“Chi Xiaozheng!”
Lin Xia pushed away the man clinging to his body, his beautiful face so grim it looked as if it could drip with water.
“Are you keeping something from me?”
Chi Zheng actually lost his nerve the moment he was pushed away, but being well-versed in the art of domestic conflict, he stiffened his neck and feigned ignorance.
“I didn’t hide any secret savings!”
“Who’s talking about secret savings?!” Lin Xia poked him in the chest repeatedly. “You said you were fine… but do you have any idea that you’ve been saying strange things since just now? Your head must have been broken from the fall!”
“You actually dare to lie about something like this. Fine, Chi Xiaozheng, I see your wings have truly grown strong!”
He rattled on while Chi Zheng listened meekly, the tension in his previously rigid back relaxing instantly.
Once Lin Xia finished talking, Chi Zheng earnestly admitted his mistake. He voluntarily detailed his entire condition before and after waking up from his faint, using clear articulation and a fluent speaking speed to prove there was nothing wrong with his brain.
“You must have been spacing out,” he counterattacked, shifting the blame. “My Alliance speech is so standard. If you couldn’t understand me, it means you weren’t listening seriously. Lin Xiaxia, your mind is entirely focused on upgrading the food stall cart, so you didn’t take a single word I said to heart.”
*Is that so?*
Lin Xia reflected for a moment, thinking he couldn’t rule out the possibility.
After all, the two of them were still in an alternate space. People easily grew paranoid in unfamiliar environments; perhaps he really was just too tense.
Thus, he patted Chi Zheng’s face. “I’m sorry, Chi Xiaozheng. You go back to resting then.”
Resting? How could he possibly rest?
If he didn’t work, wouldn’t all the labor fall on Xiaxia?
Xiaxia’s fingers were so slender; what if they got cut? Tossing a heavy stir-fry wok for a long time was also exhausting, and packaging the food plate by plate would make Xiaxia’s hands so sore he wouldn’t be able to sleep.
“Let me do it.” Chi Zheng began to scoop the food from the wok.
The plates were provided by the system. Lin Xia set the portion size for each serving at exactly 500 grams—large enough to be filling, of high quality, and reasonably priced. The diners could find no fault with it.
In fact, the customers in the hole-in-the-wall dining district didn’t care about plating at all. However, Chi Zheng was a perfectionist with obsessive-compulsive disorder. He managed to portion out every single plate of food without a millimeter of difference, as if they had been copied and pasted. Even the most critical diner couldn’t speak against their conscience to say his dishes looked bad or fell short on weight—putting the flavor aside for a moment, the presentation and standard were absolute perfection.
*Bang! Bang! Bang!*
*Screeech—creak—*
“￥%@……@￥￥！@￥￥！”
*Boom—*
In the black fog not far away, a neon sign abruptly went out, accompanied by a shrill, miserable shriek.
They couldn’t understand what the creature was screaming, but it was clear that it was experiencing immense agony. The screaming lasted for only a dozen seconds, followed by a crunching, chewing sound mixed with some unintelligible language, making one’s spine turn cold.
Lin Xia’s heart pounded wildly, yet the movements of his hands didn’t dare slow down in the slightest.
He could roughly guess what had happened outside. A stall owner had triggered a death rule, and their shop no longer provided protection. Consequently, the ravenous customers waiting outside finally found their chance, dragging the person right out of the stall to eat them as food.
And the death rules were, in all likelihood, related to ratings. Although he didn’t know how many negative reviews would cause the penalty to trigger, Lin Xia didn’t want to risk trying at all. He currently only wanted to sell out his inventory as quickly as possible and leave.
As time ticked away second by second, the black fog outside the cart grew even denser.
Signs continued to extinguish. Some owners safely exited after completing their quests, while others went straight into the bellies of the diners. But regardless, the lights that had once resembled a sea of stars gradually grew sparse, and more and more diners began to gather in front of Lin Xia’s food stall cart. Countless greedy, salivating gazes locked onto him.
By now, Lin Xia had also figured out the rules of the hole-in-the-wall dining district.
This area was for novice stalls. The food they could provide focused primarily on high quality at a low price, emphasizing cost-effectiveness, so the diners who came in weren’t high-level mutated species either.
Because Lin Xia was a novice, his food stall cart had been spawned at the very end of the hole-in-the-wall dining district, belonging to the most secluded corner of the entire street.
Yet, precisely because of this poor location, he hadn’t immediately faced the onslaught of the customer rush.
The positioning of the food carts was ranked according to their comprehensive rating. The stalls near the front belonged to owners with higher ratings, and they occupied the prime real estate at the entrance. When diners entered the alley, the higher-ranked stalls would be noticed first.
Of course, while gaining a massive flow of customers, they also bore far more risk. On the bright side, having many customers made it easy to reach sales targets, but the stall owner’s hand speed and culinary skills had to keep pace—once hit with a large wave of customer complaints, the front-row owners were also the fastest to die.
Thinking of it this way, the rules of this farm were quite fair—high risk, high reward. For a novice stall owner like Lin Xia, the farm gave him an opportunity to adapt. If those front-row shops hadn’t helped draw the aggro for him, how could he have enjoyed the ease and comfort of facing only two diners at the start?! He likely would have had his shop smashed by starving diners long ago.
*In the future, I must prepare almost all the dishes before starting a quest. Cooking on-site is too thrilling; it’s easy to make mistakes when in a rush.*
Silently summarizing his experience in his mind, his kitchen knife nonetheless nimbly sliced the last piece of roasted meat.
