AGN -Chapter 439 Two Recipes and Astonishing Buffs

When Qin Huai left the memory and returned to the living room, there were still many egg tarts left on the table. Shi Dadan had already stopped eating, clearly full.

Seeing Qin Huai raise his head, Shi Dadan asked, “What was Xiao Zhao’s dream about?”

“His struggle to find a job,” Qin Huai answered concisely.

Among spirits, Zhao Cheng’an was practically unique when it came to job hunting.

This dream wasn’t very long. Qin Huai had stayed inside it for less than four days in total, and two of those days were basically dead time where he didn’t even see the protagonist.

As a mayfly spirit, Zhao Cheng’an had no desire to game through life, nor any obsession with living longer. What filled him completely was the longing to find a good job.

“Old Shi, don’t rush. Later I’ll start a group video call and tell everyone what I saw. I also have a few things I want to ask Sister Hong. Let me first check what recipes I got.”

After speaking, Qin Huai opened the game panel.

There was no major change in Zhao Cheng’an’s status.

Name: Zhao Cheng’an
Species: Mayfly

Status: ???
Dreams: 1/3
Recipes: [Rice Cake], [Red Eggs] (tap to view details)
Gift: None

The number of dreams had finally appeared—three in total. Aside from the rice cake recipe, he had also obtained Red Eggs, which surprised Qin Huai a little.

He clicked on the recipe details.

[Rice Cake — A+ Rank]

Creator: Jiang Chengde

Dish Description:
A casual creation made by grandmaster Jiang Chengde while balancing breakfast for a family of eleven after his wife’s health was severely damaged during childbirth.

Although it was merely a rice cake made from the most ordinary ingredients with a little sugar added, and although the cake became slightly hard after cooling and lost some texture, it still left a deep impression on Zhao Cheng’an, becoming his standard for judging delicious pastries.

When eaten on a workday morning, this pastry grants a full day of motivation and a relatively good mood.

Daily crafting limit: (0/996)

[Red Eggs — C Rank]

Creator: Qin Wan

Dish Description:
To celebrate the hundredth day of her seventh son Jiang Weiguo, Qin Wan dragged along her sick body and spent an entire day boiling red eggs together with sappanwood.

Though they were merely ordinary red eggs, they contained a mother’s purest and simplest blessings and hopes for her child.

When eaten during weddings, childbirth celebrations, or one-month celebrations, they can reduce physical pain to a certain extent for 24 hours (effect varies depending on the situation).

Crafting limit per 100 days: (0/99)

The rankings and buffs of these two recipes completely exceeded Qin Huai’s expectations.

First of all—

A rice cake.

And according to the description, it was specifically emphasized as a casual creation. A rice cake that had even cooled down and hardened, negatively affecting its taste.

How could that be A+ rank?

What did A+ rank even mean?

The only A+ pastry Qin Huai had ever made was the Guo’er that Xu Cheng ate that day—the one where both he and Huang Shengli had performed beyond their limits. It had directly earned a cover spot in Zhiwei magazine’s New Year issue.

That was Guo’er!

A pastry whose filling required advanced wok-flipping techniques, whose appearance and production method closely resembled apple flour pastries, and which pushed both savory and pastry cooking requirements to the limit.

That was worthy of A+ rank.

But what was a casually made rice cake?

In Qin Huai’s mind, a casually made rice cake was the slightly sweet rice cakes sold from tricycles in his middle school days—five pieces for one yuan, sold by street vendors around five in the afternoon.

That was what a casual rice cake should be.

Yet this casual creation was A+ rank.

Then what were the B-rank and A-rank pastries he painstakingly made with full effort every single day?

Even if Jiang Chengde was a grandmaster, grandmasters should still follow basic logic, right?!

This was absurd.

Too absurd.

The S-rank osmanthus mantou specially made to amuse children was already outrageous enough. But how could this casually made rice cake possibly be A+ rank?

Was the title of “grandmaster” really worth this much?

Qin Huai almost didn’t want to open the rice cake tutorial video anymore. His instincts told him that it would probably be like the osmanthus mantou tutorial—

Completely incomprehensible.

As for the rice cake’s buff…

Essential equipment for overworked corporate slaves.

The crafting limit of 996 already explained everything.

Without question, Zhao Cheng’an must have happily worked an entire day after eating this rice cake.

But actually, what shocked Qin Huai the most wasn’t the A+ rice cake.

It was the C-rank Red Eggs.

Qin Huai knew very clearly what red eggs were. On both the day Qin Luo and He Cheng were born and their one-month celebrations, Qin Huai had personally boiled all the red eggs.

It wasn’t because the adults in the Qin family were lazy and made a child do such work.

