CH 27

"Login to Skynet again?" Aunt Su Guan glanced at Liu Weiwei.

Liu Weiwei instantly turned into a large quail and lowered her head in embarrassment. Scum student but still wanted to play online all day... Well, she was exactly like this now.

"If you have time, you should exercise more," Aunt Su Guan still gave her guarantee, but before Liu Weiwei said goodbye, she stopped her. "Girls should be stronger even if they don't study well. Your future mother-in-laws won't like you if you are too weak."

Liu Weiwei: _(:з」∠)_ "Teacher, I'm only eighteen."

Aunt Su Guan was very fascinated and she smiled, "When I was sixteen years old, I have developed better than you."

"..." Liu Weiwei blushed and returned to her bedroom. She became more determined to use all her beauty point in a certain body part. This little episode also made her forget the weird thing that happened in the corridor just now. She didn't think carefully about how Chen Qili fell so badly, as it didn't matter to her at all. She lied on the bed, hugged her rabbit, logged in to the Skynet easily, and took advantage of the crowds at night to quickly finish the cute task.

["I am a cute cooking" mission completed! Reward +10 points of beauty, +10 knife skills, and receive the recipe Mapo tofu, officially opening the Sichuan cuisine gourmet branch.]

Liu Weiwei was going to go offline first and learned the new recipes so that she could be more beautiful, but when she thought of Aunt Su Guan expression, Liu Weiwei’s face was red. She was really embarrassed to ask the auntie to be her guardian every day. She simply continued to set up her stall tonight and used up the one hour. Tomorrow, she would go out and ask the lieutenant who had received more than half of his favorability if he could help her. Thinking about this, she started her learning.

However, soon there was another clear electronic sound in Liu Weiwei’s ears.

[Jincheng’s Bamboo Song said: "Mapo tofu is famous, the tofu used is the most refined, the curtains on the side of the Wanfu Bridge are moving, and the drunken Mr. Heguchun". Mapo tofu was born at the end of the Qing Dynasty. After 7639 years of ups and downs, it has now been lost.] (TN: Jincheng historically referred to Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan Province in China.) (TN: 竹枝词/Zhúzhī cí (The Bamboo Song) is one of the ballads popular in Bayu district, now Chongqing Municipality).

[Release a new task: Learn Mapo tofu, reproduce the dish’s true essentials of numbing, spicy, hot, fragrant, crisp, tender, fresh, and lively taste. And then bring its past glory into today's universe.]

[Task requirements: sell one thousand copies, and collect comments from diners after tasting. Collect 20 acknowledgements each of the dish eight essential tastes. Task rewards: +10 knife skills points, 10 seasoning, +10 beauty points, and five Sichuan recipes will be given randomly.]

Liu Weiwei was taken aback, it was the first time she had triggered such a lucrative reward task. It seemed that after eight major dishes had been officially opened, the system tasks had begun to follow an orthodox and generous route. Originally, she wanted to continue selling curry rice to make money. But now, after Liu Weiwei immediately finished serving the customers in front of her, she closed the stall and found an open space to sit down. She then immediately flashed into the system training space. She raced against time to enter the training for Mapo Tofu!

There was already a master wearing a senior chef hat standing in the training room. As soon as Liu Weiwei entered, he started cooking. From choosing and cutting the tofu, configuring sauces, frying the ingredients in the pan, thickening the sauce, whether the chef uses a knife to cut and mix, or uses a spoon to pick up the seasoning one by one, or even the action of turning the pot neatly, they were all just flowing freely like water. In just a few minutes, the aroma in the training room was so strong that Liu Weiwei felt a little hungry. She loved spicy food, she really loved it!

In this Interstellar era, almost all nutrient solutions after seven thousand years had no spicy taste, which made Liu Weiwei almost cry. As soon as she smelled the nostalgic spicy smell, she involuntarily began to drool, wishing to sit in front of the chef immediately with a small bowl, waiting for the mapo tofu to be served. However, every time the chef completed the entire cooking process, he would start cooking again and again in a never ending loop.

After watching it sixty times in a row, Liu Weiwei's drool was dripping off, and she finally went into battle on her own. Watching the chef, she felt the cooking should be very simple, but when she was on her own, it was simply terrible. After wasting countless tofu and minced meat, the taste was off in one, salty in one, and then there was heavy beany taste in another...

It was much harder to reach the eight essential tastes spoken by the system than Liu Weiwei thought. She practiced in the system for three full days, equal to half an hour Skynet’s time, before she finally managed to get 60-point score from the training chef. Although she remembered every step in her heart, it was not a matter of cooking until perfect in just one day. She could only practice hard and relied on hands-on familiarity.

Liu Weiwei scored sixty points, which was considered to be of the level of a little chef in a restaurant. She glanced at Skynet’s login time, and she had twenty minutes left. So she hurriedly purchased ingredients. For the tofu, she chose the southern tofu that was available, which was gypsum tofu. (TN: Gypsum/ Calcium sulfate used to harden tofu.)

Tofu was rarely eaten by everyone now, but many nutrients had been added to increase nutritional content of plant protein, especially some special protein nutrients for people who couldn’t drink milk because of lactose intolerant. As for the meat, she bought ground beef that was said to be Iron Spine Cow from an antique food shop. The remaining seasonings were exchanged from the system and synchronized to Skynet’s virtual holographic network. The preparation was done, so only the cooking left to do.

Liu Weiwei set the stall back to open status, scribbled the price on the billboard in front, and started cooking Mapo tofu.

…

It was half past nine in the evening.

