The Game of Life

Jiang Feng glanced at the time, 12:19 AM, Qixi had passed, and he still hadn’t given out the Qixi gift.

As soon as Wu Minqi got home, the first thing she did was to collect the clothes on the balcony. Seeing Jiang Feng standing dumbfounded in the living room and not going to shower, she urged, “Hurry up and take a shower. It’s already late, go to bed early after you’re done.”

“Ah, okay.” Jiang Feng obediently went to find clothes for his shower.

…

The next day, Jiang Feng went to Taifeng Building bright and early, becoming the first person to arrive at the back kitchen. After quickly disposing of the evidence of the failed Qixi gift on the shelf, he started processing sea cucumbers and waited for the two sirs to come over and instruct him on how to make green onion sea cucumber.

After practicing green onion sea cucumber for a few days, Jiang Feng could taste green onion in everything he ate. According to Sang Ming, Jiang Feng was now a walking green onion; you could smell the onion scent on him from a meter or two away.

Aside from Ji Yue going home leading to Zhang Guanghang just succeeding in confessing and then having a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend, it was Jiang Feng who suddenly became the most popular chef in the entire Taifeng Building within a few short days.

Even though the Ordering System showed that the dishes prepared by Jiang Feng required a wait of over an hour, diners were still willing to wait.

The strangest thing was the mysterious surge in sales of Jiang Feng’s pure meat wontons.

In the past, Jiang Feng’s best-selling dish was the limited edition of six servings of Sweet and Sour Yam a day. Even though the unscrupulous businesswoman Mrs. Wang Xiulian kept raising the price of Sweet and Sour Yam, the price reached 99 yuan per serving, and it would still sell out within twenty minutes of lunch service starting, while other special dishes were sold haphazardly.

The haphazard method was this: If Han Guishan came to dine, the pickled vegetable dumplings would sell, but if Han Guishan didn’t come, the pickled vegetable dumplings would be ignored.

Every few days, a couple of predestined relationship set meals and Li Hongzhang hodgepodge could also be sold, but they were often complained about by customers. Those who complained would usually come back to order the Li Hongzhang hodgepodge again after a few days to a week and replace their previous bad review with a brand new positive one.

This led to Jiang Feng becoming a chef with a seriously polarized reputation in the Taifeng kitchen, receiving the most complaints but also not a few compliments. Since he was one of the young bosses, they couldn’t dock his wages to make him reform or reflect.

But this heat with the pure meat wontons was different, there were no bad reviews at all. Even the waitstaff who witnessed the customers eating pure meat wontons said every customer who ate the wontons cried their hearts out. It was as if their teacher had given them the wrong key points for the exam, and when they checked their grades, they all failed and were not allowed to retake it, which meant they had to repeat the year, a sorrowful cry like being single for twenty years right from birth, but the reviews were unanimously positive.

Even when the unscrupulous businesswoman Mrs. Wang Xiulian took the opportunity to raise the price of pure meat wontons to 26 yuan a bowl, they still sold out within the first twenty minutes of lunch service each day.

This didn’t make sense. Although the Li Hongzhang hodgepodge made people cry, it at least released the pressure in their hearts, and every salaried employee who tried it could testify with their bodies what true delight tasted like. But the pure meat wontons were different; they were simply a dish that reminded people of the bitter sorrows of their youth, and yet they still receive everyone’s unanimous praise. Jiang Feng could only sigh that society had changed.

It had started to become perverse.

He wouldn’t even eat this dish himself, okay?

Jiang Feng had once speculated whether it was the game rewards taking effect, or Ji Yue’s comics becoming popular on Weibo. But he later specifically asked Uncle Jiang Jianshe, who was responsible for promotion, about it; everything was normal on Weibo. Although the feedback was good, the numbers for retweets, comments, and likes were all within the normal range, hardly causing much of a stir. There weren’t many people following Taifeng’s official Weibo account, and given the number of fake followers created by operations just to inflate numbers, the real active followers were probably only a few thousand. Therefore, the comic’s release didn’t cause much of a fuss either.

As for the task reward, Jiang Feng thought it over and felt the game wouldn’t be so generous. The task reward mentioned a slight increase in the fame of Taifeng Building, and whether Taifeng Building’s fame had increased, Jiang Feng wasn’t sure, but his own fame had increased quite a bit. He felt that based on the game’s usual style, it wouldn’t be so generous to him.

No matter what the real reason was, thanks to the hot sales of pure meat wontons, there were always some people who had their softest or deepest memories touched while eating them, and the progress of the main task [Loyal Customers] actually went up by two, finally moving to the end stage of (9/10)—victory was in sight.

