Free Lunch
“Mm...”
A soft, whimpering sound drifted from the big bed.
Li Lan draped a thin blanket over herself and walked over to Zhu Qing, standing by the bed as she quietly studied her in the moonlight.
Zhu Qing was sleeping soundly, her profile pressed into the pillow, the corners of her mouth faintly curved as if she were having a sweet dream.
“Hm...”
Every so often, though, she let out a few disgruntled little noises.
When Li Lan was a child at the welfare home, she had slept in a dormitory lined with beds. There were always people snoring, grinding their teeth, cursing in their sleep, crying in their sleep; she had never seen anyone like Zhu Qing, who liked to whimper.
Back when they shared a bed, whenever Li Lan heard Zhu Qing making those little noises, she would pull her into her arms. As soon as Zhu Qing was held, she would go quiet. So Li Lan had formed the arbitrary impression that Zhu Qing’s whimpering was her way of showing dissatisfaction at being left alone in a cold bed with no one to hold her; that it was all aimed at her.
“You’re not allowed to be unhappy.” Li Lan breathed the words as softly as she could.
Zhu Qing: Huu—
Li Lan reached out and gently poked her cheek. Zhu Qing gave no reaction, so Li Lan pinched her lips together, squeezing them into a little duckbill.
Zhu Qing started whimpering again, frowning as she turned over; this time, she really was unhappy.
Li Lan contentedly went back to bed.
Zhu Qing was too funny, especially when she was unguarded around people. Li Lan found herself a little nostalgic for their honeymoon phase. She didn’t know whether Zhu Qing would keep trying to break up with her after recovering her memory; chances were she would, after all, since their conflicts and misunderstandings had never been resolved. The amnesiac Zhu Qing had kept her cuteness at a level beyond her usual standards, giving Li Lan a stolen, temporary sense of ease; a brief intoxication.
No matter what the future held, for now, Zhu Qing was still lying in the same room with her. Legally, she and Zhu Qing were partners; in everyone else’s eyes, they were wives.
Li Lan steadied herself, smoothed her emotions into place, and drifted off quietly.
—
When she woke in the morning, Li Lan vaguely heard a rooster crowing.
In truth, she hadn’t just heard it; rooster calls had chased through her dreams all night, making it hard to sleep deeply. By the time she stirred, dawn had already broken.
When she got up, Zhu Qing was nowhere in the room.
Li Lan pushed open the window. Outside, the air was fresh; under the clear blue sky stretched row after row of vegetable plots. Zhu Qing was carrying a bundle of firewood toward the kitchen. When she saw Li Lan, she grinned and waved hard.
After washing up, Li Lan went downstairs right away. Zhu Qing, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, was washing the freshly picked choy sum.
“Good morning,” Zhu Qing said brightly.
Li Lan straightened her crooked hat and looked around. “What time did you get up?”
“An hour ago,” Zhu Qing said with a smile, gesturing for her to look beside her. “There were four eggs in the coop. I took two, but one of them was a different color from the rest. I’m guessing the production team put that one there.”
Li Lan glanced outside and laughed. “The production team must’ve only just woken up too. Did anyone catch you picking the eggs and gathering wild greens?”
Zhu Qing shook her head, delighted. “Only the surveillance camera.”
Li Lan rolled up her sleeves and sat down to wash the vegetables with her. “Silly. And you’re still pleased when you weren’t even filmed.”
Zhu Qing nodded happily. “I’m happy because we’re traveling. How did you sleep last night?”
Li Lan’s expression turned a little subtle. She lightly pinched Zhu Qing’s cheek, where the bruising from last night’s pinch marks had already faded, paused for a moment, and said softly, “Pretty well. How are the mosquito bites? Any better?”
“They’re all better. The insect repellent and ointment Qian Chu bought worked really well. I’ll give her a big red packet when we get back.” Zhu Qing was all smiles; then she frowned a little. “I just don’t know whether we brought enough.”
Li Lan’s lips curved. “Enough. Use it all if you want; nobody’s going to fight you for it.”
Yesterday, Zhu Qing had guarded that bit of insect repellent from Yu Ling like a squirrel protecting food; Li Lan had nearly laughed out loud.
Zhu Qing chopped up a handful of choy sum, mixed it with egg and flour into a vegetable batter, and made each of them a scallion-free egg pancake.
What they drank was, naturally, the bird’s nest drink sponsored by the program; Zhu Qing added mountain spring water and boiled it again.
The egg pancakes carried the faint fragrance of greens, the crust crisp and fragrant while the inside stayed soft and fluffy; one bite, and the whole body felt comforted.
