Liam weighed the sack of corn seed in his hand and asked the system: "Why does three kilograms of seed only trade for a single tube of medicine?"
The system answered: "Because the medicine of this world is a miracle drug in that host’s world. Your medicine can cure eye conditions like near-sightedness, far-sightedness and astigmatism, and the high-grade stuff can even cure cancer. So your medicine is worth a great deal."
Liam’s mouth fell open, and he felt his whole view of the universe being rewritten.
Then he asked out of curiosity: "If level one can only trade with level one, and at this level I’m not even allowed to browse other hosts’ stalls, then how is a stall owner supposed to know where to find the goods they need?"
The blue cat rolled its eyes: "My dear host, you haven’t so much as opened the system message board, have you?"
Liam scratched his nose: "Not yet..."
The blue cat hissed: "I knew it. Whenever a stall carries something the host needs, the system sends out a notification. You can wait for other people to connect with you, or connect with them yourself. Once today’s ten exchanges are used up, your stall goes offline, and tomorrow the goods you list can be the same ones or new additions."
Hearing that, Liam immediately opened the system message board. Sure enough, close to a hundred notifications were sitting there waiting, each one a stall holding something he needed.
One look at them and his head was already swimming.
"With that many stalls, how am I supposed to choose?"
The kitten waggled its ears, hopped up and pressed a filter icon in the corner of the screen, then said: "When hosts push items onto their stalls, the system assesses a priority level for them. Take the host who just traded with you. He needs medicine to save his mother’s life, so the system marks his stall name with a red dot. And when goods he needs come up, the system notifies him first as well."
It opened the filter, selected trade history and brought it up for Liam to see: "Look here, host. Before he traded with you, his stall was red. Once the trade went through and the system assessed the danger as cleared, his stall turned green."
Liam nodded to show he understood, and the blue cat flicked a forepaw to bring the main page back and carried on explaining: "Orange is near-critical status, purple is badly needed, blue is normal, and green is not urgent. You can prioritize by color."
Liam looked over the notification board and saw three orange stalls, two purple, and the rest blue and green. Without hesitation he tapped an orange stall at the top.
The moment he did, the trade panel sprang open. The other party’s goods were already displayed: two sacks of white rice, ten kilograms each. But the other side had also loaded several more slots, containing ten cabbages, ten kilograms of sprouted sweet potato slips, twelve packets of heat-tolerant cucumber seeds and ten kilograms of Australian mandarins.
[The other party wishes to trade for mid-grade medicine x5. Accept the exchange?]
Liam rubbed his chin, surprised that mid-grade medicine was worth that much, given that low-grade medicine had only fetched three kilograms of glutinous corn seed. He tilted his head and asked the blue cat: "Someone in this host’s family must be seriously ill, am I right?"
The blue cat nodded: "That’s right. Late-stage lung cancer. If he had high-grade medicine it would take only three tubes to cure it outright, but that requires a level-three stall to trade for. These five tubes of mid-grade will buy his family member another five years of life."
Liam was quiet for a moment, then pressed accept on the system panel. While the trade processed, Liam asked: "Can I add these people as friends?"
The blue cat swished its tail: "Only once a stall reaches maximum level can hosts add each other and trade privately."
At that Liam sighed, and went ahead and used up the four remaining exchanges he had for the day. He picked two orange stalls, sold off two time-freeze storage boxes and two tubes of high-grade nutrient fluid, and traded them for twenty fertilized chicken eggs and twelve kilograms of potatoes still caked with soil.
He had gathered almost everything he wanted now. Wheat flour and yardlong bean seed weren’t urgent, and trading for them later would be soon enough.
With new ingredients in hand, Liam went cheerfully into the kitchen, intending to cook his brother and sister a proper lunch. Then he looked at the cooking equipment and stopped short.
Without a rice cooker, how exactly was he supposed to cook rice?
The blue cat offered: "That one I do know. You can do it on the steam setting of the microwave. Put the rice and water in a heatproof bowl and steam it in the microwave. Um... but I’m not clear on the temperature or the timing..."
Liam glanced at it and smirked: "And here I thought you knew everything. So there are things you can’t do after all."
The blue cat’s fur stood up: "Kindly get this straight, host. I am the Cross-World Trading Hall stall system, not an encyclopedia. I am under no obligation to know how to cook rice in a microwave."
Liam laughed: "All right, all right, I was teasing. If you don’t know, never mind, I’ll use the stewing pot and make porridge instead. Tomorrow I’ll trade for a rice cooker."
He exchanged a couple more words with the blue cat, then switched on livestream mode and started on lunch. Liam’s title for the broadcasting room today was every bit as eye-catching as usual:
#Does anyone know what food was like in ancient times? Today I’m going to show you all what the essence of cooking really is#
Liam was cooking lunch fairly late today, landing right in the middle of everyone’s lunch break, so the moment the room opened people came flooding in like a river breaking its banks. The staff member responsible for Liam’s channel was just getting up to go and eat when the red notification on his screen stopped him dead.