Everyone simply believed Qin Luo and He Cheng had practically been delivered by Qin Huai, the “Child-Giving Guanyin,” so red eggs boiled by him would carry double blessings and feel even more festive.

Not only did he boil the eggs himself, he also wrapped every single egg personally in red paper.

And because he had done it before, Qin Huai knew very clearly—

Red eggs were, at their core, just boiled eggs.

There was no room for fancy techniques.

How could boiled eggs possibly reach C-rank?

What kind of miraculous boiled eggs were these?!

How was the D-rank Gastrodia Stewed Pigeon supposed to cope with this?!

As for the buff of the red eggs, there was even less to say. It was probably the strongest buff Qin Huai had seen since obtaining all these recipes.

Ninety-nine eggs every hundred days. When eaten on special occasions, they could lessen pain to a certain degree.

It truly matched the beautiful symbolism of red eggs, because the essence of giving red eggs was sharing blessings.

After thinking for a moment, Qin Huai opened the rice cake tutorial video first.

It was the familiar close-up tutorial format, most likely filmed in Jiang Chengde’s own home.

The process for making the rice cake was extremely simple:

Soak rice and glutinous rice, grind them into rice slurry, add yeast and sugar, stir evenly and ferment. After fermentation, add a little more sugar, pour the slurry into molds, then steam over high heat.

It could be called one of the simplest pastries imaginable, extremely suitable for mass production.

Back in Jiang Chengde’s era there were no blenders, so making the rice slurry was a bit troublesome and physically demanding.

But clearly, that amount of labor meant little to Jiang Chengde.

Using the most traditional methods, he produced an exceptionally fine rice slurry. Every step was executed with perfect precision.

It felt somewhat like Zhao Cheng’an’s textbook-like precision, yet also fundamentally different.

Zhao Cheng’an’s “textbook” feeling came from the sense that he had studied the original tutorial carefully and imitated it extremely well.

Jiang Chengde’s “textbook” feeling was blatantly declaring:

“Yes. I’m the one who wrote the textbook.”

Every step was perfect. Every step was precise. There wasn’t a single flaw to point out.

The moment you watched it, you immediately felt:

Wow. This is the ideal textbook in my imagination. This is the perfect tutorial I’ve always been searching for!

Before watching the tutorial, Qin Huai had assumed the rice cake would be like the osmanthus mantou—

Impossible to understand.

Well, not “a little difficult.”

Completely impossible.

Even now, when Qin Huai watched the osmanthus mantou tutorial, he still couldn’t understand the critical steps. He knew there had to be techniques involved. He knew those steps were important.

But he simply couldn’t tell what was important about them.

To him, it felt like Jiang Chengde just flowed through a series of effortless operations and suddenly—

Done.

Finished.

The feeling was exactly like sitting in a high school math class listening to the teacher explain the final big problem on an exam paper.

You hear the teacher ramble on for a long time, then it ends.

You listened.

But you still have absolutely no idea what the teacher just said.

But the rice cake tutorial was different.

Maybe because the rice cake itself was simply too basic—so basic that there were no advanced tricks to apply—

Qin Huai could understand it.

Not only understand it, but understand it very clearly.

This rice cake tutorial gave Qin Huai the standard answer to a question he had been thinking about for a long time, yet had never found the answer to—

“What does it look like to bring the simplest pastry to its absolute limit?”

Now, Jiang Chengde had given Qin Huai the answer openly and clearly through the tutorial video—

This was the answer.

No fancy techniques.

No high-difficulty operations.

Only completely maxed-out fundamentals and movements as smooth as flowing clouds and water.

The simplest things were the hardest.

Imitating a textbook was easy.

Becoming the textbook was hard.

Qin Huai couldn’t stop himself from replaying the rice cake tutorial over and over again. The steps were obviously simple, and there didn’t seem to be anything flashy about them, yet he simply couldn’t stop watching.

It was too perfect.

Too incredible.

As a pastry chef specializing in white-dough work, Qin Huai felt this was no longer merely pastry-making.

This was art.

All the definitions of beauty and art he had previously read in books vanished from his mind while watching the tutorial.

This theory, that theory—

None of them mattered.

This was true art!

All those flashy colors and fancy combinations were superficial. What Jiang Chengde displayed in this tutorial was the kind of art Qin Huai loved most.

It possessed both a powerful personal style and absolute standardization—

Standardized to the point where no flaw could be found.

Qin Huai even felt he finally understood Zhao Cheng’an’s problem.

The reason Zhao Cheng’an still lacked a strong personal style wasn’t because he had chosen the wrong direction.

It was because he simply wasn’t skilled enough yet.

His technique had not yet reached the level where he could form this kind of textbook-like personal style.

Only after watching the rice cake tutorial at least nine times did Qin Huai reluctantly exit it and begin watching the Red Eggs tutorial.

