rather helpless. That was thrown a little too high, wasn't it? If it had been lower, he could have bent and caught it, but this high...
There was nothing for it—at the instant the knife came at him, Yang Ce had to leap up. The knife sank into the apple, neither too high nor too low, and Yang Ce landed steadily on his feet.
Yang Ce let out a breath of relief, thinking that if the training camp in Europe had not been even more brutal than this, he probably could not have caught that knife. Jump a little lower and he would have missed it; jump a little higher and the knife would have buried itself in his forehead...
Watching Yang Ce's perilous maneuver, Chen Shutang truly regretted it. Why on earth had she thrown it so high? Had she known Yang Ce would catch the knife in that way, she would rather have risked throwing it lower than have Yang Ce leap up to catch it!
Yang Ce smilingly took the apple from his head, cut it open with a knife, and handed half to Chen Shutang and half to Lin Yanhe. "Eat some apple. See, Zhiyun, nothing happened, right?
Your sister Mengyan threw it so high, and I caught it easily."
Lin Yanhe had naturally seen the danger in what had just happened, and she also knew that Yang Ce was truly unharmed. Seeing how relaxed he looked, Lin Yanhe breathed a sigh of relief too. As long as her throw did not stray too far off, Yang Ce should have no trouble catching it.
After finishing the apple, with Chen Shutang's earlier demonstration before her, Lin Yanhe grew bolder as well. She knew she would have to take this step sooner or later—it was only a question of when. But if she did not make good use of the time to practice now, there truly would be no time left.
At first Lin Yanhe was cautious, afraid of hurting Yang Ce, but later, seeing how easily Yang Ce caught them and that nothing had really gone wrong, Lin Yanhe relaxed too, and her throws grew careless.
Yet the more careless she became, the more smoothly Yang Ce caught them. It seemed that, often enough, attitude was what mattered most. By the time they were ready for bed, Lin Yanhe had grown quite adept; the timidity of before was gone, and she could fling the knives out with ease—though she had wasted a whole table's worth of apples.
Though Lin Yanhe was no longer short of money, deep down she was still frugal and treasured things, and the sight of the table covered in cut apples pained her: "So many—we can't possibly eat them all, can we? They're all cut open, they'll go bad before long..."