10
The First Table of Guests
With Old John’s “Acting True to Life” skill enhancement, the rehearsal proceeded exceptionally smoothly.
Unfortunately, the lighting, curtains, and background music only had a mind of their own when Old John was portraying himself; at all other times, Jiang Qi had to manually operate them. This resulted in the atmosphere during scenes without Old John falling somewhat short, making Liu Lan admire Old John even more.
After an entire afternoon of rehearsal, Jiang Qi was completely numb by the time it finally concluded.
While eating green pepper and shredded pork over rice at the neighboring stir-fry restaurant, Jiang Qi received the landlord’s WeChat contact from Jiang Bing.
Before Jiang Qi could send an “ok” sticker, Jiang Bing called.
“Hey, my dear brother, how’s the takeover of the Murder Mystery Game Store going?”
“Not bad, but there are no customers. It feels similar to the convenience store last time,” Jiang Qi said after swallowing a mouthful of rice.
“That’s totally normal. It’s the off-season now, and students aren’t on break yet. Once summer vacation comes, you’ll probably be too busy to handle it,” Jiang Bing said cheerfully. “Lanlan mentioned you were rehearsing a Performance today. How did it go?”
“Pretty good,” Jiang Qi felt relatively satisfied. “By the way, Liu Lan said this Exclusive Edition was something you got for free. How did that happen?”
Jiang Bing perked up at the mention of freebies: “A publisher from a new studio called Card Game reached out to me—I don’t even remember when I added their WeChat. This is their first script, and they’re promoting it with a two-week trial period where you can return it without reason. When I heard about such a good deal, I agreed on the spot.”
Jiang Qi roughly understood: “Sis, I think this script is pretty good quality. If this studio releases new scripts in the future, you should consider buying them.”
Jiang Bing wasn’t convinced: “What high-quality scripts can an unknown small studio produce? You just haven’t played enough Murder Mystery Games to know what good scripts are like. Buying an Exclusive Emotional Script would be a huge loss for a store like ours. Getting two weeks free to run a couple sessions and make some small profit before returning it is the way to go.”
Before Jiang Qi could say more, Jiang Bing changed the subject: “I heard from Auntie that you’re helping your school’s teacher with…”
“…”
The casual call lasted about ten minutes. After hanging up, Jiang Qi sat pondering what exactly the method was to obtain Cards in this broken game. Just as he was thinking, Old John used his chopsticks to poke at the braised pork in his plate with too much force, flipping his rice everywhere.
He didn’t get any on himself, but gave Jiang Qi’s hair a braised pork and rice spa treatment.
Jiang Qi: …
Forget it, he could think about these things later. The top priority now was teaching Old John how to use chopsticks properly.
.
The following days saw no business at the store. Liu Lan, long accustomed to this, happily spent her days sitting at the front desk reading scripts, slacking off, and playing on her phone after the successful rehearsals.
Over the next few days, Jiang Qi read two more scripts but experienced no auditory or visual hallucinations, didn’t enter the worlds of the scripts, and didn’t obtain any new Cards. This further confirmed that the only way to obtain Cards currently was by reading scripts produced by the Card Game Studio. Since he wasn’t particularly interested in reading scripts anyway, he could only focus on researching how to help Old John quickly increase his star rating.
Old John remained as detached from worldly desires as ever, spending his days working and cleaning. Once the cleaning was done, he would sit on the lobby sofa reading books. Those books all belonged to Cao Wenyang. When Cao Yongjun was clearing out the household clutter, he had originally intended to discard these books too, but Jiang Qi made an excuse about wanting to read them and kept them.
Back when he was viewing the property, Jiang Qi had already figured out that Old John had chosen the smallest room precisely because of those books.
Who knows what misunderstanding Cao Yongjun had, but on the very night Old John moved into the upstairs room, Jiang Qi received a WeChat message from Cao Wenyang—Cao Wenyang thought Jiang Qi wanted to pursue cross-disciplinary postgraduate studies and sent him a reading list to follow in order.
When Old John was reading, Jiang Qi and Liu Lan would occasionally approach out of curiosity and take a look. In Liu Lan’s words, it was the kind of material where you might not understand each individual word, and when strung together, it became even more incomprehensible.
Jiang Qi would read it and fall silent, Liu Lan would read it and nearly weep. Only Old John could read it with rapt attention, even occasionally taking out blank paper to jot down insights, making Liu Lan begin to wonder what exactly Old John taught.
Just when Jiang Qi thought Liu Lan couldn’t hold back from asking whether Old John was involved in the arts or academia, Monday arrived.
The day of the script reading.
Liu Lan had mentioned earlier that the person booking the session was a regular customer of the shop, but she never specified who it was, and Jiang Qi never asked.
When this regular customer entered the shop—carrying a pink crossbody bag, wearing a plaid skirt and white leather shoes, with a large butterfly clip pinned to her ponytail, dressed in a lively, youthful style—Jiang Qi was stunned.
She wasn’t just a regular customer; she was an acquaintance.
Jiang Wanwan, the daughter of Jiang Qi’s uncle, Jiang Xiaokang.
