The Game of Life

The oranges weren’t his purchase; they were bought by Ji Xia. If one must complain about the selection of oranges, it should be Ji Xia’s poor choice, which had nothing to do with him, Jiang Feng.

Jiang Feng himself admitted that he simply didn’t know how to pick fruit. When buying fruit, he just went by looks, choosing the prettiest ones. Shockingly, this superficial method had never resulted in him picking out bad fruit. Thus, he concluded, beauty is justice.

Frist, Jiang Feng made a phone call asking Wu Minqi to bring some oranges and crabs when she came, and then he started researching online.

Crab stuffed oranges were a famous dish from the Song Period, and Jiang Feng felt that this could be an excellent entry point. He intended to delve into how people from the Song Period ate crabs and oranges; perhaps it would inspire him in the making of crab stuffed oranges.

But then Baidu informed Jiang Feng that people from the Song Period popularized eating raw crabs.

That is, uncooked crabs.

Jiang Feng: …

My ancestors’ taste buds were quite bold, huh.

It was recorded in “Crab Strategy,” “Historian Huang once wrote: ‘The crab is slightly marinated and raw.’ Nowadays, people season the crab with salt and wine, mixed with ginger and orange. This is the raw crab, also known as the washed-hands crab.”

The washed-hands crab, popular among ancient elites, used orange juice as a seasoning. Nevertheless, Jiang Feng was convinced that the orange juice was not for seasoning but most likely to remove the fishy smell. The fishy odor left by a cooled, cooked crab was enough to cause nausea, let alone a raw one. The salt, wine, ginger, and orange in the washed-hands crab pointed to the ancients having normal taste and smell senses, as all the ingredients were for removing fishiness.

After finishing his research and feeling quite shocked, Jiang Feng firmly thought crab stuffed orange was a very normal dish, at least it was cooked.

If Baidu couldn’t inspire him, he had to turn to the game.

Jiang Feng decided to rewatch Cao Guixiang’s cooking process, scrutinizing it carefully, intently, without missing a single detail.

If he couldn’t find any breakthrough this time, he would have to rely on the backtracking function to see how Master Peng had done it.

Jiang Feng once again opened the tutorial video for crab stuffed orange.

Watching a tutorial video felt different from accessing memories. The tutorial was like any ordinary culinary video; Jiang Feng could only see Cao Guixiang’s hands, not even her face.

He could hear quite a bit, but the microphone picked up sound poorly; if the distance was slightly greater, Jiang Feng couldn’t hear clearly. He could only understand when the person speaking was very close to Cao Guixiang. He had watched the video so many times that he could recite the script by heart.

The advantage was that he could see every move of Cao Guixiang’s hands clearly and wouldn’t miss any detail, as if the game camera was almost poking her hands.

“There are two more oranges in the bag; you practice with the remaining crab meat later.”

“Yes, Master.”

Along with this familiar master-student dialogue that Jiang Feng knew all too well, the instructional video for crab stuffed orange began.

As Cao Guixiang sliced off the top of the first orange, Master Peng’s voice rang out again, “Changping, go outside and check the time.”

Cao Guixiang cut the top off the second orange.

Footsteps.

Jiang Feng knew Master Peng was going to deal with the sunflower duck at this point.

In his memories, he hadn’t paid attention to how Cao Guixiang made the crab stuffed oranges at all; instead, he had gone to watch Master Peng cook the sunflower duck.

Jiang Feng continued to watch. He was already very familiar with the steps; seeing what Cao Guixiang did, he knew what she would do next. He even knew exactly when she failed to scrape the orange clean and when she had to go back and scrape it again.

Nearly half an hour passed, and Cao Guixiang finished shaving the crab meat only to realize the orange wasn’t scraped clean. She picked up the orange again and started carefully scraping the remaining flesh from the inside.

“Master, you’re well aware that second senior brother has never liked this kind of dish. If it were ‘Buddhas Jumping Over the Wall,’ no matter how troublesome, he’d be willing to do it. But for this dish, he wouldn’t want to bother,” Cao Guixiang’s voice echoed in the video.

Jiang Feng remembered this part, it seemed that at this time, Qin Guisheng found crab stuffed oranges troublesome and didn’t want to do it, he slipped away, and Cao Guixiang was speaking on his behalf.

After that, there were hardly any words in this part of the video; the other people were too far away from Cao Guixiang, and she didn’t have the habit of talking to herself.

Cao Guixiang finished preparing the oranges and was ready to steam them.

“Master, should the crab stuffed oranges be served together with the other dishes?” asked Cao Guixiang.

Master Peng’s reply wasn’t captured.

Viewing the video, Jiang Feng was startled.

He suddenly noticed a problem he had never realized before.

He only knew that last time Cao Guixiang served dishes to Zhang Chu and later got lost in her thoughts in the corner of the staircase and forgot about the crab stuffed oranges in the pot, which resulted in them being steamed too long, but he never realized that Master Peng’s steaming time was also quite long.

Master Peng’s crab stuffed oranges had been steaming since Cao Guixiang started making them. During that time, Master Peng had finished making the sunflower duck and had thickened the sauce for the Braised Big Black Sea Cucumber, which took at least half an hour altogether. How could the crab stuffed oranges have continued steaming for over half an hour without turning to mush?

How exactly did Master Peng steam them?

Back in their day, they didn’t have gas stoves; they used traditional wood-fired stoves, which made Fire Control much more challenging than today. Jiang Feng had never looked behind the stove to see the size of the fire in it.

The instructional video did not show the fire in the stove.

Now the question arose, what exactly was the fire in the stove like?

What kind of fire would allow the crab stuffed oranges to steam for over half an hour without becoming mushy?

Jiang Feng knew he had to use the Backtracking function now.

He could skip watching anything else, but he had to go behind the stove to see the fire for himself. His intuition told him that this was the key to achieving an A-grade crab stuffed orange.

If there was anything Jiang Feng was good at, it was his intuition.

Jiang Feng quit the instructional video and opened the recovery function to study how to use this brand-new feature thoroughly. Then he discovered that the game was actually quite user-friendly; the Backtracking could review all memory segments or target specific segments for review. Targeting specific memory segments for review was like dragging the progress bar when watching a TV show, you drag it to the part you want to watch and click play.

When Jiang Feng chose the memory segment with Cao Guixiang, he found that there indeed appeared to be a progress bar underneath, just like in a video player.

After quietly studying for a while, Jiang Feng found that when dragging the progress bar, the segments he could see were from his perspective in his memory, only blurrier— the quality was infinitely close to 270P standard definition, as if viewed on a 98-inch super-large LCD screen.

Looking at it for a while almost felt blinding.

After dragging the progress bar for over ten minutes, Jiang Feng finally caught the segment he wanted to see and clicked yes on the choice to backtrack.

Jiang Feng once again entered Cao Guixiang’s memory.

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