Having money meant she could buy even more supplies to fill this 200 cubic meter space.
She wondered how large it would become once it reached Level 3. How much would its volume expand, and what new functions would it unlock?
After hanging up the phone, Mo Fei lay down on the sofa, took out her phone, and began placing orders across various online shopping platforms.
Out of the more than one million yuan, she planned to spend ¥200,000 stocking up on supplies through e-commerce platforms.
Some items could not be bought in excessively large quantities all at once. She neither ran a shop nor made charitable donations, so buying too much would inevitably attract attention.
But placing orders across multiple online stores spared her that concern. The goods would all be shipped from different parts of the country.
“Better buy plenty of snacks. One hundred cartons of potato chips, one hundred cartons of spicy konjac strips, one hundred cartons of Snickers, one hundred cartons of Crispy Rice chocolates, one hundred cartons of pickled pepper chicken feet, one hundred cases each of four Chocliz ice cream flavours, two hundred cartons of luosifen, two hundred cartons of daily mixed nuts…”
As the shopping cart filled with more and more items, the available credit on Mo Fei’s credit card steadily dwindled.
Seeing that her credit limit was nearly exhausted, Mo Fei finally forced herself to stop. After all, she had not yet received the money from selling the house, so she still had to exercise some restraint.
After shopping for half the day, Mo Fei’s stomach was growling with hunger. She went to the dining table, put the soup dumplings that had already cooled slightly into the microwave, and heated them for two minutes.
Just as she finished eating the dumplings, the doorbell rang.
Mo Jianian ran to answer the door and found the property management staff leading in the technicians who had come to install the internet line and replace the lock.
Besides replacing the apartment’s anti-theft door lock with one fitted with a Grade C lock cylinder and installing a video doorbell, the locksmith had also brought another worker to install an additional security door outside the entrance. Of course, before installing the extra door, Mo Fei had already sent the landlord a message. The landlord seemed to have run into some sort of problem and only replied after a long while with a single word: approved.
Originally, Mo Fei had planned to install security bars outside all the windows as well. After giving it some thought, she abandoned the idea. After all, she was living on the top floor. The installation would be time-consuming, labour-intensive, and would attract too much attention.
The installation work was completed quickly, and all the workers left first.
Only Xiao Chen from the property management office remained waiting outside the door.
Xiao Chen was a young woman in her twenties who looked as though she had only recently started working. Looking rather guilty, she said to Mo Fei, “Miss Mo, are you perhaps dissatisfied with our residential complex’s security?”
Mo Fei froze for a moment before repeatedly shaking her head. “Oh, don’t overthink it. Here’s the thing, I have an ex-husband with violent tendencies. I’m especially afraid he’ll find out I’m living here. If he ever tracked me down, what would happen to me and my children? Having an extra security door gives me peace of mind. Don’t you think so?”
The lie came effortlessly to Mo Fei. Drawing inspiration from melodramatic family television dramas, she casually fabricated a scumbag ex-husband who abused his family, telling the story with heartfelt emotion.
After hearing it, Xiao Chen was filled with righteous indignation and deeply sympathised with Mo Fei. She repeatedly assured her that she would instruct the security office to strictly monitor everyone entering and leaving the residential complex. Only after offering Mo Fei a few more words of comfort did she finally leave.
“So, can you get online now?” Mo Fei asked as she walked into Mo Jianian’s room.
“Yes,” Mo Jianian replied, looking up with a smile spread across his face.
Originally, Mo Fei had assumed that a child Mo Jianian’s age would immediately download a few games to play. Instead, she saw him open some kind of window on the computer. His fingers flew across the keyboard as lines of code rapidly appeared on the screen.
The sight left Mo Fei completely dumbfounded. When she had been his age, she had not even known what programming code was. Being able to do basic addition and subtraction properly had already been an achievement.
Unable to understand any of it and too embarrassed to interrupt him, Mo Fei quietly placed some snacks beside Mo Jianian before softly leaving the room.
“What are you doing?” Mo Fei asked as she entered Mo Jiayue’s room, setting down another basket of snacks.
“Mom, come look at my drawing,” Mo Jiayue said, taking Mo Fei’s hand and leading her over to admire what she had spent the entire morning drawing.
It was a comic. In the picture, an adult was holding the hands of two children as they arrived at a luxurious house. It was exactly what they themselves had experienced over the past two days.
The brushstrokes were childish, yet the drawing was full of life. It carried a unique warmth that could only come from a child’s perspective.
“Why didn’t you colour it in?” Mo Fei asked as she looked at the drawing. She felt it would look even better with colour.
Mo Jiayue looked a little aggrieved, her face flushing red. “Mom, you forgot. Last time you said you’d buy me a box of markers for my birthday.”
“I remember, I remember.” Mo Fei nodded.
Right then and there, Mo Fei decided to add many more children’s supplies to her shopping list.
Pencils, fountain pens, gel pens, coloured pencils, markers, paints, textbooks, exercise books, exam papers, and all kinds of extracurricular books, she would buy plenty of everything. Once the three second-hand tablet computers she had ordered arrived, she would fill them with every kind of educational material and practical living resources she could find.
After all, this house belonged to their biological mother.