Jiang Wanwan was currently a junior at the local University of Finance and Economics, living on campus from Monday to Friday and returning home on weekends. She had friends everywhere. Back in high school, her favorite pastime was watching delinquents fight in the alley behind the school. Once, while spectating, she was mistaken by the discipline supervisor as one of the students involved in the fight and was caught on the spot. Jiang Qi had to bail her out from the academic affairs office.
“Brother Jiang Qi!” Jiang Wanwan was even more shocked than Jiang Qi. “Aren’t you preparing for the re-examination? Dad told me not to disturb you. I’ve been wanting to invite you to a script reading for ages but didn’t dare to.”
Jiang Qi: “…I failed the re-examination two months ago.”
“Where’s Sister Bing?” Jiang Wanwan started looking for Jiang Bing. Not finding her, she met Jiang Qi’s gaze, and years of cousinly understanding allowed her to quickly decipher his hint.
Jiang Wanwan covered her face in despair: “Don’t tell me Sister Bing’s shop is going under again.”
Jiang Qi didn’t bother saying something like, “Maybe it won’t go under”—a lie Jiang Wanwan would never believe. Every time Jiang Qi took over one of Jiang Bing’s failing businesses, Jiang Wanwan reacted this way.
When the bubble tea shop, fried chicken shop, skewer shop, snack shop, and convenience store went under, Jiang Wanwan had been utterly heartbroken.
She had eaten her fair share of bubble tea, fried chicken, skewers, spicy strips, chips, and ice cream from those places.
“If Sister Bing’s shop closes, where will I get free script readings?” Jiang Wanwan put on a pained expression, just as Jiang Qi had expected.
Just as Jiang Wanwan was looking devastated, Liu Lan returned with bubble tea: “Wanwan, you’re here so early today.”
“Lanlan, why didn’t you tell me earlier that Wanwan was the one booking the session today?” Jiang Qi asked.
Liu Lan slapped her forehead, wearing the puzzled expression of someone with a young person’s forgetfulness: “Huh, didn’t I mention it?”
“I thought I had.”
Jiang Qi: “…”
Today, Jiang Wanwan had brought her university classmates to play the script. The other five were first-time visitors to the shop. After they went upstairs, Jiang Qi opened the system panel to check the shop details and found that both fame and satisfaction remained at 0, with the task still incomplete.
It seemed Jiang Wanwan’s affection for this shop was fake.
She simply loved freebies—she didn’t truly care for the shop itself.
But that shouldn’t be the case.
Jiang Qi sat at the front desk, propping his head in his hands as he pondered. Based on his understanding of Jiang Wanwan, there was no way she could be dissatisfied. As long as something was free, she was happy—absolutely thrilled.
Back when Jiang Qi first took over the milk tea shop and his matcha milk tea was so awful it could practically poison someone, just because it was free, Jiang Wanwan still called it “not bad” and kept coming back for more.
“Could it be… the game’s definition of ‘affection’ is different from what I think?” Jiang Qi muttered to himself, lost in thought.
After failing to reach a conclusion, Jiang Qi started playing on his phone while waiting for Liu Lan to message them to come up for the Performance.
While waiting, he checked in on his wealthy roommate Yu Fang to see if his father had beaten him to death yet, tallied how many times Wang Zhuo and Zhan Ren—who had successfully made it into grad school—had cursed Xiao Zhang and Xiao Liu in the dorm group chat that day, and scrolled through his friends’ social media feeds to see what everyone had for dinner. He was just about to post something himself when Liu Lan’s message finally came.
Jiang Qi stood up and waved to Old John. “Performance time.”
Old John set down his book and followed Jiang Qi upstairs.
The entire room was pitch black. The blackout curtains were highly effective; even if the door wasn’t fully closed, no light from outside could penetrate the curtains. Using the sliver of light from the doorway, Jiang Qi quickly arranged the tables, chairs, and bags, then closed the door and crouched in a corner.
Liu Lan stood in another corner, demanding in a female voice, “John, do you still remember your father?”
Jiang Qi crouched in his corner, motionless. The background music started automatically, a circular spotlight lit up, and Old John’s shadow fell upon the curtain like a memory from a silent film.
“Wow.” Jiang Qi heard a girl inside gasp softly, whispering to her companion, “Wanwan, your cousin’s shop has such high-end Performances.”
Old John and Liu Lan continued their Performance, and no further sounds came from inside.
It was quiet. In the dark, silent environment, it was easiest for people to focus their attention on the only source of light.
The Performance was segmented. Besides brief intervals between scenes for changing actors and props, after each character’s memory segment ended, Liu Lan would step out to host, handing out corresponding cards that hadn’t been adapted into live Performances to the players. This allowed them to read by candlelight in the dark, making them more susceptible to the atmosphere and easier to immerse.
After John’s memory segment concluded, Jiang Qi crouched in the corner, waiting for the hosting segment to finish.
Suddenly, he heard very soft sobbing.
Faint and intermittent in the darkness, growing clearer.
Jiang Qi immediately perked up.
Someone was crying?!