When Old Homa was young, he did not believe geniuses existed.
In his view, those so-called geniuses were simply people with better educational resources, better living conditions, and enough effort of their own to match. Given all that, it was only natural that they would end up achieving far more than others.
And the reason ordinary people could not catch up to them, no matter how hard they worked, was simple enough as well: everyone might be working equally hard, but differences in resources and circumstances were still enough to create a gap.
That belief lasted until the day he met someone.
That person clearly had no superior resources. In fact, his conditions were even worse than Homa's. Homa worked just as hard as he did—yet the speed at which that person improved made no sense whatsoever.
At first, the man had been nothing but a rookie who knew absolutely nothing.
But before long, Homa had watched him catch up to his own level with his own eyes—and then surpass him without the slightest hesitation.
After that, no matter how desperately Homa tried to chase after him, he could never catch up again. All he could do was watch the man's back grow farther and farther away.
Homa tried to understand it. He tried to reason it out.
But no matter how he thought about it, he could not come up with any satisfactory explanation.
And so, for the first time in his life, he sighed and said to that person:
"You really are a genius."
But to Homa's surprise, the man merely smiled and shook his head. He told Homa that he did not count as a genius at all. Compared with so-and-so, that person was the real genius.
Homa stood before a mountain, listening to that mountain speak of peaks still higher.
In that moment, all the theories he had once believed in collapsed completely.
And only then did he truly realize that differences in talent were an objective reality.
For people whose gifts far exceeded those of ordinary men, if one did not call them "geniuses," then how else was one supposed to comfort oneself and accept the reality of one's own mediocrity?
Now Homa was old.
Long ago, he had already made peace with his own mediocrity.
So when a "genius" like Jiang Qi suddenly appeared, Homa felt none of the competitive resentment he might have felt in his youth.
What filled him instead was delight.
And expectation.
He was old now—so old that, in a peaceful era, he ought to have retired by this point and gone home to enjoy a quiet old age.
But in this world, no one was going to take care of you in your later years.
Not even if you were one of the gang's veterans.
If one day he truly became dim-eyed and confused, unable even to speak clearly, no longer capable of contributing any value at all to the Flying Crow Gang...
He had no doubt that, at best, his ending would be to choose an auspicious day while he was still not completely senile—and put a bullet through his own temple.
Unless...
Unless he could find someone who was genuinely willing to see him through old age and bury him when he died.
And Jiang Qi might just be a good choice.
After all, the boy had potential.
And Homa liked the look of him.
For now, Homa still had the power to shelter others. If he wanted to, he could still lift a scavenger up into the gang's middle or even upper ranks.
But if a few more years passed, he might not retain that ability.
True, he did not yet know Jiang Qi all that well, and he had already vaguely sensed that the boy seemed to be hiding some kind of secret.
Even so, he still felt it was worth placing a bet on him.
While Homa was making his calculations, Jiang Qi, standing alone in Homa's workshop, was also storming through possibilities in his own head.
It didn't take him long to realize what Homa had gone off to do.
Most likely, he had gone to test the energy core.
And by now, Jiang Qi was also beginning to come around to something else:
His earlier behavior had probably looked a little strange.
Ever since gaining the Appraisal ability, Jiang Qi had grown used to fixing anything by simply taking one look, spotting the problem, and getting straight to work.
Add to that how badly he wanted this job, and he had thrown himself entirely into the repair, eager to show what he could do. He had completely forgotten that, for most other people, simply identifying which parts were damaged was already a technical skill in its own right.
Half the tools laid out on that table were inspection tools.
And yet there he had been, not even touching a single testing probe before diving straight into the repair like a madman.
No wonder it had stunned Homa.
Still, when Jiang Qi thought about it carefully, this might not necessarily be a bad thing.
At present, only Homa knew.
And Homa had watched the entire repair process from beginning to end.
So Jiang Qi could simply insist that he was naturally gifted, and there was not much the other man could say against it.
They said a man was condemned by the treasure he carried—but if he himself was the treasure, then Homa naturally had no reason to destroy him.
As long as Homa wasn't the kind of lunatic who would lock him in a dark room and force him to work as some kind of black-market slave, then maybe... just maybe... Jiang Qi could use the man's resources to change his own circumstances.
Neither of them realized that, by sheer coincidence, the two of them had somehow arrived at a kind of mutual choosing.
So when Homa's figure appeared once more at the entrance to the workshop, the same bright, heartfelt smile spread across both of their faces almost at the same time.
Each with his own little scheme—
No, rather.
Each silently understanding the other.
Jiang Qi truly had not expected that, after only using his newly repaired night-vision helmet once, he would already manage to climb out of the ranks of the scavengers.
The moment he saw the smile on Homa's face when the old man came back, Jiang Qi had a feeling his new job was basically secured.
And sure enough, Homa directly asked whether he was willing to stay on and become his apprentice.
That still came as a surprise to Jiang Qi.
He had assumed Homa might hire him as some sort of repair hand at most. He had never expected the old man to be willing to take him on directly as an apprentice.
For a moment, Jiang Qi did wonder whether this so-called "apprentice" arrangement might really mean apprentice in name, free labor in practice.
But once he learned that he was currently the only apprentice in Homa's entire workshop, he put that suspicion aside.
This clearly was not the style of one of those people who used "taking apprentices" as a pretense to recruit unpaid labor.
And becoming Old Homa's apprentice also caused Jiang Qi's identity and status within the town to leap upward overnight.
If White-Claw Crow, the gang's upper echelon, and people like Old Homa counted as first-class citizens of Deadwood Town, then ordinary gang members would be second-class citizens, and beneath them, people who worked regular jobs in town would be third-class citizens.
As for scavengers, they were the fourth-class underclass at the very bottom.
The only people lower still were the slaves captured from enemy gangs.
Jiang Qi had not actually become a member of the Flying Crow Gang, but as Homa's apprentice, his status now probably fell somewhere between that of a second-class and third-class citizen.
Deep down, Jiang Qi did not accept Deadwood Town's class system at all.
But the advantages brought by a rise in status were objectively real.
At the very least, he probably would not have to worry anymore about gang members coming to make trouble for him for no reason.
At the restaurant, too, he should now have the right to order other kinds of food. Whether he would actually be able to eat meat regularly was still unclear, but at the very least, his meals should no longer be as monotonous as they had been before.
On top of that, Jiang Qi also learned more about Homa himself.
Just as he had previously heard, Old Homa was not technically a member of the Flying Crow Gang, yet he held the status of a veteran elder and also served as the gang's chief specialist in mechanics and electronics.
But beyond that, Homa had another identity.
He was also the teacher of every one of the Flying Crow Gang's current frontline mechanics.
One could even say that all of the gang's technical personnel had either been taught directly by him, or by his students.
Once Jiang Qi learned that, he was not only astonished—he also became even more puzzled.
He could not understand why Old Homa, despite being so thoroughly tied to the Flying Crow Gang, had still never formally joined it.
In Jiang Qi's eyes, with Homa's network and status, he should by all rights have been able to lie back and coast through his old age in Deadwood Town.
So Jiang Qi asked the question directly.
After a brief silence, Old Homa gave him this answer:
"A wolf that can no longer hunt will one day be driven out of the pack."
When he said those words, Jiang Qi clearly saw that Homa's eyes, as they rested on the town beyond, were filled with bleakness—
And with a deep, heavy disappointment whose source Jiang Qi could not yet name.
Join here to read ahead.
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