The National-Team-Caliber Appetizer!

Wang Tong and Zhang Ying had originally been sitting closer to the lounge, so by the time the young couple reached the entrance to the North Hall 12 corridor, around forty or fifty people were already lined up ahead of them.

"Wang Tong, look."

Zhang Ying glanced around and tugged at the cuff of Wang Tong's shirt.

"The people in this first group of visitors seem to have some pretty unusual backgrounds."

Wang Tong looked around too and nodded slightly.

By "unusual backgrounds," Zhang Ying didn't mean that they were rich second-generation kids or the children of officials. Otherwise, there was no way an ordinary guy from the countryside like Wang Tong would be here.

What Zhang Ying meant was that, compared with the other visitors in the lounge, the people in the first group stood out much more.

For instance, Wang Tong saw that many of them were carrying professional cameras with long lenses. They looked far more legitimate than bloggers with nothing but a phone or selfie stick. You could tell at a glance that they were media professionals or professional photographers.

Another example:

There were also more couples—or, more broadly, people who had come in pairs—in this group than in the others. Of the more than one hundred and fifty people, there seemed to be twenty or thirty couples.

But Wang Tong soon figured out why. Just like him, bringing Zhang Ying along, these people had probably helped Xu Yun in some way in the past, and had later received tickets for their families from him.

For example, the man in one couple standing seven or eight rows ahead of Wang Tong was wearing an employee T-shirt printed with "Institute of High Energy Physics."

Since they were the first group of visitors, it made sense to let