Suming and Ding left the hospital, and after a brief farewell, Ding climbed into a business van waiting at the door and sped off.

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Nangong Huang and Su Meng, who were waiting at the door, came over. Nangong Huang, with an exaggerated tone, said, "Brother-in-law, I’m impressed by you, even a hospital visit turns into a chance to pick up a girl on the way!"

"Bullshit, I’ll slap you to death!" Suming glared fiercely at the youngster, then briefly explained what had happened to both of them.

Mainly to Nangong Huang. Continue your adventure at novelbuddy

A younger brother-in-law is a very strange creature, who most of the time, can join you in cahoots, indulging in all vices, acting like a total lickspittle, but never think that a brother-in-law has a tight lip, nor that he can be absolutely trusted—remember, the primary role of a brother-in-law is being the wife’s brother. He has a naturally high fidelity to his sister.

"Got it now? It’s not what you think, don’t talk nonsense in front of your sister when you get back!" After saying that, Suming took out the menu and handed it to Nangong Huang, "Take a look at this menu she left for me."

For an amateur like Suming, a menu is just a menu, no big deal. But upon hearing the origin of this menu, Nangong Huang’s attitude was like that of a martial artist facing a precious scripture, treasuring it as he took it carefully into cupped hands.

However, after only one glance, he expressed his doubt, "Fairy Stir-Fry Meat? What a crappy name! Oh, no, wait, Stir-Fry Fairy Meat?"

Suming held back a laugh, also feeling that the name was both tacky and lousy, it sounded like something a street stall would use to attract construction workers, totally inconsistent with the intimidating background of a three-hundred-year-old secret recipe of Hong Family Cuisine.

Yet, after seeing the ingredients listed, Nangong Huang’s expression turned odd, and he remarked in astonishment, "Brother-in-law, now I understand, this dish is literally built with gold, just with these ingredients, even if you called it stir-fry shredded pork it would still be a top-tier luxurious feast! The problem is, where do we find these raw materials? That Ding is sly, those she underlined we can buy with money, but these last four, where do we find them!"

The so-called Stir-Fry Fairy Meat’s first key component is the ingredients. If you stack them according to the menu, even someone who can’t cook wouldn’t do too badly, let alone a top chef?

But as Nangong Huang said, the five ingredients Suming was to find were mostly unattainable in the market, things you can only come across by chance and not by searching.

Nangong Huang leaned in, blinked his eyes, and said, "Brother-in-law, I’ll speak from the heart. I don’t mind you trying to pick up girls, and I definitely won’t tell my sister when we get back. But isn’t the difficulty level a bit too high this time? With these ingredients, even if the state leaders wanted to eat them, they might not be able to find them!"

"I told you it’s not about picking up girls, it’s about starting a business!" Suming took the menu back from Nangong Huang and shook it twice, "Others might not find them, but your brother-in-law here might just be able to."

"No way, you can find these too? Brother-in-law, you’re becoming a Food God!" Nangong Huang said disbelievingly.

"Let’s go, first take a trip back to Yangchuan City with me in the car!"

Without another word, they hurried to the parking lot, started the Wrangler, and temporarily left Huayin County to return to Yangchuan City!

Suming dared to take up this menu not because he had impulsively lost his mind, but because he had a measure of confidence. Seeing the menu, Suming almost wanted to laugh out loud to the sky. Hong Feifei, the beautiful chef, seemed to have been born for the Zoo Restaurant!

For the dish Fairy Stir-Fry Meat, he needed to prepare one main ingredient, one seasoning, and three side dishes, making a total of five.

The main ingredient, that is, the so-called ’fairy meat’.

The word ’fairy’ is not used lightly; the meat must be something otherworldly. Not fatty nor lean, creamy without being oily, tough without tendons, and when butchered, must not shed blood. Most importantly, it has to have a ’fairy’ cultural background, so when this meat is mentioned, it brings to mind fairies...

The saying goes, ’Dragon meat in heaven, donkey meat on earth.’ Of course, the so-called fairy meat is not donkey meat, and dragons are creatures that don’t exist; thus, the fairy meat in the recipe is simply a legendary beast!

It would be impossible for others to find authentic meat of a legendary beast on short notice, no matter how much they spend. For Suming, it was merely a matter of stepping on the gas; a gigantic legendary beast lay beneath the waters of Whisperwind Pavilion at Shuixie Lake—a small piece of its meat was not a problem.

The seasoning needed was liquor! Ordinary grain or fruit liquor wouldn’t work as they are filled with artificial flavors and tainted with worldly tastes, naturally unsuited for concocting ’fairy meat.’ This seasoning must be naturally made liquor, embodied with the spirit of heaven and earth, with the essence of Ginkgo...

In Suming’s Great Sage Liquor Industry, there were monkeys that knew how to brew wine. Every year, Great Sage Liquor Industry released a limited collection of genuine ’Monkey Wine,’ which was another convenient item for him to procure.

Three side dishes.

A delicious type of mushroom. Two choices were available: one was the so-called emperor of edible fungi, black truffle, while the other was the so-called empress, the morel... Evidently, as a female chef, Hong Feifei would be more suited to use the Empress Mushroom for cooking.

