Foreigner Of Time [Book II]

23

"This is called... a fire barrel. It's an imported item I got yesterday. You haven't seen it before, right? This thing is pretty scary, I'll let you see what it can do later." 

He said this while gently and preciously rubbing the object in his hand.

I had never been this shocked ever since I came to this kingdom.

"Yeah, I haven't seen it before." I swallowed my saliva. 

The shock in my heart was already evident on my face.

What he called a 'fire barrel' was known on earth as a 'gun', and the one in his hand should be a 'flintlock pistol' if I remembered correctly.

I recognized it because I once had a phase where I was super into a western single-player survival game, and I had looked up the performance of every type of gun so that my character could make better upgrades with my limited resources...

Coincidentally, the one in his hand was also what my character had!

On earth, this flintlock pistol was only invented in the sixteenth century. 

It counted as a revolutionary product which replaced guns that need to be manually lit first. 

It greatly simplified the shooting process and its accuracy, and it was popular for over two hundred years before it was replaced by newer designs.

"Brother-in-law, do we have this kind of thing here?"

He shook his head. 

There was a gleam in his eyes, though it was mixed with a look of uncertainty as he replied, "There isn't, I traded for this thing from the second mate of a foreign ship with a hundred liangs of gold. Those three shops I own will take at least two years of steady business to earn that back, and your sister doesn't know about this yet, so you have to keep this a secret for me."

A hundred liangs of gold was a thousand liangs of silver. 

This was not actually a small sum to a family like Psy's family, but he could actually have such daring and resolution...

Was he expecting something? 

Or did he want to wait for the right price to sell it?

"Rest assured, big brother-in-law. I will definitely keep this a secret, but a hundred liangs of gold is not a small sum. This... isn't this just scrap metal? Why would brother-in-law make such a costly trade?"

I stared at the flintlock pistol in his hand with a heart full of concerns, and my back was already drenched in sweat.

This world was still in the era of cold weapons when I travelled here...

But the thing in his hands could push the entire kingdom into another era if it wasn't handled properly.

The most prominent mark of the transition between the era of cold weapons to hot weapons was the exponential increase in war casualties...

Although this was probably a transition that every world must go through, I just had to bump right into it as a time traveller!

At this moment, the thing in front of my eyes was the first 'hot' weapon in the kingdom. 

The slightest mistake... could change the entire direction of this world. 

How could I not be afraid?

If I wasn't afraid of revealing unexplainable slip-ups, I really wanted to escape right now.

"Ay, brother-in-law, now you're not seeing a fine invention for what it is. Hehe... I couldn't see what's good about it when I first saw it either. But once you see what it can do, you will definitely drop to the ground in shock! Let's go, I'll show it for you right now!"