The VIP channel he was responsible for was livestreaming at midday. Flustered, the staff member hurriedly contacted the communications department and requested that Liam’s channel be pushed to the top of the Hot LiveRoom board.
Only once everything was arranged did he let out a breath of relief. He didn’t even bother going to the break area for his nutrient fluid, choosing to eat right there at his desk. And only then did he have time to read the title of Liam’s room.
"Ancient food? Who alive today knows how to make anything like that?"
The staff member opened the room dubiously, and the screen immediately filled with a heap of white grains like pearls. On the other side, Liam was scooping up handfuls of rice and spreading them open in front of the camera:
"Look at this, everyone. These are grains of plain white rice. Rice can be cooked into steamed rice, into porridge, into cakes, into noodles. In ancient times people didn’t eat nutrient fluid or star-beast meat or high-energy greens the way we do now. They relied on this thing called rice to fill their stomachs."
"It doesn’t give instant satiety or nourish your mental power the way today’s food does, but it tastes wonderful. Enough talking, I’ll demonstrate for you right now."
Liam promptly scooped a small bowl of rice into the stewing pot and added water to wash it. As he washed it he said: "I meant to make steamed rice, but the thing you cook rice in is a rice cooker and I couldn’t find one anywhere, so I’ve had to switch to porridge instead."
[Rice? Steamed rice? Porridge? What is any of this? I’m a history major and I can state for a fact that none of these things has ever appeared in the history of the Lumina galaxy!]
[What the hell? Has the room owner run out of ideas and started making things up for views?]
[I’m a mechanical engineering student and I can state for a fact that I have never heard of any device called a rice cooker!]
Liam laughed: "The ancient times I’m talking about may be a very long way from the ancient times you know. As for whether I’m fishing for views, stay until the end and you’ll find out, won’t you?"
Once the rice was washed, he filled the stewing pot most of the way with water: "If you want steamed rice, you only need water two thirds of an index-finger joint above the surface of the rice. For porridge, you need at least a liter and a half."
"Leave the star-beast ribs in one whole rack like this, or if your pot is small you can chop them down. Remember to clear away all the bone fragments at the cut ends so no splinters get into the porridge."
"Blanch the bones briefly in hot water, then drop the lot into the porridge pot. Now put the lid on and let it simmer slowly over a low heat."
[Room owner, there’s really no need to teach us this. I wouldn’t have the first idea where to find any of the things you’re using.]
Liam read that comment, curved his lips into a small smile and said with a great deal of meaning behind it: "I wouldn’t be so sure. You might well run into it a few months from now."
[Huh? What does the room owner mean by that? Do you know some kind of secret?]
[I can confirm it: brother Sunflower is definitely with the Research Institute!]
[Upstairs, would a man from the Research Institute be out here working as a streamer? Try coming up with a theory grounded in reality.]
Liam didn’t answer any of these questions. He set the porridge to simmer and moved on to the next dish, taking out a small piece of star-beast meat threaded with lean and fat, washing it and slicing it thin.
"This piece I’m going to turn into cracklings, to stir-fry with cabbage. I don’t suppose any of you know what cabbage is?" Liam lifted a cabbage the size of a human head onto the table and introduced it: "This is called cabbage. Its leaves wrap around each other in layers, and the further in you go the sweeter it gets. You can eat it raw, boil it, stir-fry it, or pickle it."
He split the cabbage in two with one decisive stroke of the knife. The cut face showed layer upon layer of leaf stacked like the rings in a piece of timber, snow white and heavy with moisture.
The smart system zoomed in on the cut face automatically. In the broadcasting room the comments stopped dead for three seconds, and then erupted ten times harder than before.
[That’s beautiful...]
[I’ve suddenly started craving something I can’t even name.]
[God, that smell! The scent simulation is on! How is it that fresh?]
[I just ordered vegetable-flavored nutrient fluid and now my life feels meaningless.]
Liam shredded the cabbage into fine strips about a centimeter wide, then rinsed it through three changes of water. The star-beast meat in the pan was steadily rendering its fat, and Liam turned it over once and left it to go a little more golden.
"While we wait for the cracklings to crisp up, let me introduce you to something else." He took out a round brown tuber and scraped lightly at the skin with a fingernail, exposing the pale yellow flesh beneath: "This is called a potato. You can boil it, roast it, stir-fry it, stew it in soup, fry it crisp, bake it into cakes. In short there are a great many ways to eat it."
"Potatoes contain a great deal of starch, which will fill your stomach. However, raw potato is poisonous, and a sprouted potato is extremely poisonous, so under no circumstances should you eat either."
