"I just finished warming up, too." Lin Zhiqiang looked at the glass jar Zhou Yan handed him. It was filled to the brim with red-skinned pickled radish strips. He accepted it with a smile. "You’re too thoughtful. The two of them were nagging me the day before yesterday to get some more from you, but I kept forgetting. Without your pickled radish, they can hardly stomach their morning porridge anymore. I won’t stand on ceremony, then."

Lin Zhiqiang left the pickled radish at the security office of the family courtyard and came out to jog alongside Zhou Yan, chatting as they ran.

"Wang Wei is a good comrade. If she hadn’t reported Sun Meili by name today for corruption and falsifying accounts, the rent issue would’ve just been temporarily shelved. They would’ve definitely found another way to come after you. Now, it all depends on the amount the security department and the disciplinary committee uncover. She might even end up rotting in jail..."

Lin Zhiqiang gave Zhou Yan a rough summary of what had happened.

Zhou Yan was a bit shocked after hearing the story. He really hadn’t expected Wang Wei to file a report under her own name and take Sun Meili down directly.

’Bold!’

’Incredibly bold!’

’This comrade looked to be about my age. She’d just graduated from a technical secondary school and had only been working at the textile factory for a year, yet she’d turned around and sent her boss to prison.’

’He was indeed the catalyst.’

’Wang Wei had felt sorry for me, which was why she’d made the last-minute decision to report it under her own name. According to her original plan, she was going to gather more evidence for a while longer and investigate the food suppliers.’

"Are you sure Comrade Wang Wei graduated from a technical school with a major in accounting, and not from the police academy?" Zhou Yan was a little dumbfounded after hearing everything and couldn’t help but confirm with Lin Zhiqiang.

Lin Zhiqiang smiled and said, "Her major is correct, but I hear her father is a veteran criminal investigator with the Rongcheng City Bureau."

"I see. Like father, like daughter. A heroine who rivals any hero," Zhou Yan couldn’t help but admire. ’I owe her one. Should I treat her to a meal to thank her?’

Lin Zhiqiang added, "Actually, Yaoyao is very impressive too. She’s been first in her major for three consecutive years and has won many awards for her art. She hasn’t even graduated yet, and several provincial design institutes are already fighting over her."

"Ah? Yes, yes, Xia Yao is very outstanding..."

Zhou Yan didn’t know why Lin suddenly changed the subject to Xia Yao, but he went along with it.

They didn’t talk about it for long. The topic shifted, and Lin Zhiqiang started talking about Deng’s Southern Tour at the beginning of the year, the opening of fourteen coastal port cities, the massive wave of people "jumping into the sea" to start businesses, and the founding of private enterprises.

For the most part, Zhou Yan just listened. After all, these events were just a few short sentences in history books. Hearing them described by Lin Zhiqiang gave him a sense of participation. ’At least I’m a grain of sand in the tides of this era,’ he thought.

"Zhou, do you think I’m right?" Lin Zhiqiang asked, turning to look at him, caught up in the excitement of the topic.

"I think your judgment is correct, Lin. Coastal cities like Peng City, Shanghai, and Yangcheng are full of opportunities. They’re bound to become the leaders of China’s economic development in the future," Zhou Yan said with a smiling nod.

"Great minds think alike. This is the general trend. If you go with the flow, you only need to seize one opportunity to take off." Lin Zhiqiang gazed into the distance, a light shining in his eyes.

Watching him, Zhou Yan couldn’t help but feel a sense of admiration.

He was the thirty-eight-year-old vice director of a large state-owned factory with a boundless future, yet what he saw was the far more profound trend of the nation, and he was preparing to be a part of it.

’Lin’s desire to jump into the sea of business is stirring.’

Zhou Yan had no doubt that with his ability and vision, he had a chance to become a trendsetter of the era.

As for Zhou Yan himself, he didn’t have such grand ambitions, nor did he have that kind of ability.

A single ripple in the tide of the times could drown him. Right now, he just wanted to run Zhou Yan Restaurant steadily, pay off his debts, and let his parents and Zhou Momo live a good life.

’Make money, live a leisurely life.’ He had his own rhythm.

He loved the feeling of making his small restaurant bigger and stronger, bit by bit, earning more each day than the last.

...

"146.3 yuan!"

"Hehehe!"

"A new record high!"

Zhou Yan jotted down the day’s net profit on a piece of paper, his smile gradually turning villainous. After returning from his run and taking a shower, he began his favorite part of the day: bookkeeping.

Today’s revenue hit a new high of 288.6 yuan, an increase of more than fifty yuan from yesterday.

This was the effect of the celebrity effect plus riding the wave of popularity. It was remarkably effective.

After subtracting the 20 yuan he repaid his mother today, he had 388.74 yuan on hand.

He was still 299.78 yuan short of paying off all his outstanding debts.

’Today is Wednesday. I have three days left. Once I make another three hundred, I can ease up.’

After putting the bundled cash into the money box, Zhou Yan didn’t hurry upstairs. Instead, he took out a pen and paper and started calculating prices for rice bowls.