The Red Eggs tutorial was even simpler.

Aside from the care spent selecting the eggs, the rest was just ordinary boiled eggs with sappanwood added.

The sappanwood was used for coloring. In that era, before artificial coloring existed for dyeing eggs, buying some sappanwood from a traditional medicine shop to make red eggs was the most normal and cheapest method.

Qin Huai could tell that Qin Wan had spent a great deal of time and effort choosing the eggs.

Every egg had a red shell.

In those days, when large-scale farming barely existed and eggs had to be collected household by household, Qin Wan had carefully selected what she believed were the best eggs in terms of size and appearance.

She controlled the water temperature and cooking time precisely before boiling and dyeing them.

There were no techniques to speak of.

One could only say she had put an immense amount of care into it.

Perhaps that was why the Red Eggs were C-rank.

Qin Wan possessed the skill and was willing to devote that much effort, so producing delicious Red Eggs worthy of C-rank actually seemed perfectly reasonable.

Unable to resist, Qin Huai watched the Red Eggs tutorial three more times.

By the time he realized how long he had been immersed in the tutorials and exited the game panel, Shi Dadan was already playing on his phone.

More accurately, he was scrolling through videos without sound, probably worried about disturbing Qin Huai.

“Old Shi, sorry about that. I got too absorbed watching the tutorials a few more times,” Qin Huai apologized quickly, glancing at the egg tarts on the table. “You’re probably not eating the rest, right? They’ve been sitting out for quite a while too. Ah, I forgot to message Tan Wei’an and tell him to come pick up the egg tarts.”

“I already messaged Xiao Tan. He should be here soon,” Shi Dadan said. “No need to apologize. What you were doing was important. Normally when I play on my phone at home, I can’t turn the sound on either.”

“My wife always thinks the kids’ bad grades are because the sound from my phone distracts them. So I either play silently or go outside.”

“I’m used to it.”

As soon as Shi Dadan finished speaking, knocking sounded from outside the door.

Qin Huai quickly got up to open it, and as expected, it was Tan Wei’an.

Tan Wei’an walked in excitedly and said, “Wow, Qin Huai, what made you suddenly decide to make egg tarts? Wow, there are so many! There’s no way I can finish all these by myself.”

“But it’s fine. If I can’t finish them, I’ll just refrigerate them. I actually love cold egg tarts. Qin Huai, let me tell you—cold egg tarts are just as delicious as freshly baked hot ones. They’ve got a completely different kind of flavor.”

As he spoke, he walked to the table, grabbed an egg tart, and stuffed it into his mouth.

He took a bite and chewed.

Tan Wei’an: “…Why is it so sweet? Is it because it cooled down?”

“It’s okay. I’ll bring some back for my junior apprentice too.”

Qin Huai: …

So now that it tasted sweet, he suddenly remembered Gu Li?

Why hadn’t he mentioned Gu Li even once earlier?

“Qin Huai, I heard you weren’t at Zhiweiju this afternoon. Master Zhou gave you and Zhao Cheng’an a day off to go see an exhibition. Was it useful? We’re chefs—what’s the point of looking at exhibitions?”

Tan Wei’an had even brought his own takeaway containers. While packing egg tarts, he continued fishing for gossip.

Neither his hands nor his mouth rested.

Of course Qin Huai couldn’t say exhibitions were useless. Saying that would basically mean Master Zhou’s decision to give him time off had been pointless.

Besides, after watching Jiang Chengde’s tutorial, Qin Huai really had gained some insights.

“It cultivates aesthetic sense,” Qin Huai said. “I even bought a painting.”

Tan Wei’an: ?

His face practically screamed:

Brother, since when did you secretly become such a refined art enthusiast?

“It should be useful,” Qin Huai said tactfully, giving Tan Wei’an some mental preparation in advance.

No matter how much Tan Wei’an continued questioning afterward, Qin Huai refused to reveal anything more.

In the end, Tan Wei’an could only leave carrying a head full of question marks along with the egg tarts.

After Tan Wei’an left, Qin Huai took out his phone and entered the group chat called [Loving Family]. He discovered everyone happened to be chatting there already.

Chen Huihong was enthusiastically sharing information in the group about taking advantage of steak discounts.

Qin Huai directly started a group video call.

Chen Huihong joined instantly.

Without even waiting for the others to enter, Qin Huai immediately asked:

“Sister Hong, when you used to eat at Taifenglou, did you ever feel like there were actually other spirits there too?”

Qin Huai’s sudden question completely caught Chen Huihong off guard.

She froze instantly and even looked a little flustered. Opening her mouth, she showed a somewhat dazed expression.

“Huh?”

“T-There were?”

“L-Let me think…”

“That was all from my first life. You suddenly asking me now… I don’t really remember very clearly.”