At last the production team fully woke up, and the cameraman recorded the two of them eating.
The clip of Zhu Qing cooking had been captured by the surveillance cameras and edited into a short segment; combined with the meal footage, it was finally released, and this time no one criticized her anymore.
As for Li Lan’s usually most active fans, aside from a few who seemed brainless enough to complain that Zhu Qing was feeding Li Lan such a rough meal, the rest with normal brains all knew that in a show famous for being “stingy and starving its guests,” for Li Lan to wake up to a hot meal was such a little angelic thing, so worthy of praise.
Of course, the awkwardness was still there. Praising her was impossible, especially since there wasn’t much to eat anyway; it was just an egg pancake, a plain old egg pancake... though it did look delicious.
—
On the other side, Qi Yao and Yu Ling simply skipped breakfast and slept until ten in the morning.
By the time they got dressed, put on makeup, and came out, it was already eleven.
“What are we eating for lunch?” Qi Yao asked. “I’m starving.”
Yu Ling handed him the bird’s nest drink. “Try this. It tastes pretty good.”
Qi Yao downed three bottles of bird’s nest and was still hungry. When he attended events, his manager usually handled everything, and he often didn’t get enough to eat. He hadn’t eaten dinner last night either, and now he was so hungry it was becoming urgent.
The production team handed them a task card.
[Take from the mountains what the mountains provide, from the waters what the waters provide. Guests may go out on their own to search for ingredients. If you need cooked food, you must gather enough goods to exchange for it. The specific exchange rules are as follows:]
Below that was a long list of items that could be exchanged.
Wild vegetables: such as Houttuynia cordata, wild amaranth, bracken, treehead greens, etc.; one jin exchanges for 10 points.
Vegetables: lettuce, carrots, baby bok choy, rapeseed greens, taro, etc.; one jin exchanges for 20 points.
Seasonings: scallions, Houttuynia cordata, cilantro, green garlic, etc.; one jin exchanges for 30 points.
Firewood: one jin exchanges for 5 points.
Fruit: Chinese date, Rosa roxburghii, etc.; one jin exchanges for 10 points.
Mushrooms: termite mushrooms, zongshu mushrooms, etc.; one liang exchanges for 30 points, morel mushrooms one liang exchanges for 300 points if in good condition, others one liang exchanges for 10 points.
Bamboo shoots: one jin exchanges for 50 points.
River fare: snails, loaches, crabs; one jin exchanges for 80 points.
...
The types of items that could be exchanged for points included:
Chicken, one jin, 30 points.
Pork, one jin, 60 points.
Beef, one jin, 100 points.
Fruit, one jin, 80 points.
Rice, one jin, 30 points.
...
Qi Yao was stunned. “Where are we supposed to find all this?”
Yu Ling looked outside and asked the production team, “Where are Teacher Li and the others?”
The production team said nothing, but someone pointed them outside.
After thinking for a moment, Yu Ling said to Qi Yao, “I saw vegetable fields outside. The production team is all about taking from the mountains what the mountains provide, so why don’t we go take a look first?”
Qi Yao found it hard to accept waking up without breakfast and still having to go to work, but since the cameras were on them, he didn’t say anything else. He found a basket and followed Yu Ling outside.
Before leaving, he went into the kitchen and looked around, then said in surprise, “There are two eggs here!”
Hearing him, Yu Ling came over, stopped Qi Yao from cracking them open and eating them, took them, and shook them. “They’re raw. We need to boil them.”
By then Qi Yao couldn’t even be bothered to be angry. He hurriedly lit the fire, boiled water, and put the eggs in the pot.
Yu Ling, on the other hand, looked around carefully, her gaze falling on the pile of thin sticks and the water-filled ceramic jar.
Qi Yao didn’t know the meaning of saving resources. Boiling two eggs wasted half a jar of water and used up all the firewood.
-
Meanwhile, Zhu Qing and Li Lan had gone out early. Zhu Qing had her eye on the priciest morel mushrooms, while Li Lan said nothing, but she had a feeling the odds of finding them were low.
“Let’s dig bamboo shoots,” Li Lan suggested sincerely. “We seem to be walking farther and farther away.”
The vegetable fields below the wooden house belonged to someone; they couldn’t just be picked at random. The choy sum Zhu Qing had gathered that morning had been wild greens, but even if they only picked wild vegetables, four or five jin wouldn’t exchange for much.
Zhu Qing had grand ambitions. In order to earn more points, she decisively dragged Li Lan up the mountain.