Half an hour later, Zhou Yan put down his pen, crumpled the two sheets of paper into a ball, and threw it into the trash.

’The pricing structure is a mess. Without low-priced dishes to go with them, the rice bowls aren’t cost-effective enough.’

’If I can’t lower the price, I can’t attract more customers.’

’Even if the customers who usually order stir-fries were willing to switch to rice bowls, it wouldn’t significantly increase revenue. On the contrary, it would muddle the restaurant’s positioning.’

’Rice bowls lean towards fast food, while the restaurant’s current dishes are priced relatively high compared to the cafeteria’s mass-produced meals. It has secured a group of customers based on taste.’

’What I should be doing now is locking in these high-value customers with flavor and dining experience, relying on a relatively high per-customer spending to guarantee revenue.’

’Blindly pursuing customer numbers, aside from making the kitchen more hectic and chaotic, won’t necessarily lead to earning more money.’

’Right now, I’m the only one in the kitchen handling everything. That’s a problem I have to consider.’

Zhou Yan Restaurant had established its footing not through low prices, but through flavor.

The cafeteria’s ingredient costs were half of his, and they also received factory subsidies. They dared to sell a plate of Twice-Cooked Pork for fifty-five cents. How could he compete with that?

Of course, if he could develop some more cost-effective dishes later on and hire a suitable helper for the kitchen, it wouldn’t be too late to expand into rice bowls as a new growth point.

What Zhou Yan wanted to create was a rice bowl with a large bowl of rice covered with three different dishes, priced around sixty cents, that would satisfy customers while still giving him a 50% profit margin.

With the current menu, no matter how he combined the dishes, the price would never be less than one yuan. It was basically impossible.

He tossed the ledger into the cash box and carried it upstairs.

The most important part of running a restaurant is calculating costs and profits. You have to make trade-offs to manage it well.

The old hands in the restaurant industry that Zhou Yan had interviewed had become his most valuable repository of experience for opening his own place.

Lying in bed, he pulled up the system panel and glanced at it:

[Player: Zhou Yan]

[Profession: Chef]

[Wealth Value: 342.08]

[Professional Skills]:

Knife Skills (Advanced): 2600/100000 (A cut above the rest. No ifs, ands, or butts.)

Fire Control (Intermediate): 4488/10000 (Coming to a boil—can’t hold it in any longer!)

Seasoning (Intermediate): 4688/10000 (Impressive. You have to hand it to me.)

Oratory Skill (Advanced): 88890/100000 (A sparrow pecking a bull’s behind—in a word, im-peck-able.)

Zhou Yan’s gaze paused. ’This damn system is full of bad puns.’

After his Knife Skills broke through to Advanced, they continued to improve steadily. His Fire Control and Seasoning had also clearly improved.

This was something Zhou Yan could sense himself; the system just provided quantified data.

He could slice pork belly into uniform 2-millimeter-thin pieces, and he could also slice pig ears, pig tongues, cucumbers, and potatoes into uniform thin slices. His Knife Skills didn’t vanish with different ingredients; it had truly become his own skill.

The improvement in his Fire Control and Seasoning was the same.

For example, the greens he’d stir-fried the past two days were noticeably tastier than the ones he’d made last Monday.

This was the change brought about by the improvements in Fire Control and Seasoning.

The dishes rewarded by the system weren’t standalone skill packs.

Zhou Yan would definitely learn dishes with similar cooking methods much faster.

For example, having mastered Twice-Cooked Pork with garlic sprouts, if he wanted to make Twice-Cooked Pork with green peppers, he wouldn’t need to learn the dish from scratch. He would only need to adjust the ingredients and then continuously test the fire control and seasoning.

His gaze moved down to the familiar dishes. Apart from Shredded Cucumber, everything else was still Advanced.

[Mastered Dishes]:

Double Pepper Beef Noodles (Advanced): 99999/100000

...

Twice-Cooked Pork with Garlic Sprouts (Advanced): 99999/100000

Shredded Cucumber (Intermediate): 1871/10000

...

Special Skills: Food Identification (Grandmaster): 999999/1000000 (Not upgradeable)

[Main Quest: Dominator Textile Factory: Quest Progress: 712/1000]

[Side Quests: Pick up the Initial Old Brine and begin your journey into braised cooking! Quest Reward: Braised Flavor Encyclopedia. Quest Progress: 0]

[Wealth Mall]: Unlocks when Wealth Value reaches 1000.

...

"The Wealth Mall is about to unlock soon!" Zhou Yan couldn’t help but feel a little excited.

...

「The next day.」

「The wharf.」

Zhou Jie had put up a new sign. The ’Zhou’s Kneeling Beef’ sign replaced the original ’Zhou Ji Soup Pot’.

The soup pot, originally forty cents a bowl, had also been changed: Kneeling Beef—fifty cents a bowl! Kneeling Beef (with extra beef)—sixty cents a bowl!

Their neighbors who had just moved back in, Zhou Liangliang and Wu Guihua, stared at the new sign, their eyes wide.

"Holy shit? They’re selling it for sixty cents even at the wharf!"