Sooner or later, I'll eat myself to death at the Fortunate Inn!

Lin Family Village was less than five kilometers from the Mount Sanqing scenic area.

It was only a ten-minute ride on an electric scooter.

By the time Lin Zhe dropped Lin Xiaomeng and her grandmother off at their front door, it was already quite late.

The grandmother and granddaughter lived together, with no man in the house. To avoid setting the neighbors gossiping, Lin Zhe did not go inside. He turned around and left.

"Be careful on the way back, Zhe! Take it slow~"

Lin Xiaomeng waved, watching Lin Zhe ride a hundred or two hundred meters away and disappear into the night before lowering her hand.

After seeing Lin Zhe off, Lin Xiaomeng turned around and met her grandmother's intensely curious gaze.

Her grandmother held out both hands and bent her thumbs toward each other, mimicking a bride and groom bowing at a wedding, a delighted smile on her face.

"Oh, Grandma, it's not what you think! Didn't I tell you? We got so caught up talking about work that we came back late."

"Let's go inside first. I'm locking up."

As Lin Xiaomeng explained things to her grandmother, she bolted the door.

Her grandmother was unusually animated that evening. Like an inquisitive child, she hovered around Lin Xiaomeng, gesturing nonstop with one question after another.

"Ahem, yes, Zhe is a really nice guy, and he treats me very well."

"You're reading too much into it! Right now, Zhe and I just have a normal working relationship. He's my boss, and I'm his employee."

"A marriage proposal? No, no, no, no! Grandma, Grandma, please don't do anything rash! You absolutely must not send someone to propose marriage to Zhe!"

"I'm only twenty-two! Who gets married and has children this early? Even if you want a great-grandchild, you can't be this impatient!"

"..."

The grandmother and granddaughter chatted as they returned to the main house.

Once inside, Lin Xiaomeng endured another long round of questioning before finally escaping to her own room.

Ding-dong!

The moment she walked in, her phone chimed with an incoming message.

For some reason, Lin Xiaomeng had a very strong hunch that this message absolutely had to be from Zhe!

Excited, she pulled out her phone.

Sure enough, there was a message from Lin Zhe on WeChat.

[Got back to the inn safely. Don't worry about me. Get some rest. Good night.]

It was clearly a very simple message, yet reading it made Lin Xiaomeng incredibly happy.

She tapped the text box, then tapped away at the keyboard, typing out a whole pile of words.

Just as she was about to hit send, she suddenly felt that something was not quite right.

Would this make me seem too forward? No, no. Delete it, delete it...

Lin Xiaomeng quickly read through what she had written. The more she looked at it, the less appropriate it seemed, so she deleted the whole thing.

After deleting the message she had already written, Lin Xiaomeng began working out what to say all over again.

She had intended to keep it short, just say good night or something.

But once she started typing, she could not seem to stop. Before long, she had tapped out another dense block of over a hundred characters.

Looking at the wall of text on her screen, Lin Xiaomeng thought it over and still felt it was not quite right, so she deleted everything and started again.

And so Lin Xiaomeng kept alternating between typing and deleting.

She started sometime after ten forty that evening and kept at it until midnight.

After agonizing for over an hour, she still had not managed to compose a message that satisfied her without making Lin Zhe feel she was overstepping.

In the end, Lin Xiaomeng was so sleepy she could barely keep her eyes open, and her brain was beginning to shut down.

So she simply sent him, "Good night."

Early the next morning.

Although Lin Xiaomeng had gone to bed rather late, she was up before the roosters, getting out of bed to wash up shortly after five.

At this time of year in summer, it was already broad daylight at five in the morning. Her grandmother was up too, sweeping the courtyard with a broom.

A few little birds on the courtyard's grape trellis had started their chirpy conversations bright and early.

Lin Xiaomeng greeted her grandmother, then went to wash up at the courtyard sink.

After sweeping, her grandmother lit the little stove in the courtyard and began cooking breakfast.

Once Lin Xiaomeng had eaten breakfast with her grandmother, she hurried off to the inn on her electric scooter.

It was only a few minutes past six when she reached the inn, and most of the guests were still asleep.

The inn was quiet, with only a few birds chirping on the roof.

Rather than disturb Lin Zhe, she went straight to the kitchen to prepare that day's breakfast.

Besides egg fried rice, today's breakfast offerings included stir-fried rice noodles, with free seaweed and egg soup in place of porridge.

Of course, the eggs used for the soup were ordinary eggs bought at the market.

There were not even enough stat-boosting eggs for the main dishes, so naturally they would not be used for egg soup.

At eight thirty that morning, in Room 212 on the inn's second floor.

Li Li opened her eyes under the covers, switched off the air conditioner, then rubbed her eyes and got out of bed.

She and Du Huan had spent the whole previous day enjoying the scenic area, and she had only started putting in extra hours on her writing that evening.

She had kept typing until after two in the morning before finishing an important plot sequence, then slept straight through until now.

She walked over and opened the window, stretching as she breathed in the fresh mountain air. At once, she felt much more refreshed.

After washing up, Li Li called Du Huan to go downstairs for breakfast together.

"Oh! There's something new for breakfast today. Li Li, do you want to try the stir-fried rice noodles?"

Du Huan's eyes lit up when she saw that stir-fried rice noodles had been added to the day's breakfast menu on the little blackboard.

Over the past two days, she had no longer been able to eat ten servings of egg fried rice.

No matter how delicious the egg fried rice was, eating too much of it would still make her crave a change.

"Sure! Let's try the stir-fried rice noodles, then! Miss, we'd like two servings of stir-fried rice noodles~"

"Certainly, two servings of stir-fried rice noodles. I'll call the kitchen. We also offer free seaweed and egg soup. Would you two like some?"

"Yes, please. Two bowls, thank you~"

"Certainly."

Less than ten minutes after Hu Ting relayed Li Li and Du Huan's order to the kitchen, the older woman working there brought it out to the lobby on a tray.

The inn had no dining room, so guests generally ate in the ground-floor lobby or took their food back to their rooms.

Li Li and Du Huan planned to go out after breakfast, so they did not bother returning to their room and ate right there in the ground-floor lounge.

"Wow! These stir-fried rice noodles are incredible! They're so delicious-every bit as good as the Soul-Stirring Egg Fried Rice!"

With her very first mouthful, Du Huan was instantly won over by the delicious stir-fried rice noodles!

"They smell so good. Let me try..."

Li Li tried a mouthful, and a surprised expression appeared on her face too. The flavor had clearly exceeded her expectations as well.

"They really are delicious! These are the best stir-fried rice noodles I've had since coming to Western Jiangxi."

Li Li also rated the stir-fried rice noodles highly. She had eaten them plenty of times, but never any quite as delicious as these.

"What kind of amazing chef did Lin Zhe hire? The egg fried rice is outstanding, and these stir-fried rice noodles are fantastic too! Sooner or later, I'll eat myself to death at the Fortunate Inn."

Du Huan happily slurped up her stir-fried rice noodles, having long since forgotten all about her weight-loss plan.