As he talked, Liam peeled the potatoes with quick, practiced hands, dropping each one into water as he finished it. The room watched closely, throwing out the occasional comment, and Liam would pick a few of the more engaging ones to answer.
Once the peeling was done, Liam cut out the leftover eyes on the tubers and sliced them into long batons of perfectly even thickness, dropping those into the cold water too.
"Soaking them washes off some of the starch clinging to the outside, so they come out crisp later and don’t stick to one another. Five minutes or so is enough, then lift them out and pat them completely dry. Wet potatoes mean oil spitting everywhere, so mind your hands."
By the time the potatoes were cut, the cracklings in the pan had gone golden. Liam quickly lifted them out and set them aside, then poured off some of the fat into a heatproof bowl.
"Stir-fried greens are best cooked right before you eat them, so let’s fry the potatoes first."
He lifted the potatoes out, patted them dry with a clean cloth, then set a deep wok on the stove and poured in oil to heat until it was good and hot.
"Same principle I told you about the other day: anything fried gets fried twice. The first fry is over medium heat to cook the inside through, then out they come to cool. The second fry is over high heat, and one minute is all it takes to get them golden and crisp outside."
Baton after baton went down into the oil with a lively sizzle. Liam stirred them gently, and when they had turned pale gold he lifted the lot out into a colander.
After about five minutes to let them cool, he turned the heat up as high as it would go and tipped them all back in.
This time exactly one minute. When he lifted them out, every baton was a deep gold, the outside shattering-crisp and the inside still soft and floury. Liam scattered a little salt over them, tossed them evenly and turned them out onto a plate.
He picked one up, blew on it a few times and bit into it. The lens zoomed in on the potato in his hand and on the lower half of his face from the mouth down.
The crack of it went straight through the microphone.
The broadcasting room detonated.
[What was that sound?]
[Bite it again! I’m begging you!]
[Damn it, I just bit down on my nutrient fluid tube by mistake.]
[Mother, I want to eat that. I genuinely want to eat that.]
[Whatever it costs, sell me one plate!]
Liam chewed, his eyes crinkling with laughter: "It’s delicious. Shame none of you can have any."
[That’s cruel!]
[This guy is doing it on purpose!]
[Stop him! Don’t let him eat any more!]
He ignored the howling audience and turned to set a flat pan on for the cabbage. He heated a little fat, fried off spring onion and garlic until fragrant, then added the cracklings. Two turns of the cracklings and in went the cabbage, followed by the seasoning. Greens want a high flame and a fast hand, so about two minutes of quick tossing, and the moment the cabbage was just cooked through and still holding its crunch he turned off the heat.
The smell of stir-fried cabbage spread through the kitchen at once, and through the taste simulation system it reached every single person sitting in front of a screen. The comments could no longer form words beyond wailing that they wanted to eat.
Gifts came flying in without pause until the effects flooded the whole screen.
Liam carried the cabbage and the fried potatoes out himself first, then went back in to check the porridge. He pressed the release valve to let all the steam out of the stewing pot before opening the lid.
The grains that had started out small had swollen to fill the pot, and the ribs had simmered down to falling apart. Liam carefully lifted the ribs out onto a plate, used a fork and chopsticks to strip the meat from the bones, then tipped the meat back into the pot. The bones went straight into the bin.
Next he seasoned the porridge and stirred it until the rib meat and the rice had become one thing. Only when it came bubbling back to a boil did he turn the heat off.
Liam ladled it out into three large bowls and scattered a pinch of chopped spring onion and a little pepper over the top.
"And that’s done. Three dishes: rib porridge, fried potatoes, and stir-fried cabbage."
He carried all three out to the dining table, set them down neatly, then turned back and looked straight into the lens: "Now I’m off to eat. I’ll see you all at the next livestream."
[Wait!]
[Don’t switch it off! I haven’t finished smelling it!]
[Big brother, please, sell me some!]
Liam waved goodbye and shut the room down without hesitation.
He was about to go out and call his brother and sister in to eat when the blue cat suddenly leapt out and said: "Cook another plate of Grass Worms. You need them badly right now."
Liam tilted his head in puzzlement: "I’ve already had them twice this week. Didn’t you say a live Grass Worm carries a small quantity of radioactive toxin? So why are you telling me to eat them?"
The blue cat swung its tail in exasperation and slapped him with it: "You only remember the parts you want to hear, don’t you? I said live! Only a living Grass Worm carries the toxin, and once you’ve boiled them there’s nothing left of it! From today on, you’re eating at least ten a day for me!"
Liam rubbed his forehead and narrowed his eyes at the blue cat: "Listen, kitten. What exactly is wrong with my body? What are you hiding from me?"
The blue cat promptly dived back into Liam’s soul space and played dead, refusing to show its face again.
Liam: "..."
Wretched system. Fine, don’t tell me. As if I couldn’t just go to a hospital and get checked myself.