“Fine,” Zhu Qing said, the small wooden basket at her waist already piled full of gray-white mushrooms, with two extra termite mushrooms on top. “This should be enough to swap for a jin of meat. I saw some garlic sprouts on the way back; I’ll grab a few and stir-fry them with the meat.”
Li Lan was almost hungry just listening. “Any scallion sprouts? The teachers are all coming this afternoon, and I don’t want to smell like garlic.”
“You’re right.” Zhu Qing thought for two seconds with complete seriousness. “Even though garlic sprouts don’t smell that garlicky, scallion sprouts still smell very scalliony!”
Li Lan: “...”
“Then let’s just stir-fry wild vegetables and give up on scallions and garlic.”
The two of them went up the mountain to dig bamboo shoots, but neither of them had ever done this kind of work before. It was only after Zhu Qing stopped a passing grandmother, who seemed to have been sent by the production team, and asked for advice that they finally managed it.
“Do you think the production team will play word games?” Zhu Qing panted as she dug out more than a dozen bamboo shoots. “If they mean the bamboo shoots after they’ve been peeled, then ours will only be a little bit left after peeling; that can’t really be considered weight.”
Li Lan wiped the sweat from her face and held the basket more securely as they walked back. “Then we won’t sell them. We’ll keep them for ourselves.”
“But bamboo shoots are more expensive than chicken. It’s a little painful to part with.”
“Once it’s in your stomach, it’s all worth it.”
Today both of them wore long windbreakers in youthful, fashionable styles; even Li Lan had tied up her hair. Foraging in the wild, hiking up the mountain to dig bamboo shoots, the work was tiring, but the two had company and could talk as they went; whenever they looked up, they could see each other, and their mood stayed buoyant the whole time.
The camera had followed them from start to finish. When Li Lan was walking, she even smiled at the cameraman a little apologetically. “You’re really working hard, carrying all that heavy equipment and following us up the mountain.”
Zhu Qing said to the staff member, “You don’t need to film the way down, right? You’re tired carrying the gear too; we have an action camera, we can film ourselves.”
The staff member finally couldn’t help laughing too. After filming for a bit, he lowered the equipment. “You two have amazing energy. You’re the first pair to go out looking for food on the very first day and first trip, and come back loaded down.”
This show’s selling point was realism. Most guests who went out foraging came back empty-handed, not because they were slacking off, but because people who hadn’t done physical work for years lost the ability to use tools and find food; they weren’t nimble enough at the work, and if all their energy went into making variety-show material, of course they wouldn’t produce anything.
No one had expected Li Lan and Zhu Qing to be this efficient. When it was time to work, they worked; their movements were quick, and their coordination was excellent.
Li Lan waved a hand. She was used to high-intensity work and could still hold up even when exhausted. Zhu Qing, however, had excellent physical fitness and had always kept up the habit of working out.
After they got back to the wooden house, the two counted their haul. The termite mushrooms came to two pieces, one big and one small; the bigger one weighed over two liang, the smaller one less than one liang. The production team gave them 80 points. Add in the remaining ten liang of mushrooms, and they exchanged for a total of 180 points.
The director checked over everything for a long time, miserly as ever, and finally confirmed that the two of them had really earned 180 points in a single morning. That was an unprecedented result, not to mention that they had been out for less than three hours!
As for the bamboo shoots, just as Zhu Qing had expected, the production team made them sell them peeled.
The director said righteously, “The bamboo shoots sold outside aren’t with the skins on.”
Zhu Qing took the hint and didn’t sell them. “Then we’ll keep them to eat. We’ve got enough points anyway; after peeling them, they still wouldn’t be worth our little bit of labor.”
Director: “...”
With those points, Zhu Qing exchanged one jin each of chicken and pork, plus one jin of rice, spending 120 points and leaving 60.
The production team tried to recommend fruit. “Take a look at apples, bananas, and pears.”
Zhu Qing shook her head at once. “I brought vitamins.”
Director: “...”
Although the production team had left a bag of flour in the house so that the guests wouldn’t starve to death if they truly couldn’t find food, Zhu Qing still felt that eating only flour-based food for days on end would make people unhappy, so she decided to have rice for lunch.
“I’m going to make sure you eat in different styles,” Zhu Qing declared grandly. “If you want to keep a woman’s heart, you have to keep her stomach.”
Li Lan failed to stop Zhu Qing from showing off in front of the camera, and she couldn’t hold back her laughter, bursting into a full laugh.