Seeing that it was about time, Mo Fei took three Australian purebred Wagyu ribeye steaks out of her space. Today’s meal would be an upgrade, steak for dinner. It just so happened that the kitchen cupboards already contained a complete set of knives and forks.
She first seasoned the fresh ribeye with black pepper, salt, and cooking oil, then left it to marinate for five minutes.
The large iron wok was used to boil water for the pasta, while Mo Fei chose a frying pan for the steaks. She cooked her own steak medium, while the children’s steaks were cooked well done. Paired with rosemary and cherry tomatoes, with pasta served alongside, the three plates of steak pasta were ready.
“Dinner’s ready!” Mo Fei called out.
The children had already smelled the delicious aroma and happily ran out.
“What is this? It smells so good!”
The children usually ate beef in stir-fried beef dishes or tomato braised beef brisket. They had never eaten steak before, so they were rather excited. Before long, they had cleaned their plates. However, Mo Fei noticed clearly that the children seemed even more interested in the pasta cooked in the iron wok. Even she herself preferred the seemingly ordinary pasta.
The only difference was that the pasta had been cooked in the iron wok, while the steak had been fried in the frying pan.
Could it really be because of the iron wok that the food tasted exceptionally delicious? Doubt arose in Mo Fei’s heart, and she decided to find another opportunity to conduct more experiments.
“After lunch, you can watch television for a while. But when it reaches one o’clock, you have to go take your afternoon nap, understand?” Mo Fei said as she tossed the iron wok into the sink and gave it a rinse.
The two children readily agreed. Mo Jiayue chose to watch The Flower Fairy in the living room, while Mo Jianian returned to his room to continue tinkering with the computer.
Mo Fei had no intention of returning to the receptionist job the original owner used to have. She directly submitted her resignation to her boss through WeChat.
The receptionist position had been quite leisurely to begin with, and almost anyone could easily fill it. As it happened, the boss’s niece had just graduated from university and had not yet found a job. The resignation went through unusually smoothly. The boss only told her to come by when she had time to complete the handover and collect her certificate of resignation.
Putting away her phone, Mo Fei began washing ingredients in the kitchen. She planned to start a business that could make money even faster than selling fried rice and fried noodles.
The weather outside was no different from the height of summer. Although it became much cooler at night, it was still hot, and many people were out strolling to enjoy the evening breeze. Cool and refreshing treats would naturally be very popular.
There were already plenty of stalls selling bingfen and hand-shaken lemonade on the market, but she had not yet seen anyone selling ice rice. Mo Fei decided to give it a try that night.
Since it was her first time selling it, Mo Fei did not prepare too much. She first steamed five jin of purple rice, three jin of black rice, and three jin of glutinous rice. The purple rice was steamed in the large iron wok, while the black rice and glutinous rice were cooked in the rice cooker.
After all the rice had finished cooking, she mixed in sugar evenly and placed it in the refrigerator to chill. She also whipped cream cheese together with sugar into a smooth milk foam. For toppings, she prepared diced watermelon and raisins.
After finishing that, Mo Fei saw that she still had some time, so she used the large iron wok to simmer a large pot of mung bean soup. The mung beans had first been frozen in the refrigerator before cooking, making them much easier to break down into a sandy, creamy texture. Once the soup had chilled, she added ice cubes, poured it into insulated containers, and everything was ready.
The ice rice would be sold in transparent square plastic containers with smiley face stickers attached to the lids. The mung bean soup would be served in the same kind of cups that milk tea shops normally used for fruit tea.
As for the pricing, there were temporarily no competing ice rice vendors at the night market, so Mo Fei spent quite a while thinking it over.
In the end, after estimating the production cost, she decided to charge ¥15 per serving of ice rice and ¥5 for a cup of mung bean soup. If customers bought both together, the bundle price would be ¥18.
Today she had prepared enough ingredients for fifty servings. The total cost came to around ¥350. If everything sold out, then at the bundled price of ¥18, it would mean a net profit of ¥550 in a single evening.
Besides, this was far easier than selling fried rice. Mo Fei wanted to earn as much money as possible while everything outside was still peaceful and prices remained stable.
At dinner, each of the two children hugged a bowl of ice rice and refused to put it down.
“Mom’s cooking gets more delicious every day,” Mo Jiayue praised as she ate. She already had a sweet tooth, and the ice rice Mo Fei made was not only icy and refreshing but pleasantly sweet without being overly rich. Mo Jiayue wished she could eat three bowls of it.
Mo Jianian also ate two bowls, which was already remarkable restraint on his part.
Looking at the two of them, Mo Fei asked, “Which of these three kinds of rice tastes the best?”
Without exception, both children chose the ice rice made from purple rice. Mo Fei raised an eyebrow, already having her answer. It seemed that the large iron wok’s miraculous qualities did not stop at providing storage space and cooking without a fire source. It even gave food an additional boost in flavour.
“Come on, you’re coming to the stall with me tonight! We’re not selling fried rice today. We’re selling this ice rice instead!” Mo Fei waved to the children.
“Woohoo!!!”
Compared to delicious food, going to run the stall together with their mother clearly made the siblings even happier.
Their mother had always insisted that they focus on studying and had refused to let them accompany her to help at the stall no matter what. Now, at long last, she was finally willing to take them along!
They were determined to help their mother work hard, and since the ice rice she made was so delicious, it would definitely sell out in no time.