The Taste-Off Decision

Sun Xingzhe's playing dumb left Shun Lie at a loss. Still, he couldn't help beginning to wonder whether the story about Senior Sun Xingzhe encountering that gentleman when he descended to the mortal world was true.

And had his madness really improved because he received that gentleman's peaches of immortality?

But if that gentleman was involved, there was no chance of getting any answers. So Shun Lie suppressed his curiosity and focused on driving.

Before long, the car had stopped outside Dou Wei Arena.

Dou Wei Arena was a food organization that claimed to be absolutely neutral. It had branches around the world and handled all matters related to taste-offs, including but not limited to:

Drawing up contracts, providing venues, inviting judges, livestreaming matches...

In short, aside from competing in person, they could and would handle anything related to a taste-off.

"Hello. Are you here to book a taste-off?"

As the doors opened, a young woman in a Dou Wei Arena uniform immediately came over and asked the standard question in a friendly tone. But with their sharp eyes, Shun Lie and Sun Xingzhe could easily spot the exchange of glances between the employee and the old gangster.

Everyone knew that anything claiming to be "absolutely neutral" was unlikely to be truly neutral. No matter how fair Dou Wei Arena was, it would always have some bias.

That might be less of an issue in a big city, but an arena in some backwater town could hardly stay pure.

Fortunately, every taste-off in this era was livestreamed and archived. So even if there was bias, it could only come into play before the competition began. Once the taste-off started, everything really would be decided by culinary skill alone.

And that kind of unfairness was precisely what Shun Lie and the