It was another tranquil afternoon; the late August heatwave, also known as the ‘Autumn Tiger’, was still fierce. The high temperatures of summer launched one last aggressive assault. The temperature in the back kitchen around noon had reached a level that felt alarming. Both sirs unanimously decided it was not suitable for a midday cooking lesson in such adverse conditions, so they continued to meet for tea and listening to stories at the teahouse and let Jiang Feng play wherever he wanted.

The troublesome affair at Ji Yue’s home was drawing to a close; Ji Yue’s brother could no longer stay at his original school. With the power of money, the school grudgingly agreed not to expel her brother and allowed him to transfer out of his own accord. Jiang Feng could glean the progress of her brother’s transfer and the frequency with which he was strung up and beaten from Ji Yue’s daily explosive social media rants, thus estimating her leave time and this month’s salary.

But why he had suddenly become the most popular chef in Taifeng remained an unsolved mystery that puzzled him.

So, taking advantage of this calm afternoon, Jiang Feng sought out a waitress in the lobby to conduct a small investigation.

Naturally, the first person he found was Qi Rou. Aside from Fan Mei and Ji Yue, Qi Rou should be the only other employee in the lobby whose name he could remember; he couldn’t even recall the faces of some of the girls, let alone their names.

“Qi Rou,” Jiang Feng called, stopping her just as she was about to go to the boutique store on the second floor of the neighboring mall for a round of looking without buying, “I have something I want to ask you.”

“What is it?” Qi Rou’s mind was filled with the crystal ball she had seen the day before.

“Have you noticed who has been ordering my pure meat wontons these past few days?” Jiang Feng asked.

“Pure meat dumplings?” Qi Rou thought carefully, “I have been in charge of welcoming guests these past few days, I haven’t really served pure meat dumplings to customers, but I remember that the customers who cried in the restaurant were all quite young.”

Quite young.

This was a key piece of information.

“You should ask Lin Ling, I remember she served pure meat dumplings to two customers today,” Qi Rou suggested.

“Which one is Lin Ling?” Jiang Feng asked.

Qi Rou: …

With a ‘are you really our little boss?’ look, Qi Rou pointed at Lin Ling who was sitting by a table for two, eating a salad and watching a drama alone: “The one eating the leafy greens over there.”

Jiang Feng turned and walked towards Lin Ling.

“Lin Ling? Could I ask you something?” Jiang Feng approached her from behind.

Lin Ling took off her headphones, put down her chopsticks, stood up, and asked, “What is it, little boss?”

Jiang Feng: …

So the lobby staff actually all call me that behind my back.

“Do you remember what the customers who ordered the pure meat dumplings looked like this afternoon?” Jiang Feng asked.

“Appearance? Let me think, I roughly remember three customers who ordered dumplings, two of whom were at the same table. Those two from the same table were both guys, looking to be in their twenties, one of them seemed quite disheveled. Another is a young lady who came to eat with a friend, she was saying to her friend when I served the dish that the dumplings looked just like the ones in a comic book,” Lin Ling said.

If it were just a comic book, it couldn’t have attracted so many customers.

Jiang Feng nodded as if he understood, “Do you remember who else has served dumplings to customers these days?”

“It would be Hu Li, she just told me yesterday that the customers she served were crying terribly,” Lin Ling said.

“Thanks, where is Hu Li?” Jiang Feng asked.

“I think I saw her go out just now. How about this, little boss, you go ahead with your work, and I’ll call you when Hu Li comes back,” Lin Ling proposed.

“Okay,” Jiang Feng nodded.

Young people, both men and women, looking quite disheveled, have read comics.

Jiang Feng felt like he was playing a large-scale puzzle game, needing to ask each NPC for key information and piecing it all together to deduce the outcome.

What was the reason, after all?

Why did pure meat dumplings suddenly become so popular without any warning signs?

“What’s the matter, why do you suddenly look so worried?” Wu Minqi had just come down from the second floor when she saw Jiang Feng with a frown, deep in thought, staring at a pillar.

“I’m pondering why my pure meat dumplings have suddenly been selling so well these past few days,” Jiang Feng said.

Wu Minqi: ???

Isn’t it good that they’re selling well?

Although Jiang Feng was her boyfriend, as a chef, she had to objectively say something.

Her boyfriend was great at everything except making dumplings. The pure meat dumplings Jiang Feng made were so bad that even pigs would turn their noses up at them if they were dumped into a swill bucket.