The Game of Life

According to the data provided by the officials, a total of 12,129 people registered for the Good Taste Cooking Contest across four regions. For a cooking contest, this number of contestants is terrifying indeed, but there’s also a significant amount of fluff. Many people just signed up for fun, like An Ling did. The first round of selections was expected to weed out half of them, and Jiang Feng guessed that the preliminary rounds would be even more ruthless in thinning the crowd.

Organizers had set up a special forum, which Jiang Feng browsed for a bit, but it wasn’t very interesting. Some were complaining that the dishes for the tryouts were too simple to show their real skills, while others were grumbling that the contest rules were not strict enough. Common judges with no taste, they claimed, were the reason they got eliminated. One comment led to another, and half the posts on the forum ended up in arguments.

In the official announcement, the number of votes for the contestants advancing from each region and every match was listed. Scanning through it briefly, Jiang Feng noticed there were quite a few people who had passed with just 10 votes, and the sheer number of competitors was overwhelming. Without any detailed information, it wasn’t very helpful as a reference.

Finding nothing substantial on the official forum, Jiang Feng decided to check out the online forums.

Compared to the clashes of titans on the official forum, the online forums were much more entertaining. There were various gossips, both true and false. Rumors that the tryouts were rigged, that a relative of a high-level executive at Good Taste Company had also entered the contest, and that a certain culinary genius had signed up and was recognized in one of the regions.

Everyone on the forums was talented at spinning a yarn. Their stories, whether about insider scoops or fiction, were like reading a novel. There were motivational tales straight out of a youth magazine, love stories for the female audience, and mostly male-oriented ‘power-up’ stories. Dramatic plot twists in each post, the braggadocio and face-slapping moments were on point, tugging at the heartstrings with tales of love and hate. Forum users played along, leaving a flurry of comments.

“666,1’ll chip in five yuan for the poster to keep the story going!”

“I like this story better than the one next door, I’ll contribute one yuan!”

“I’m down for ten yuan if the poster could kindly kill off that XXX.”

Jiang Feng was reading with relish when he stumbled upon the hottest thread in the entire forum.

“My Roommate Who Got the Pig’s Feet Script”

The post was made just after noon today.

Jiang Feng was very familiar with the style and tone of the writing. The poster single-handedly built over a hundred floors of discussion, summarizing an inspirational story of an average university student who suddenly strives for success after his family falls on hard times. It included familiar tales of opening a shop to pursue his dreams despite the family’s debts, seven visits to a professor’s office making his name known across the department, as well as events Jiang Feng wasn’ t familiar with. A particular dish attracted a local heavyweight, confrontations with a rich schoolmate, skepticism about final grades from teachers and classmates followed by face-slapping when retaking the exam in front of everyone, and enduring insults while being ‘kept’ by a domineering CEO named Wu.

Jiang Feng:…:)

He didn’t bother flipping through the next seven or eight pages of posts, fearing the headlines the next day would read, “Shocking! The Real Reason Behind a College Student’s Murder of His Roommate Revealed!”

Heading straight to the last page, he saw the poster was still updating, with the latest addition from 20 minutes ago.

Eight hours of review, and seven hours of browsing forums.

Jiang Feng figured there was no hope, might as well wait for death or get ready to retake the course!

Without realizing it, he had spent over an hour on the forums. Glancing at the time, it was 10:40. The library closed at 10:30, so if Wang Hao hadn’t gone out for barbecue, he’d be back at the dorm within 10 minutes at most.

Twenty minutes later, Wang Hao walked through the dormitory door, carrying books and a bag of barbecue.

“Feng, how was the competition today? Reading all day has practically killed me,” Wang Hao said as he plunked the takeout barbecue onto the table. “The barbecue place behind us has raised their prices again, the lamb skewers now cost 4 yuan each, and it’s not even real lamb, why so expensive!”

“Reading all day?” Jiang Feng chuckled emotionlessly. “How come ‘My Roommate Who Got the Pig’s Feet Script’ was still updating forty minutes ago?”

Wang Hao froze on the spot.

His face filled with horror.

Five minutes later, Wang Hao sacrificed the barbecue he had purchased for a hefty sum and promised to delete the plot where the male protagonist was kept by a domineering president surnamed Wu from his posts, and after agreeing to add 1,000 words of physical description to extol the male protagonist’s handsomeness from all angles, the matter was laid to rest.

“Oh right, Feng, speaking of which, it’s quite funny, I got a private message this afternoon asking if I was interested in writing stories for some small, broken-down website,” Wang Hao said while offering all the barbecue to Jiang Feng as an apology, but his body honestly reached for the lamb skewers and started to nibble on them conscientiously. “They even said that my story could definitely become a hit if it was further developed and expanded.”

As the pork leg of Wang Hao’s fabricated stories, Jiang Feng preferred to make no comment.

“But there was a post that was actually real, did you see it?” Wang Hao suddenly became serious, grabbing another skewer of potatoes. “It’s about that cooking prodigy from the Beiping division.”

“Which cooking prodigy?” Jiang Feng inquired. There were so many posts about cooking prodigies in the forum that it was almost to the point of making dishes that glowed in the dark.

Wang Hao pulled out his phone; he had bookmarked the post and quickly showed it to Jiang Feng.

Jiang Feng recognized which post it was just from the beginning. It hadn’t received much attention because the writing wasn’t overly sensational, nor was the author’s prose particularly good, but it was one of the few posts on the forum that got the cooking techniques right.

“Is this for real?” Jiang Feng reread the post. If there were no exaggerations, the protagonist of this post was indeed a bona fide genius, even more so than Wu Minqi.

Gifted with extra sensory perception, a divine palate, exceptional knifework capable of slicing meat on silk, the prodigy was of Chinese-French descent with a rich culinary heritage. His father, a master of French cuisine, mentored him in Beiping since childhood. After turning 19, he returned to France to study Western cuisine with his father. Not even novels dared to write this.

“It’s true. I checked on Baidu, and there really is such a person. Although the post is a bit exaggerated, he is indeed a genius, hailed by the French media as a culinary prodigy that appears once in a century,” Wang Hao declared, grabbing another skewer of enoki mushrooms.

Jiang Feng continued looking at Wang Hao’s phone and at the same time pulled out his own to look up Zhang Guanghang. Sure enough, he existed, but he was better known by his French name, Abel Durand, lauded as a once-in-a-century culinary talent by the French media, 27 years old with a laundry basket full of awards from various culinary competitions, many of which were highly prestigious.

“He definitely is impressive, and quite handsome too,” Jiang Feng remarked impartially and objectively. When he put down the phone and looked up, he saw that Wang Hao had already finished all the barbecue on the table.

Wang Hao was conscientiously wiping the table, adding, “Yeah, he’s really handsome. It says in his biography that he’s 1.92 meters tall, just like a model.” Jiang Feng silently observed Wang Hao.

Completely oblivious, Wang Hao finished cleaning the table and spread open ‘Signalsand Systems,’ pointing to a problem and asking, “Feng, explain this one to me, will you? It’s about the Fourier series.”

Jiang Feng: guna