In the hills behind, there was a large patch of morel mushrooms thriving vigorously—Suming had previously pondered how to put them to good use. And there was a super-sized morel by the lakeside; too cheap to auction off, yet Suming was somewhat reluctant to eat it. Now, it was the perfect opportunity to use the right tool for the job!

But as for the other two side dishes, even Suming didn’t have them on hand at the moment.

A hundred-year-old ginseng was needed, not the whole root, just a few whiskers would do—but they had to be guaranteed to be at least a century old, or else the latent flavors of the other super ingredients couldn’t be stimulated.

In movies, thousand-year and hundred-year ginseng pop up all the time, which is basically nonsense. These days, real thousand-year ginseng could never appear on the market, and even hundred-year-old ones are rare. A genuine five-hundred-year-old ginseng would essentially be considered a national treasure.

While it’s difficult to find hundred-year-old mountain ginseng, in theory, it’s still hoped to be attainable.

The truly challenging part was the last side dish.

An entire wild Yangtze hilsa’s… fishbones!

Eileen Chang once said there are three great resentments in life, and one of them is that hilsa fish are bony. Hilsa fish are delicious but full of bones; this dish precisely requires chefs to use their exquisite knife skills to remove the bones, carve them into the shape of a fairyland, and arrange them on the plate.

I can’t help but comment, who on earth invented this dish? In a fairyland, filled with a pile of fairy meat, it’s just like a horror movie! It might as well be called ’Bone Spirit and Tang Seng’s Flesh’.

As one of the Yangtze River’s three delicacies, the hilsa fish, just like the Baiji dolphin, had been declared ’functionally extinct’ two decades ago, meaning that no reproducing populations exist in the wild anymore.

When Nangong Huang mentioned earlier that not even the national president could have a taste, it wasn’t a joke. In the past, a national president couldn’t find wild hilsa for a state banquet to entertain foreign guests and had to use farmed ones instead.

Even if you wanted panda meat, Suming could somehow manage to procure a small piece, but wild hilsa fish are out of reach even for gods.

Fortunately, it’s just a side dish—no one was so preposterous as to want to eat the bones. If wild hilsa truly couldn’t be found, using farmed ones as a substitute could barely pass muster; the Zhonghai Ocean Group has them in stock, priced roughly at 4000 yuan per jin (approximately half a kilo).

If luck is on his side, he might even catch a hilsa’s close relative—the American hilsa—in the Yangtze River.

Of course, real top-notch gourmets would still spot the difference.

These ingredients make it clear that Ding Jing giving the menu to Suming wasn’t a desperate shot in the dark but rather a glimmer of hope. As everyone knows, Monkey Wine is the crown jewel of Great Sage Liquor Industry, and now is the spawning season for herring entering the Yangtze River. Theoretically, there’s still a slim chance to find herring. With the zoo sitting on the hills, if they mobilized the masses to search the mountains, they might find mushrooms and ginseng.

As for the main ingredient, ’fairy meat,’ Ding certainly didn’t know Suming had an old immortal creature. She might have naively assumed that with so many animals at the zoo, perhaps a very special kind of meat could be found.

Giving the menu to Suming brought with it a faint hope, but giving it to someone else would mean no hope at all. After all these years in the catering business and being quite well-off, Ding had yet to find any of these ingredients.

The menu also listed other particular ingredients, like tender green onions sprouted from the Qingming season’s rainwater, ginger with exactly nine stripes, and the finest double-headed abalones—these were Ding Jing’s responsibility to source.

After returning to the zoo, they split up to complete tasks: Suming tasked Su Meng with leading Nangong Huang to the back hills to collect a small batch of morel mushrooms, digging them out along with the soil they grew in to keep them preserved for a long time. He himself went to the edge of Shuixie Lake, first grabbing a half-bottle of Monkey Wine from his room to toss into the car, then when no one was around, stripped to his boxer shorts and dived into the lake.

The crocodile eel, which previously lived in the lake, had a lot of babies and the lake couldn’t fit them all—it was rather frightening to see the teeming little crocodile eels swimming under the water, especially at night, it was like watching a ghost movie. Suming let them live in the reservoir, taking turns coming back for a break.

The lake was fairly calm for the moment; the alligator snapping turtles were partially surfaced, sunbathing, and the few six-angled dragonfish bought at the last auction were lying on the turtles’ backs, also basking. These little ones, no bigger than the palm of a hand, had a pink-hued body, half-transparent, and jelly-like. In the blazing heat, they didn’t seem bothered by the prospect of being dried into fish jerky.

Speaking of the six-angled dragonfish, Suming had to scold Nangong a bit. They cost several thousand US dollars, yet that girl played with them for less than two days before growing tired of them, and in the end, they were sent back to be raised in the lake.

Suming quickly made it to the bottom of the lake, and it seemed like the old immortal creature had grown even larger, spreading its whitening body over the lakebed, like a crashed UFO.

"Let’s negotiate, I’m going to pull off a piece of meat…" Suming first communicated his intentions to the immortal creature using his spiritual power. Although the creature could regenerate, it didn’t seem right to yank off a piece of its flesh without saying anything.

The immortal creature’s response was much like before, sending a murky message. Suming couldn’t tell if it had agreed, or agreed, or agreed...