“Fine, fine. Both the person and the stomach are yours.”
Zhu Qing shot her an aggrieved look. “Don’t laugh at me.”
The two of them bickered all the way to the kitchen, though there was one less-than-pleasant thing. After coming back, Zhu Qing discovered that the small sticks she’d gathered for kindling, the chopped firewood she’d brought out of the storage room, and the jar full of water she’d carried back from the village well to the east were all gone.
Li Lan came in, followed Zhu Qing’s gaze, and understood at once.
“I’ll chop firewood and carry water. You rest first.”
Zhu Qing shook her head, not very happy. “You light the fire. I’ll go fetch water.”
The director’s team appeared at exactly the right moment. “Mineral water is 5 points a bottle. It’s all mountain spring water.”
Zhu Qing was about to say she wouldn’t buy it when her eyes rolled. “How many milliliters per bottle?”
The director’s team gave her five hundred.
Zhu Qing said, “Then if I carry a bucket of water down from the mountain, one bucket is about ten liters, which is twenty bottles of mineral water, so 100 points!”
The director’s team fell silent for two seconds, then refused coldly, “No.”
Still, Zhu Qing huffed and puffed her way back with water. This time, though, she didn’t go to the public well in the east of the village. Instead, she knocked on a neighbor’s door down the slope and, with sweet talk and three bamboo shoots, negotiated permission to fetch water nearby.
This place was close to the water source. No one lacked drinking water; every household had a well. It didn’t need to be very deep, and the water was clean and inexhaustible. There was no reason to be stingy with Zhu Qing’s few buckets.
The production team, having been defeated by this loophole, focused on filming Zhu Qing’s negotiation process and edited it into today’s highlight. Some people were impossible not to admire; she was working earnestly to make money, rarely interacting with the camera and not paying much attention to the production team, yet somehow she had the strongest variety-show sense of all.
Very soon, Zhu Qing finished three dishes and a soup: pork stir-fried with bamboo shoots, mushroom and bamboo shoot soup, cold-dressed purslane, and a bowl of rice sprinkled with a handful of millet; Zhu Qing had exchanged two handfuls of rice for it.
“So fragrant,” Li Lan said, holding her bowl as she sat down. She looked at the dishes on the table, then at the camera, then at Zhu Qing. “How are you this capable? Even a big iron wok is no problem for you.”
“That’s right.” Zhu Qing loved hearing Li Lan praise her; it made her happier than any other compliment. “We still have a bit of chicken left. Tonight I’ll fry you a chicken cutlet.”
Li Lan asked curiously, “Do we still have oil?”
Damn the production team; besides salt and soy sauce, they hadn’t left them any oil at all. The only reason this food had been cooked at all was because Zhu Qing had rendered fat from a slab of pork belly to stir-fry it.
“There’s one slab of pork belly left, and this iron wok is well-seasoned. It won’t stick with just a little oil,” Zhu Qing thought for a moment and sighed. “Actually, the conditions the production team gave us are pretty generous. If we didn’t have this wok, we might not even be able to eat a hot meal.”
Zhu Qing was sincerely lamenting that the conditions weren’t all that harsh, but Qi Yao, who had staggered back covered in dust and dirt, clearly did not agree.
“Where did your food come from!” Qi Yao’s eyes were practically green as he asked the production team, “Why do they get to have rice?”
Li Lan lifted her head to look at him, then glanced past him and saw Yu Ling behind him.
Yu Ling was carrying a wooden basket full of wild vegetables; her tracksuit was a little dirty, and she was so tired she was breathing hard.
Qi Yao looked even worse. His knees and elbows were covered in mud, and he looked like he’d taken a hard fall.
Zhu Qing looked shocked. “You two went... chasing wild rabbits and digging for bamboo rats?”
Qi Yao got angry just thinking about it. “We got to the foot of the mountain and saw a vegetable field. There was no house in sight anywhere, so we thought it was wild greens and picked a few. Who knew dogs would suddenly start barking and charge at us? We were so scared we ran immediately and ended up like this.”
Yu Ling looked extremely embarrassed. The truth seemed to differ somewhat from what Qi Yao said, but Zhu Qing and Li Lan both tacitly chose not to press further, and only comforted them. “Then go change your clothes quickly and see if you’re hurt.”
Qi Yao sat right down and waved a hand. “No rush. The first thing I need right now is food. Where did you get your meal? Give me a portion too.”
Li Lan and Zhu Qing looked at each other; neither of them spoke.
————————
Zhu Qing puffed up angrily: Wife, look at him!!!!!!!!