He then drizzled his specially prepared secret sauce over it, letting the rich flavors permeate into the fibers of the meat, before handing it to Chi Zheng for plating. A dish of smoked lizard-tail barbecue, perfect in color, aroma, and taste, was complete.
“Put it on the shelves. This is the last dish.”
Lin Xia washed his hands by the sink and gulped down several large mouthfuls of pure water before finally finding the time to check the diners’ feedback.
Currently, a total of 55 dishes had been sold, yielding 750 Mall Coins.
It wasn’t that Lin Xia didn’t want to charge higher prices, but the unit price for food in the hole-in-the-wall dining district could not exceed 20 points.
Of course, if the quality was exceptionally outstanding, it wasn’t impossible to exceed 20 points, but diners could use cost-effectiveness as a reason to leave a negative review. Lin Xia didn’t dare try to earn that life-threatening money.
Therefore, in Lin Xia’s display cabinet, most dishes were priced between 10 to 15 Mall Coins. For the higher-priced items, Lin Xia would compensate by increasing the portion size. Although this strategy was conservative, it was absolutely safe; at least all customer complaints regarding the price were rejected by the system.
The rest depended on the contents of the feedback forms. Diners were unable to lie on the feedback forms, so what they provided were genuine evaluations (including their mental processes). He could use this chance to figure out the general preferences of the hole-in-the-wall dining district.
—*Beep.*—
—*Congratulations, you have received the approval of 50 diners. Would you like to open the detailed page?*—
“50?” Lin Xia frowned. “Wasn’t it 55?”
Thoughtful, he immediately opened the five feedback forms that hadn’t received approval.
The first diner was complaining that his food portion was too small, not even enough to fill the gaps between its teeth, and it cursed the purchase limit rule in the Outer Dining District that allowed only one serving per person.
> A stall owner who doesn’t consider individual circumstances doesn’t deserve to live at all! With this tiny amount of stuff, my fingernails could barely pinch it! Even if it’s cheap, it shouldn’t disappear before I can even taste the flavor! Is it my fault that my digestive juices are too efficient?! This is fundamentally racial discrimination against #$$@@! Negative review!
> *(Note: Detected that this review is not directed solely at the stall; therefore, it will not be counted toward the rating system.)*
Lin Xia let out a long sigh of relief, completely abandoning any thoughts of shrinking portion sizes to make more money.
He flipped open the second feedback form.
The second form contained a genuine negative review, and it had been incorporated into the evaluation system by the system, causing his stall’s approval rating to be docked by 3 points.
Receiving one approval increased his rating by 1 point, while receiving one negative review docked it by 3 points. According to this calculation method, if he wanted to complete the additional quest in the end, he not only had to control the occurrence of negative reviews but also ensure his sales volume was large enough; otherwise, maintaining an approval rating above 60% would be very dangerous.
Once the approval rating fell below 60%, the stall owner would lose their qualification to run a stall in the hole-in-the-wall dining district, and the food stall cart would no longer prevent the diners’ attacks.
Of course, that didn’t mean they would certainly die. As long as they rushed to return to their original world before the diners launched an attack, even if the quest failed, the person still stood a chance of surviving.
However, Lin Xia didn’t hold out much hope for this. After all, those stall owners whose signs had been extinguished earlier also had the chance to click for a return journey, yet the vast majority still ended up as dishes on the diners’ tables. Not many successfully escaped.
“Don’t worry, we’ll definitely be fine.” Chi Zheng patted Lin Xia’s head, his gaze sweeping intentionally or unintentionally over the shadowy monsters looming outside the cart. “Just focus on cooking with peace of mind. Leave everything else to me.”
Lin Xia was amused by his overly arrogant declaration. He gave an answering nod and placed the final serving of smoked roasted lizard tail into the display window.
He pointed at the monsters gradually surrounding the cart outside. “Forget it, safety first for us. Look at them; they haven’t left even after finishing their food. They must be harboring bad intentions.”
“They’re just waiting for our quest to fail so they can swarm us.”
Chi Zheng lifted his eyelids, a flash of golden light darting through his inorganic pupils.
*Not leaving? Then all of you can stay.*
Low-level species were nothing more than a disorganized mob. Even ten thousand heads couldn’t piece together a complete brain; they didn’t understand the purpose of the rules’ existence at all.
They viewed the outsiders entering the farm as food, entirely unaware that they themselves were also food for higher-level predators.
Next was the time spent waiting for the results to come out. The system would only calculate the final quest results after the last diner submitted their feedback.
Lin Xia felt this process was exceptionally long. Currently, his approval rating hovered around 70%, and there were still 20 sales orders whose results hadn’t come out. Lin Xia’s finger hovered over the return button, not daring to relax in the slightest.
He had already decided that the moment his approval rating dropped to 65%, no matter how many orders were left behind, he would instantly initiate the teleportation. No matter how valuable the food stall cart’s power system was, it couldn’t compare to his and Chi Xiaozheng’s lives!
Fortunately, during the subsequent time, although some diners submitted unapproved ratings, they were all rejected by the system, and those that applied for a re-evaluation met the same result.
As the last feedback form was collected, a new prompt screen also appeared on the food stall cart’s light screen.
—*Beep.*—
—*Dear Host, it has been detected that you have completed the red enhanced quest. Would you like to initiate teleportation and exit the vending area?*—
*Note: After exiting the vending area, you will no longer be able to continue selling food. All uncompleted side quests will be voided, and outstanding accounts and rewards will no longer be distributed to the host’s account, though this will not affect the distribution of rewards for the main quest.*
Lin Xia hadn’t triggered any side quests in the Outer Dining District, nor did he have any accounts receivable or rewards, so he pressed the confirmation button without the slightest hesitation.
Time to go home!
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