This Smoke Packs a Bit of a Punch

"I'm telling you, for lunch they're treating us to canteen slop? Didn't they say they'd drink us under the table? Not even half a bottle of Erguotou?"

"Cut it out! They already said lunch is a work meal, no drinking allowed. Tonight they'll put on a proper feast for us."

"A proper feast, my foot. Looking at how stingy they are... Hmm, this canteen food doesn't taste bad, though."

The lunch Changbei Machinery Company prepared for the visitors was simply a meal in the workers' cafeteria alongside the regular employees.

Although the food was a little more lavish than what ordinary workers got, it had only reached the standard of stir-fried dishes, nowhere near the banquet-level spread used for normal receptions.

Since it was not a banquet, there was naturally no liquor, so Lu Zhizhang's promise to feed them full and drink them drunk could not be entirely fulfilled.

Still, apart from a handful of liquor-craving men like Master Mu, nobody else cared much about such appetites of the mouth and stomach.

As they shoveled down their two meat dishes and two vegetable dishes, everyone observed the workers eating around them.

Most of the people dining in this cafeteria were young. One look told them they were kids who had only joined the company not long ago.

But everyone had seen them in the workshop earlier. These kids were hardly greenhorns with fuzz still on their lips and no ability to get things done; every one of them worked with solid skill.

To get these kids capable of filling positions and taking shifts in less than a year—never mind whether their training and management methods were advanced or not—this pace of expanding production alone was enough to make Master Mu and the others raise their thumbs.

Of course, there were