The Game of Life-Chapter 782 - 781 Punishment

Chapter 782: Chapter 781 Punishment

Chapter 782 -781 Punishment

Jiang Feng only sold two portions of stir-fried shredded potatoes in four days.

Everyone had guessed that his stir-fried shredded potatoes might lag behind, but no one expected it to drag on this much.

Even though the two servings of potatoes received two good reviews, Jiang Feng only earned four points in four days.

By Thursday night at eleven o’clock, Taifeng Building had only garnered a total of 525 points.

Out of which, Jiang Feng had 4 points, Sun Maochai 16 points, Wu Minqi 87 points, and Sun Jikai 418 points. The combined scores of Jiang Feng and Sun Maochai were barely more than a small fraction over Sun Jikai’s score by two points.

Before the competition started, everyone thought Sun Jikai might be the one dragging Taifeng Building down. But when the competition actually began, they realized that Sun Jikai was truly the one carrying the entire team.

It was as if, even with one dragging three, these three pig teammates were just too difficult to carry.

The most difficult to carry was undoubtedly Jiang Feng. Starting from the afternoon of the second day, the camera teachers stationed in the kitchen didn’t film Zhang Guanghang much and focused almost entirely on Jiang Feng. They shot his hands, his face, trying to capture every subtle expression of his.

That made Jiang Feng suspect that these camera teachers might have a special group where they would share daily the performance of the people they filmed. Jiang Feng was probably the last, and even the camera teachers felt he was so miserable that they gave him extra screen time.

Or maybe the camera teachers simply wanted to capture Jiang Feng’s despair, anger, and even his meltdowns to add some explosive moments to the show.

But Jiang Feng didn’t have any of that; he remained very calm throughout these four days.

So calm that he felt like chopping someone.

Jiang Feng had thought of many ways to turn the tide, including some not-so-legitimate methods to get customers to order the stir-fried shredded potatoes, but ultimately he vetoed them all inside his head.

If any customer had a normal brain, who would frivolously order Jiang Feng’s dish, the potatoes.

“Sigh,” Jiang Feng let out a sigh.

He was the one with the protagonist’s template in the novel, yet when it came to the crunch, even hanging on was futile.

Since the start of the program, the sales of Jiang Feng and Sun Maochai had been low, Wu Minqi had been performing steadily, Sun Jikai had almost worked himself to death, and the atmosphere in Taifeng Building’s kitchen had always been delicate.

Everyone thought Taifeng Building was going to lose.

But losing has its ways; if it were due to Sun Jikai holding Taifeng Building back, everyone would think that it’s normal, albeit regrettable because a weakness couldn’t be countered. But now, the ones who were failing were Jiang Feng and Sun Maochai, which made it hard for everyone to accept.

If one were to describe the specific feeling, it would probably be—

This is it?

This is it?!

We’re going to lose like this??!

Wu Minqi poured Jiang Feng a glass of water, and subconsciously looked up at the camera in the living room.

“The scores for today should be out, right?” Wu Minqi sat next to Jiang Feng.

“They’re out,” Jiang Feng gulped down half a glass of water, “I’m still holding us back too much.”

“Don’t say that, Fengfeng,” Wu Minqi also felt very helpless about the current situation.

Pulling lots is a matter of metaphysics, and problems of metaphysics can only be defeated with metaphysical abilities. Unfortunately, no one in Taifeng Building knew how to do divination or change destiny, so there was no way to turn Jiang Feng’s luck around.

In the beginning, Jiang Feng thought that even if Taifeng Building was unlucky in the first week, with the two main players getting suffocating dishes and unavoidably low scores, possibly even bottom-rank, as long as the luck wasn’t as bad in the second week and they could maintain a decent result, they could stage a comeback in the third and fourth weeks, and victory was not out of question.

This kind of steady progress and fighting for a comeback was a plot everyone loved to see.

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But the premise was that the first-week scores couldn’t be too low.

Although no one knew the scores of the other seven competing restaurants, they were definitely all higher than Taifeng Building’s, possibly by a lot.

