"Let me try." "Two-Person Dog" was instantly tempted and gave it a go.

"Lin Li, aren't you eating?" Chen Yu Ying asked.

"Yeah," Lin Li nodded, then leaned his upper body over and opened his mouth. "Aaah—"

There was indulgence in Chen Yu Ying's helpless smile, but feeling the teasing looks from her friends beside her, shyness ultimately won out. She'd picked up the chopsticks to feed him, but settled for the next best thing and dropped the bite onto the plate near Lin Li instead.

"Feed yourself, you don't get to just open your mouth and wait for food." The girl lectured him in all seriousness.

"This is all your fault…" Lin Li looked resentfully at Ding Sihan and Qu Wanqiu.

Extra people really are a pain.

The two of them felt no shame at all, in fact they were proud of themselves.

"This one's pretty good too, very layered. You guys should try it." Ding Sihan cheerfully pointed at a plate of sushi, her cheeks bulging, her words muffled.

Lin Li and Bai Bufan's gazes shifted over. The sushi was covered with a layer of tiny, bright, translucent orange-red roe.

"What's this?" Bai Bufan asked.

"Mentaiko," Ding Sihan answered.

Bai Bufan thought it over and couldn't remember what kind of fish mentaiko came from, so he asked, "What exactly is mentaiko again?"

Lin Li: "Zhu Biao."

Bai Bufan stared at Lin Li like he was an idiot.

What the f*ck kind of "Crown Prince of Ming" is that supposed to be.

"I mean, what kind of roe is mentaiko." Bai Bufan enunciated each word.

Lin Li looked over at Bai Bufan and shook his head with a face full of righteous indignation:

"Bufan, I can't agree with you on that. I don't think Zhu Biao is a dumbass."

"Zhu Biao definitely counts as a wise and virtuous Crown Prince. He was kind and gentle by nature, affable in conduct, and was deeply loved by both the court and the people.

Zhu Yuanzhang was such a blood-and-iron emperor, and Zhu Biao was the only one he placed his hopes in, treating him as the ideal heir to the Great Ming. If he hadn't died so early, the Ming throne's succession wouldn't have gone off the rails, and you wouldn't have gotten that whole mess of the Jingnan Campaign later. According to the official histories, Zhu Biao handled state affairs steadily and often advised Zhu Yuanzhang to use fewer cruel punishments and show pity to the common people.

He's clearly the model of a morally upright, capable heir-apparent, absolutely not a dumbass. Bufan, in daily life, maybe read a little less Three Kingdoms and spend some time studying other dynasties. Don't just toss out such ridiculous judgments."

Bai Bufan: "(;☉_☉)?"

After spacing out for a bit, Bai Bufan relaxed and laughed.

Still laughing, he nodded and patted Lin Li's shoulder, saying with satisfaction, "Mm, mm, mm, I get it, Lin Li, Zhu Biao isn't a dumbass. Of course he isn't. The dumbass is someone else, some! one! else! entirely!"

His patting grew heavier and heavier toward the end; Lin Li had no idea who Bai Bufan was swearing at.

So hard to guess.

Then Bai Bufan picked up his phone, ready to look it up himself.

Whether mentaiko is the roe of what fish—does that really matter? Not really. But guys are just like this sometimes: they'll suddenly get extremely curious about some weird-random question, to the point that they absolutely need to know the answer. It becomes a kind of obsession.

Sometimes, even if it's the middle of the night and they're already drowsy, once a question pops into their head and their curiosity kicks in, they'll ditch all that carefully accumulated sleepiness and grab their phone to look up the answer.

—How long is an elephant's booger, actually?

—Can giraffes choke on phlegm?

—Which one does an intersex person pee with?

—What do blind people see in their dreams?

—The tallest dwarf in the world?

—How exactly are eunuchs castrated, how do they pee afterward, and how does it affect their life?

And so on, and so on, and so on.

"Pollock roe, obviously." Seeing that Bai Bufan really wanted to know, Lin Li finally answered properly. "I forgot the exact kind of pollock, but apparently in Japanese the pronunciation is close to 'mentai', so it's called that."