Work day’s night was one of the busiest time of the day in the streets and alleys of Interstellar Skynet. Even some food restaurants that were usually very deserted had customers stopping by.

"Baby, this is the legendary awful chicken taste, do you know it now? Whoever invites you to eat chicken in the future, you must break your relationship with him."

"This is the antique food that you are clamoring to try. How about the taste of brown sugar? Didn’t it feel like you have eaten a piece of plastic!? Next time, don't trust that navy on the Internet. They were teasing you."

"Daughter, when dad was ten years old, grandfather brought me a meal called noodles. From that time, dad vowed to save money to buy a limited-flavored nutrient solution. The taste of this noodle was no better than swallowing bitter medicine right?"

From time to time, there were such conversations here and there. Many parents bring their children to the Skynet to educate them. Nowadays, what everyone lacks most was experience. Virtual experience could make everyone avoid mistakes in reality. Every day after work or on weekends, parents were happy to take their children to experience life and experience a lesson themselves.

A young father carrying a five-year-old girl with high ponytail on his shoulders just came out of a store called Candy. "Qianqian, have you learn it now? From now on, if there is a strange uncle saying, ‘Please eat candy’ you must not believe it. Candy is not delicious at all, right?"

The little girl with apple hair nodded, "Baba, the smell of candy is even more stinky than the shit baba pulled out at home~"

The young father was suddenly embarrassed, staring at everyone around him bursting into laughter, and quickly walked to the corner. "Qianqian, it's Papa, not Baba."

The pink and tender face of the girl with apple hair was confused, but she lifted her face quickly. Her cute little nose sniffed into the air, "Baba, it's so fragrant..."

The young father was almost desperate, but when his daughter said this, he also immediately noticed the smell. There was a complex fragrance in the air, so complex that he didn't know how to describe. Since he had his baby girl, he had wandered up every night with his baby, but he had never smelled such a tempting but unexplainable fragrance before!

This fragrance was even stronger than the barbeque-flavored nutrient solution that he just bought last month.

Take a deep breath... Sneeze!

The young father sneezed loudly. He couldn't help but stopped in shock. He didn't have cold or runny nose and sneezing for so many years, so he almost couldn't remember the sensation. It's so refreshing!

He was very excited. Following the urging of his little daughter, he immediately looked for the source of the fragrance.

…

At this moment, in front of a small stall in the corner, long queue had stretched 100 meters away from the corner to the side of the street.

The original billboard in front of the stall had been enlarged ten times at this moment, and it was also placed ten meters high in the sky, allowing people to see clearly even from a distance.

[Mapo tofu: 200 credits per serving; White rice: 10 credits for a small bowl, 20 credits for a large bowl.]

[Special Offer: Leave good comment on the message board, and receive 20% discount + unlimited rice refills.]

The young father glanced at the billboard and was stunned. He couldn't help catching a middle-aged man on the back of the queue and asked, "Mapo tofu? I haven't heard of it before. Also the white rice, why is it so expensive? On the other store, rice is only one credit and people can eat as much as they want."

The middle-aged man gave him a deeply agreeable look, but he sighed, "Brother, you'll know after you buy one. I'm in my third time queuing."

"Huh?" The young father was surprised.

"You look at the sky." The middle-aged man pointed to him.

It turned out that just above them, in the sky at the front of the line, there was a light screen almost ten meters long. It was densely packed with text and various emoticons. And within a few seconds of looking up, another dozen lines of text bounced out.

[The food is so good, I keep spouting long praises. It was... I will omit five hundred different ways to express its deliciousness here! I just want to say, Sh*t, I seem to have drifted beyond the sixteenth galaxy...]

[Mapo tofu, amazing work. I am a young man with an internet addiction who has been on the internet for twenty years. It is the first time that I kneel and lick a plate crying... Actually, I also wrote this paragraph on my knees (serious face)]

[Upstairs, you are not alone.]

[Mom told me to go home for dinner, but I won't go back, (heh.jpg)]

[Skynet’s most expensive white rice is here, but the inhuman me is already eating my fifth bowl! With the sauce, I even feel can still eat the sixth bowl while licking the plate~ Long live unlimited refills!]

[Breaking news: The stall owner said that there are only ten minutes before she go offline! Everyone behind should stop queuing, it’s too late~ Then my comment, I learned this word in the textbook, but just now I almost eat the plate to really understand – it turns out that the taste that makes people cry is called delicious!]

The young father looked up, completely shocked.

And the middle-aged man who pointed also screamed, "Huh? Only another ten minutes! Sh*t! I shouldn't have written such a long review, a waste of time!"

The young father whose hair was pulled by his little daughter: "..."

At this moment, Liu Weiwei patted her heart. She was also stunned. She kept looking at the business reports given by Skynet. Sold 20 copies,......60 copies......80 copies......

However! The eight essential taste descriptions, numbing, spicy, hot, fragrant, crisp, tender, fresh and lively were still not enough. Until now, she had collected more than 50 comments with the word ‘fragrant’, more than a dozen with ‘hot’, and three ‘fresh’, but the other words were  not mentioned at all.

Desperate!

Liu Weiwei wanted to collect twenty each, but it seemed to be too difficult. But, her rented ten-meter message board had still been filled with no gaps. Sh*t! She, a seven thousand years ancient girl, was so much better at appraisal, and she could even express her love indiscriminately. What’s wrong with this unimaginative people now!

Hey, administrator, I want to report! ￣へ￣ 

*****

TN:

MD: ICRAB rating on novelupdates is so low T-T. Can you help raise it to at least 4 star?