Only the top two could advance, and if the first-week scores were really too low, then advancing was basically out of the question.

The situation at Taifeng Building was that there were nominally four contestants, but in reality, only two were competing. Jiang Feng and Sun Maochai could be pretty much ignored; they were forced to loaf, relying entirely on Sun Jikai to support them. Sun Jikai was so stressed frying beef chow fun that he almost developed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from it. During lunch, Jiang Feng could sense Sun Jikai’s right hand trembling at a beef chow fun frying frequency; anyone who didn’t know better would think Mr. Sun had developed Parkinson’s at a young age.

The first cook in the second competition, Taifeng Building couldn’t risk the chef for the sake of a competition.

“I think Sun Jikai can’t go on like this anymore. Do you know how many orders he took today? I feel like he never stopped. When I saw his arm shaking while I was eating lunch today, I was worried. There are still two days to go, and we can’t have him damaging his hand,” Jiang Feng said.

“But it’s only his orders that are effective,” Wu Minqi seemed somewhat disheartened, “His beef chow fun gained fame during this period, and the dishes customers order from him are mostly beef chow fun.”

Just as the two felt utterly at a loss, there was a sudden knock on the door.

Upon opening it, they found Sun Maochai and Sun Jikai standing there with grim expressions.

“What’s happened?” Jiang Feng welcomed them in, guessing from their faces that something unpleasant must have occurred.

“I just called you and you didn’t pick up. Didn’t you see the message the program team sent out just now?” Sun Jikai asked.

“An announcement?” Jiang Feng quickly pulled out his phone. He had been preoccupied with discussing the points with Wu Minqi and hadn’t paid much attention to his phone.

Since it was a reality show, sometimes during filming, some temporary situations and issues might arise. So the program team responsible for filming and recording at each restaurant had created a WeChat group for the contestants of every restaurant.

There wouldn’t usually be any messages in this group.

But now there was one.

It was an announcement and a document.

Bazhen Restaurant, due to illicit operations suspected of cheating, after discussion by the program team, was ultimately disqualified from the competition, revealing the contestants’ names, current points, and the facts of the cheating.

Cheating!

Jiang Feng quickly clicked on the document under the announcement.

Actually, Bazhen Restaurant wasn’t foolish enough to cheat in an obvious way, such as committing fraud that could be spotted and caught red-handed. Their method of cheating was quite skillful, and it was nearly undetected.

Bazhen Restaurant had launched a special discount meal deal.

Introducing special meal deals is a common marketing strategy for restaurants. Bazhen Restaurant didn’t specifically bundle all their dishes into one discount meal. In fact, among the six discount meals, only one contained a dish from the competition. The discounts offered on these meal deals were quite moderate, so initially the production team didn’t pay much attention and considered it regular marketing.

But in reality, Bazhen Restaurant had manipulated the deals.

On the surface, the three-person meal deal that included the competition dish offered little discount, reducing the original price from 288 to 258. However, Bazhen Restaurant distributed a large number of three-person discount meal coupons through channels hidden from plain sight, such as city discount groups, internal discount public accounts, and internal discount apps, all for 68.

Although the way they manipulated sales was clever, they were still discovered by the production team, resulting in disqualification from the competition.

The document contained a lot of superfluous information; Jiang Feng skimmed it to get a rough understanding of the incident and considered it read. The last part of the document showed the current data for Eight Immortals Restaurant, which resorted to this form of cheating because their draw in the competition resulted in a very poor score on the first day. They took a risky move and cheated, only to be caught after two days.

And now the total score of Eight Immortals Restaurant was 1342 points.

The production team kindly provided a reference score, which was the score excluding the data for the dishes involved in the cheating over the past two days, amounting to 972 points.

Jiang Feng: ?

You guys are getting 972 points legitimately and still need to cheat?

Bro, you’re pushing it a bit too much.

In the end, Jiang Feng reviewed the participant list announced by the production team for Eight Immortals Restaurant, and it included two chefs who were very well-known in the world of Cantonese cuisine. This time, they could be said to have been dragged down by the restaurant and ended up losing face completely.