"Found it. It's Alaska pollock. And it's not that Japanese calls it mentai first—this fish was brought over to Japan from the land of the rising sun, and in Korean it was already called mentai. Japan just adopted the name." Bai Bufan wagged his index finger, correcting Lin Li's mistake.

"So that's how it is. Learned something new." Lin Li raised his brows, calmly accepting the knowledge update.

The mentaiko sushi hit the tongue salty and savory. The texture was that crunchy pop of every little egg bursting, though it did carry a bit of briny ocean taste and a faint fishiness. Overall it was pretty good—and conveniently filled a few lines of word count.

Where there's tasty stuff, of course there's also landmines.

Lin Li spooned some eel rice into his mouth. He'd been pretty looking forward to it, but after chewing a few bites, he frowned in disappointment.

"Not good?"

Copycat king Bai Bufan also scooped a spoonful of eel rice to jump on the bandwagon. He hadn't eaten it yet; seeing that expression, he asked.

"A bit on the hard side. For this place to manage to turn eel—which is good no matter how you cook it—into something this neither-here-nor-there, that's honestly kind of impressive in its own way." Lin Li did not hold back his "praise."

Fish and rice went into his mouth; Bai Bufan slowly chewed.

"Well?"

"It is a bit hard," Bai Bufan nodded in agreement, but then he lowered his voice and leaned in closer to Lin Li:

"But I think the problem might not be the restaurant. It might be us—our problem is how we paired the dishes."

"Hm?" Lin Li frowned slightly.

Didn't they just have the classic pairing of eel + rice? They hadn't done any weird combo at all.

Lin Li looked at Bai Bufan expectantly.

The reason he was expectant was because he had a feeling Bai Bufan was about to stop speaking human again:

"What do you mean, pairing it wrong?"

This was exactly the line Bai Bufan had been waiting for. He nudged Lin Li with his elbow and pointed at the sashimi platter:

"Didn't we also order fish slices?"

"As everyone knows,"

"when people watch porn, they get hard."

"When a knife sees a knife blade, it gets sharp."

"So this fish has been staring at fish slices for so long—how can it not get hard?"

"We shouldn't have ordered fish and fish slices together, or at least had them come out separately. Then I bet this eel would've stayed soft." Bai Bufan spoke with a straight face, very convinced of his own theory, his tone firm.

Lin Li: "(;☉_☉)!"

F*ck! That actually makes sense!

Reasonable. The pairing really was the issue.

Lin Li rubbed his chin. After thinking for a moment, he sighed. "But that also highlights another problem: this particular eel has no standards. The quality is low."

"What do you mean?"

Now it was Bai Bufan's turn to look at Lin Li with anticipation, because given the situation, it was obvious that Lin Li was about to extrapolate.

"We're talking raw meat fish slices here, and this eel is getting hard just from a glance?" Lin Li pointed at the eel with some disdain. "As the saying goes, if you watch porn and don't care about the story, you lose half the flavor."

"Take me for example: I only watch cooked meat porn—that's my standard. But this eel doesn't care if it's vegetarian or meat, raw or cooked; it's fine with all of it. I kind of look down on it."

At that, Bai Bufan fell into deep thought and rubbed his chin. "What if this eel is imported from Japan, so it doesn't need a fansub group and can just chomp down raw meat directly?"

"You think I didn't consider that? Bufan, just look at the price point. Where would they get imported eel for this price?

Besides, Japanese eel and domestic eel aren't that different. These days, most Japanese restaurants are using domestic eel anyway. Any place that's not chasing some insane markup wouldn't bother importing. Extra cost for zero payoff."

Lin Li's thought process was pretty thorough, so he immediately refuted him and laid out the reasoning.

"Makes sense!" This time, Bai Bufan was fully convinced.

"So, people whose ways differ shouldn't plan together." Lin Li tossed down his chopsticks and shoved the bowl of eel forward. "An eel with no standards is kind of disgusting. It doesn't deserve to go into my mouth. I'm done!"

"+1, I'm done too! Trash!"

The three girls across from them looked up when they heard the clatter of chopsticks dropping, and saw Lin Li and Bai Bufan sitting there with their arms crossed, sulking.

Ding Sihan, Chen Yu Ying, Qu Wanqiu: "(;☉_☉)?"

Who pissed these two off now?