"Hey, can you not say it like that? If I hadn’t come back, I wouldn’t even know Shi and You Guang were childhood friends, and now they’re even dating." Xie Shengxing hurried to explain. "Talk about deep fate—"

"Come on, let’s drink!"

Yun Ze Wu covered his glass and picked up a piece of baked eel in rice wine sauce for him. "Eat something."

"Why is it that every time I buy a fund I lose money?" After listening in on the work talk of several successful big brothers, Zhuang Jianxian felt hugely discouraged. "I go to work every day, work for my sister and make five hundred, and my fund loses five thousand. What’s going on? It’s to the point I don’t even dare touch that stuff anymore. If I don’t touch that stuff, I don’t even have to work and I can net four thousand five a day."

"You really can do the math." Zhuang Siqi put a piece of baked fish jaw into her brother’s bowl. "This one’s pretty good."

Zhuang Jianxian happily picked up the fish jaw and ate it. "The clay pot congee here is also great."

"The barbecue is just so-so," Zhuang Siqi added, twisting the knife.

"It’s already kind of a miracle the goddess is letting us have two skewers of lamb." Zhuang Jianxian said, "Without the medicine she prescribed us, we wouldn’t even be able to handle clay pot congee right now, plain white congee would be more like it."

"You’re not wrong..." With a very complicated mood, Zhuang Siqi called a server over. "Top up my congee with another bowl."

"Zhuang Yijing’s little brother and sister, we’ve still got abalone and crab here. Why are you two only drinking congee?" Chatting with Yun Ze Wu, Xie Shengxing noticed the twins had been eating congee the whole time and called out.

"Brother Shengxing, congee is enough for us, congee is enough." Zhuang Jianxian picked up a big piece of lobster meat from his congee. "This congee is honestly insane."

He gave Xie Shengxing a thumbs up.

"My little brother was the one who recommended this place to me." Young Master Xie said with a laugh. "He’s busy right now, he’ll see if he can come over later. Let’s just take our time eating."

Yun Ze Wu also warmly asked the Zhuang twins, "Weren’t you saying you wanted barbecue? They can grill scallops here too, want some?"

"I’ll pass." Zhuang Jianxian shook his head.

"I want to, but I can’t." Zhuang Siqi looked at the scallops and sighed. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

"Why can’t you?" Yun Ze Wu asked curiously. "Dieting or what? At your age, a little late-night snack gets digested in no time."

"Not dieting." Zhuang Siqi and Zhuang Jianxian both glanced at Ning Youguang. They felt like the reason they’d come to Beijing this time was kind of hard to explain in one sentence.

Ning Youguang noticed the complicated look in the twins’ eyes and let out a soft laugh. "It’s fine, if you want some you can eat a little. One each, no more."

Zhuang Jianxian and Zhuang Siqi each very quickly grabbed a baked garlic scallop from the plate and started slurping.

Yun Ze Wu’s probing gaze fell on Shi Wangyue. Shi Wangyue gave him a cool look and said nothing.

Yun Ze Wu had no choice but to look at Ning Youguang, then at the Zhuang twins again, clearly full of curiosity.

The Zhuang twins had originally felt that family scandals shouldn’t be aired in public, but now it seemed a bit too weird not to tell him.

After thinking it over, Zhuang Siqi said, "Because we literally just had food poisoning."

"???"

Now it wasn’t just Yun Ze Wu; even Xie Shengxing’s eyes went wide with curiosity. "What happened?"

Ning Jianxian scratched his head and filled everyone in on the details. "So my dad—he just retired recently, right? After retiring, he’s always organizing a bunch of friends to go out and have fun. For the past couple of years he’s somehow gotten obsessed with deep mountain hiking. This month, he and his buddies happened to be hiking in the mountains of Yunnan. You all know what the mountains are like in Yunnan—every kind of mushroom and fungi you can think of. He went wild picking them, and when he came down the mountain he airdropped us two boxes of mushrooms he’d picked himself. As soon as the mushrooms arrived at home, my mom had the kitchen cook them up for us... that night, two hours after we finished dinner, the whole family was throwing up and having diarrhea and got carted off by 120 for emergency treatment."

"..."

For a moment, neither Xie Shengxing nor Yun Ze Wu knew what to say.

"Ridiculous, right?" Since he’d already spilled all the embarrassing parts, Zhuang Jianxian just went all in. "None of us ever imagined we could get the whole family food-poisoned and sent to the ER in the middle of the night just by having a meal at home."

"Because of this, my sister is now traumatized by mushrooms and fungi and all that." Zhuang Siqi was still visibly shaken. "She said from now on at home, aside from the common mushrooms you see in the wet market, any mushrooms or fungi that you can’t name in one second are strictly banned from going into the pot."

"Your sister’s right. Eating things you don’t recognize really is pretty dangerous." Yun Ze Wu nodded.

Xie Shengxing called over a server. "Do you still have soup? Bring them each a bowl."

Once their story was mostly done, Ning Youguang added, "Their whole family only got out of the hospital yesterday. They weren’t really supposed to be discharged yet, but Siqi was in such a rush to come see Yiyi’s performance that when Yijing heard I was here she didn’t stop her. She even asked Jianxian to come along, and had me adjust the two of them’s bodies a bit after this round of food poisoning did such a number on them."

"They really do need some nursing back to health." Yun Ze Wu asked the Zhuang twins, "And your sister? How’s she doing physically?"

"My sister was discharged two days earlier than us." Zhuang Siqi sighed. "There’s too much going on at the company. She couldn’t even rest properly in the hospital, like eight hundred calls a day."

"Boss Zhuang really does go hard!"

Xie Shengxing and Yun Ze Wu had known Zhuang Yijing back in the United States.

They had a very deep impression of that girl’s self-destructive level of drive.

After coming back to China, Xie Shengxing ended up in the same city as her again.

He’d heard plenty of stories about her in the business world, and the two of them still interacted quite a bit.

"Little Ning has been helping Little Zhuang recuperate, right?" Yun Ze Wu asked Ning Youguang.

He was a bit older than Zhuang Yijing and Shi Wangyue and the others.

So back in the United States, he’d looked after them quite a lot.

Now that he heard Zhuang Yijing had been poisoned, he was really worried and naturally had to ask a few more questions.

"Yes." Zhuang Jianxian jumped in to answer. "When we got to the hospital, my sister called Youyou right away. Youyou gave us a prescription on the spot. While we were in the hospital, they used both Chinese and Western medicine to treat us."

"The hospital doctors also said we were recovering relatively fast." Zhuang Siqi said. "The medicine Youyou prescribed worked really well."

"Of course, our You is a little miracle doctor." Even though Xie Shengxing had been in the United States for years, he often heard his grandma, his dad, and his younger brother talk about this little sister.

He actually knew quite a bit about her.

Shi Wangyue didn’t say anything, but the pride on his face was obvious at a glance.

When Yun Ze Wu looked over, he happened to be swapping his own freshly filled hot congee with his wife’s cold one.

"How’s Little Zhuang’s body now, can she still handle it?"

"She still needs a lot of rest." Ning Youguang set down her chopsticks and answered Yun Ze Wu seriously. "After I personally took Jianxian and Siqi’s pulses, I wrote her a new prescription. Once she finishes these five doses, her energy should more or less come back. As for everything else, it’s going to take slow, gradual conditioning."