It was just uncertain whether, when the show aired, the production team would outright state they cheated or save them face and say Eight Immortals Restaurant had to drop out due to other reasons.

Despite having one less competitor, Jiang Feng still felt a touch of sorrow for their misfortune.

After all, those with 972 points felt they were doomed and out of desperation resorted to cheating, while those with just over 500 points were clearly doomed from the start.

“This time Eight Immortals Restaurant has really lost face,” Sun Maochai said.

He and Sun Jikai were Cantonese chefs and knew the Cantonese cuisine circle well, recognizing most of the chefs at Eight Immortals Restaurant. Their feelings ran much deeper than Jiang Feng’s and Wu Minqi’s.

“Their boss does tend to look for shortcuts and is inclined to cheat, probably thinking a foreign production team wouldn’t dig so deep. But they wouldn’t have cheated if they hadn’t been in dire straits,” Sun Maochai sighed.

“I think it’s the competition format that’s flawed,” Sun Jikai, who nearly developed a psychological trauma from constantly cooking beef ho fun, said. “When I first looked at the rules of the show, I didn’t see any problem, but when the competition actually started, I realized this set-up is fundamentally flawed. The uncertainty introduced by this lottery draw system is too great; it’s not suitable for a competition at all.”

“But after all, the menu was reported by us,” Wu Minqi said.

“But we all know very well, no one has ten signature dishes, not even a single restaurant can identify ten top-selling dishes,” Sun Jikai said somewhat agitatedly.

Sun Maochai nodded, “Indeed, the competition format has serious issues.”

Jiang Feng also nodded in agreement.

Sure enough, participating in a reality show and watching one are entirely different experiences. The same show felt exhilarating and entertaining when Chef Arno was on it, but when you’re the one participating, all you want to do is strangle the production team.

Wait, Chef Arno.

Jiang Feng felt he had been overlooking something.

“Qiqi, you’ve finished the first season of this reality show, right?” Jiang Feng turned to ask Wu Minqi.

“Ah?” Wu Minqi was startled, not understanding why Jiang Feng was suddenly asking her this. She nodded and said, “Yeah, I… have finished it.”

“I remember you telling me that the show became popular because Chef Arno cursed out the production team. Do you remember why he did that?” Jiang Feng inquired.

Without second thought, Wu Minqi responded, “Because the initial competition format set by the production team was flawed, which was extremely unfair to the girl who was good at making desserts, so Chef Arno blew up halfway through the filming and severely criticized the production team.”

Wu Minqi paused to think and then added, “The show went viral also because the production team then amended the competition format and redid the first match.”

It could be said that a flawed competition format was a traditional flaw of this show.

Everyone suddenly realized what Jiang Feng was getting at.

“Fengfeng, are you suggesting…”

Jiang Feng silently gave a big thumbs up to Chef Arno in his heart—if it weren’t for Chef Arno setting a precedent by berating the production team into changing the competition format, nobody might have thought you could play reality TV like that.

If the competition format is flawed, you should solve the problem at its root, like dealing with the production team itself.

“Didn’t the production team leave us a contact number? The announcement was just posted twenty minutes ago; they definitely haven’t left work yet. Who’s good at English? The communication will definitely be with Americans, so it has to be in English,” Jiang Feng lifted his phone.

All three of them looked unanimously at Sun Jikai.

Sun Jikai: …

Sun Jikai had no choice but to pull out his phone. He hesitated before making the call; Jiang Feng’s approach was too unconventional, and Sun Jikai had never seen anyone do this before.

“Is it useful? The competition rules are set in stone, and there are seven restaurants involved; they can’t possibly change the rules just like that,” Sun Jikai felt the call would be futile.

“What are you afraid of? Isn’t Chef Arno also competing? If we don’t make the call, Chef Arno is bound to curse them out later anyway. Don’t worry, the production team is used to it,” Jiang Feng encouraged.

Sun Jikai: ?

Actually, Jiang Feng wasn’t wrong—the production team was indeed used to it.

Because Chef Arno was currently cursing someone out.

The kind that starts with “shit.”