Lu Mingran felt as if a dialog box was appearing in front of him. Under Wei Jiangyan's question, there were three options for him to choose from. Each option was followed by a parenthesis with the numbers +1, +2, and +3 indicating the level of affection.
However, when Lu Mingran looked at Wei Jiangyan, the feeling of being in a strategy game vanished. He suddenly wanted to stand up and hug this man who had been disliked since childhood and was the first person all the ghost stories asked to watch.
In the end, Lu Mingran didn't get up, but continued to pick up food with her chopsticks and said a compliment:
"Your cooking is really good. Can I come to your house for a meal sometime? Just one bowl."
Wei Jiangyan was stunned for a moment, then smiled:
"Sure, just don't use your big iron pot as a bowl."
...
After they finished eating, they stood in the kitchen, one washing the pots and the other washing the dishes. Lu Mingran took the opportunity to ask about things in the building. He hoped that Wei Jiangyan could inform him in advance if there were any little girls leaving bloody handprints on doors and calling for their mothers in the middle of the night, so that he could be mentally prepared.
"No, not at all. But I must warn you, you must never believe what the old gatekeeper says."
As they were talking, a faint fragrance wafted into Lu Mingran's nose. He remembered what the system had said about recognizing women by their scent, so he tentatively said, "Your house is so clean, and it smells nice."
"Oh, it was like this when I moved in. I always thought it was the smell of mothballs."
As she spoke, Wei Jiangyan's brows furrowed involuntarily.
Lu Mingran pressed, "What's wrong?"
"Um... are you from this city? There's been a lot of trouble lately."
The food outside smells just like what they have at home.
Two young people had an accident while boating in the riverside park a couple of days ago. The boats in the park are those cartoon boats shaped like swans and rubber ducks, which require people to use foot pedals to row. These boats are quite old; some of them are probably older than the young people involved.
The survivor recalled that when she and her friend boarded the boat that day, they smelled the plastic on board and felt nauseous, but they still gritted their teeth and continued to stomp on it.
If the boat goes to either side, it will paddle towards a wider area, but perhaps because they had never paddled before and their sense of direction was not very good, they were dizzy and paddled to the left after leaving the dock.
The further they went, the more remote the place became, ending at a sloping stone embankment surrounded by dark blue-green silt. As the small boat passed under the stone bridge, the survivor realized something was wrong and cried out in alarm.
"Qianqian, this isn't right, we need to row back."
But no one around him responded.
She felt a little uneasy, even afraid of the willows drooping on the opposite bank. She pinched her silent friend and tried to turn the steering wheel around.
At that moment, the girl saw a scene she never wanted to remember again.
"It lowered its head! It's looking at us!"
The swan's long neck and head, which should have been fixed to the bow of the boat, had disappeared and ended up on the roof. Moreover, the "swan" had lowered its head.
The swan's neck and head drooped down like a human's, and even bent slightly, as it looked at them.
Girl: "Try bending down and looking at your belly; that's what swans do."
A white plastic neck suspends the swan's tiny head, which droops down, and its flat, yellow beak faces them.
Even though swans have eyes on the sides of their heads, the girl said the swans were looking at them.
The girl was so frightened that she fainted. When she woke up, rescuers told her that their boat had crashed into a rock wall, and her friend was more seriously injured and had been taken to the hospital.
The dock owner also complained, "If you two can't row, then don't go boating! You've damaged my boat, and you've even knocked off the swan's head and neck."
The swan's head and neck, severed by the impact, were stuck in the mud, staring at the rescuers.
It happened to be a Sunday. Wei Jiangyan was playing with her relative's child at the park and also at the pier. When they arrived, the girl had just been rescued and was trembling with fear. Wei Jiangyan, considering she had a child with her, wanted to stay away, but then she smelled a familiar fragrance.
This isn't the first time. Last time, it happened in a different, strange place.
"Hey, maybe it's your own scent. You just haven't noticed it before."
Lu Mingran patted his arm and comforted him, saying that he was just too nervous. She told him to smell the clothes he was wearing and that they really did have that fragrance.
"Hmm, maybe I'm just overthinking it."
Wei Jiangyan laughed along with him, but Lu Mingran could tell that he was still skeptical.
"System," Lu Mingran called out in her mind, "Where will the next incident occur?"
If he smells it again, it will be hard to call it a coincidence.
"Oh, Shunda Plaza, the largest shopping mall in the city."
It's also infamous for its "eleven consecutive jumps." When someone fell to their death here in early March, given all the strange things that had happened in this mall and how many people had died, there wasn't much discussion about it.
So? Or did you fall from the building?
"Will Wei Jiangyan be able to see the scene from the first floor?"
After receiving confirmation from all parties, Lu Mingran said:
"System, can you open a shop?"
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The next day, Wei Jiangyan went to work, while Lu Mingran went to the first floor of Shunda Plaza to take over the shop that the system had set up for him.
"Lu's snail rice noodles. The most extreme stench, the most exciting enjoyment."
It really stinks, but there's absolutely no enjoyment in it. Customers complained, "Boss, do you even know how to make snail rice noodles? It's so smelly and disgusting! The whole first floor is stinking from your cooking! Aren't you afraid of getting beaten up?"
Wearing a gas mask, Lu Mingran glanced back at the diners who were nearly overcome by the fumes, then continued to diligently add pickled bamboo shoots.
Chapter 19 Want to know the formation? No way (5)
Lu Mingran used to think that cooking rice noodles was a very simple thing. All you had to do was prepare the seasonings, cook the soup, throw the rice noodles in and cook them.
It wasn't until today that he realized cooking snail rice noodles is a skill that requires a lot of expertise, and for the first time, he realized how bad his cooking was.
Fortunately, it really smelled bad.
The stench was so pervasive that within just half a day of the shop opening, many people in the neighborhood knew about it: there was a snail rice noodle shop owner wearing a gas mask. He wasn't doing performance art; he was genuinely afraid that the smell of his food would kill him before it overwhelmed his customers.
By the afternoon, most of the other shops on the first floor had tacitly bought air fresheners, while Lu Mingran was still sticking to his post.
He wanted to create a special atmosphere here, so that when Wei Jiangyan came here the day after tomorrow, he would only smell the wonderful aroma of snail rice noodles and would never smell the fragrance on Miss Xiao again.
This is called fighting poison with poison.
It's also called "killing a thousand enemies while losing eight hundred of your own"—that's the system's original wording.
In the afternoon, the landlord came to negotiate, hesitantly offering a dry laugh as he tried to be tactful:
"Xiao Lu, I know a master chef who makes snail rice noodles. Would you like to ask him to give you some pointers?"
While they were talking, the shop owner stood at the entrance, covering his nose, and refused to go inside.
“That’s right, boss.” Lu Mingran said tactfully, “I guarantee this shop won’t survive more than four days.”
Once he survives the next ghost story, he will immediately close down the shop. As for why he came to open the shop now, according to Lu Mingran, he wanted to experience the wonderful feeling of being sought after by everyone in advance—at that time, he thought he could get rich by opening a snail rice noodle shop.
After finally managing to appease the boss, Lu Mingran was wondering whether she should chat with people from other shops to ease the tension when she suddenly noticed that many shops had closed down.
"Smack—" "Smack—"
The sound of roller shutters being lowered echoed throughout the mall as shop owners, employees, and customers hurried past with expressionless faces, leaving the shopping center.
As more and more shops closed and the surroundings became quiet, each sound of a door closing made Lu Mingran's heart skip a beat.
Lu Mingran looked up and saw the large wall clock on the first floor:
It's 7 p.m.
The sign at the entrance of Shunda Plaza says it closes at 9 p.m., but no matter the season, everyone assumes that they should leave by 7 p.m. at the latest.
Lu Mingran wasn't the protagonist of the ghost story, so he didn't have the guts. He hurriedly closed the door and went outside.
It was almost dark by then, and the streetlights came on. Lu Mingran took a few steps, and for some reason, he felt an inexplicable urge to turn back and look at Shunda Square in the night.
In the end, Lu Mingran didn't dare to turn around.
The novel says that sometimes at night, people who are having a bad day can see something different in the gilded characters of the Shunda Plaza sign on the mall.
——————————————————
On the way back, Lu Mingran received a lot of disapproving looks because the smell of snail rice noodles lingered on her body.
In the end, the old man at the gatehouse was the kindest to him. Lu Mingran peeked through the small, low window and saw the old man watching a tiny, bulky black-and-white television. When he noticed Lu Mingran looking at him, he turned his head and grinned.
Remembering Wei Jiangyan's words about not trusting this old man, Lu Mingran cautiously smiled at the old man, not intending to say anything more. However, the old man called out to him:
"You're new here, right? Something really bad happened in Unit 8. If you pass by there at night, you'd better hurry."
The old man even pointed out the direction of Unit 8 very carefully. The layout of this community is that after entering, you first see Unit 8, and if you walk straight forward along that horizontal row, Unit 1 is at the very end, and each unit is quite far apart.
Although she didn't want to believe it, hearing it from someone else made Lu Mingran somewhat of a psychological suggestion.
He first went to the supermarket in the neighborhood to buy air freshener for his home. Perhaps because he had spent so much time at Su Yun's supermarket, his first instinct upon entering was to check the checkout counter.
However, Su Yun wasn't there; there was only a little girl. The air fresheners were also placed in a different spot than in Su Yun's shop.
The girl was very kind; she didn't look down on him, but just smiled and said, "Even if snail rice noodles are delicious, you can't eat that much."
"Oh, right, there's one more thing..."
Before Lu Mingran left, the little girl reminded him:
“A terrible thing happened in one of the units last year; it’s not peaceful at night. You need to be careful.”
If Lu Mingran had previously doubted the old man's words, now he was beginning to waver.
Once you step outside, turn left and walk a short distance to reach Unit 8. Looking at it from afar in the darkness, Unit 8 definitely doesn't look quite right.
Few residents turned on their lights; it was pitch black.
It's okay, it's okay...
Lu Mingran muttered these words aloud, but his body betrayed him; he started trembling as soon as he reached the entrance of Unit 8.
As he kept shaking, he unlocked his sprinting skill. Lu Mingran started running, completely disregarding his image, swinging the bag in his hand with a loud clatter, almost letting out a howl.
He kept running until he reached the entrance of Unit 4. Once he was sure he was in a safe area, he gasped for breath and bent over to rest, supporting himself on his knees.
After resting enough, Lu Mingran started singing a song, a song about being poor but happy. He hummed the tune of "Who am I, the little guy from whose family? Stronger than Li Kui!" and sang it for several lines before slowly walking away. Perhaps because his singing was too awful, a stray cat meowed and quickly ran past him.
It just so happened that Wei Jiangyan had also finished get off work recently; he came from the west gate. Lu Mingran bumped into him at the entrance of the building and, seeing how exhausted he was, wanted to chat with him to soothe the wounded soul of this corporate slave.