Xiao Luo reported back to Yan Wang and Feng Zixiao, who were at the training camp, that Gu Qianxue was with him. Then he took Gu Qianxue to a hotpot restaurant.
The young girl didn’t even glance at the vegetables on the menu and only ordered meat. It made Xiao Luo feel like the two of them shared some common interest after all. They were both meat lovers.
After boiling a plate of shaved meat, Gu Qianxue started to eat straight away. She blinked her bright eyes and asked Xiao Luo, “What kind of meat is this?”
“Shaved lamb meat,” Xiao Luo said.
“This is not lamb. I had lamb in the Mount Tianshan. It doesn’t taste like this.” Gu Qianxue took it very seriously.
Xiao Luo raised his eyebrows and thought to himself: There was so much shaved meat in hotpot restaurants. They claimed those were pork, beef, or lamb. But as long as it was edible, who would care what kind of meat it really was?
He changed the subject and said, “By the way, why didn’t you go back to the training camp after finding out I played a trick on you?”
Gu Qianxue didn’t respond straight away. She lowered her head and put some meat in her mouth with a fork. After a while, she said to Xiao Luo without raising her head, “I don’t remember the way back.”
It turned out she really didn’t have any sense of direction!
Xiao Luo exhaled a sigh. How could such a directionally-challenged person be an auxiliary police officer? He couldn’t help but start to feel suspicious about Gu Qianxue.
He then said, “You could have called your sister with your phone.”
“No way. She would definitely come to take me back if she knew I signed up to be an auxiliary police officer.”
“Even if you can’t tell your sister, you could have asked the police for help. They would certainly take you back as soon as you tell them you’re in the training camp,” said Xiao Luo.
Hearing Xiao Luo’s words, Gu Qianlin raised her head and took a brief look at him. A trace of disdain seemed to appear in her sparkling eyes. She said, “We are the police officers.”
Xiao Luo was speechless. The auxiliary police were indeed part of the police. There was nothing wrong with what she said.
After the short conversation, Gu Qianxue continued to bury her head in the food. Starving, she didn’t have the psychological burden of a pretty girl who was afraid of displaying such poor table manners. She gulped down meat and chugged water with the style of the martial ladies in ancient times.
Even though Xiao Luo had already taken dinner, looking at Gu Qianxue devouring food gave him an appetite once more. He picked up the chopsticks and was about to taste a slice of beef in the hotpot.
However, as he was about to put it to consume it, the slice of beef was snatched by Gu Qianxue, leaving him with a pair of empty chopsticks. She then duly brought to her own mouth that already looked oily from the food. She started to chew the beef with relish.
She glared at Xiao Luo and said, “These are all mine. You’re not allowed to eat!”
What?
Xiao Luo furrowed his brows and thought, “This young girl had gone too far. I treated her with hotpot, yet she has hoarded all the food and wouldn’t even allow me a slice of meat. How was this reasonable?”
He was not in the mood to give in to her ways and picked another slice from the steaming hotpot using his chopsticks.
Nevertheless, the chopsticks in Gu Qianxue’s hand once again pouched the meat he picked like a snake springing at the prey. Prepared, Xiao Luo dodged immediately and made Gu Qianxue come away empty-handed. Gu Qianxue’s knitted thin arched brows as she twisted wrist, and once again, the chopsticks in her hand shot at the piece of meat.
The back and forth between them looked like the typical chopstick fighting scene that was frequently shown in wuxia TV shows. Offense and defense. Advance and retreat. Sometimes the slice of beef would be flipped up in the air while their chopsticks fighting against each other. One pair would snatch the meat again when it fell, only to be retrieved by the other.
It was an excellent spectacle of skill!
Many guests and waiters craned their necks to watch.
“Look! A chopstick war!”
“How exciting! Who would think the actions in wuxia TV shows are not entirely nonsense at all.”
“Could this be a performance of the hotpot restaurant for entertainment?”
When Gu Qianxue grabbed hold of the beef and put it in her mouth, the whole restaurant burst into thunderous applause.
Awesome!!!
Shouts of cheers went up as well.
Gu Qianxue rolled her eyes at Xiao Luo and said in a rude and unreasonable tone, “You’re not a match for me. Don’t waste your time!”
What?
Xiao Luo had never been dismissed like this in his life. He replied angrily, “Don’t think you won that previous exchange. It was only because I didn’t want to lower myself to your level in front of so many people.”
Gu Qianxue ignored him and continued to eat the meat. The cloud of steam of the hotpot rose up to her face and made her naturally rosy cheeks even more ruddy.
…
…
The two left the hotpot restaurant after one and a half hours.
Xiao Luo was at a loss of whether to laugh or to cry. This little girl had a much better appetite than ordinary women. The hotpot cost him over 300 bucks, and he didn’t get to eat even a slice of meat. Gu Qianxue finished all the food leaving him to only several cups of tea.
“Do you eat this much for every meal on the Mount Tianshan?” Xiao Luo asked curiously.
“Master said that a martial arts practitioner has to have a good stomach.”
Gu Qianxue answered. After being treated by Xiao Luo for dinner, she was not as cold towards Xiao Luo as before.
“What do you usually eat on the mountain?”
“Meat.”
Gu Qianxue thought for a while and added, “Snow deer meat. There is a lot of snow deer in Mount Tianshan.”
“I heard that you spent ten years on Mount Tianshan. Have you ever attended any school?” Xiao Luo asked.
Gu Qianxue stared blankly in front of her, then clicked her tongue and said, “There is a school in the city at the foot of Mount Tianshan.”
Alright!
Xiao Luo felt a little bit of awkwardness between them. He was the only one who was asking questions while she never initiated anything and immediately ended the conversation with a dead-end reply. He had to find a new subject just to keep the conversation going, which made it quite difficult for him to continue.
In the meantime, he couldn’t help but sigh that he had actually met someone as cold as snow and with no idea how to hold a conversation with others. He thought he was terrible enough himself.
…
…
They finally went back to the training camp.
Yan Wang was fuming in anger, yelling at Xiao Luo and Gu Qianxue, “Do you really think the training camp is your home where you can come and go whenever you want? Do you know? You two are the worst auxiliary police candidates that I have ever trained. Motherf*cker. Go run ten laps, no, twenty laps as your punishment. You’re not allowed to go to sleep before finishing your laps!”
The intended punishment was ten laps. But Yan Wang suddenly remembered that both Xiao Luo and Gu Qianxue had physical training before, so he doubled it, knowing ten laps would be too easy for them.
The two didn’t explain themselves, nor did they complain; they just started to run on the track.
They were running fast, maintaining the sprinting speed of the average trainee. Yan Wang and Feng Zixiao were left open-mouthed when they realized that Xiao Luo and Gu Qianxue only took 20 minutes to finish the course. Those 20 laps were enough to break any other ordinary trainees.
One lap, two laps, three laps…
They didn’t seem to be pressured at all as if they were running for fun. After the laps, they walked back to their dorms without saying a word to Yan Wang.
“Was my punishment too light?” Yan Wang took off his sunglasses and stood there, staring at them, wide-eyed, in astonishment.
“It’s not that your punishment was too light. It’s because these two are too sick.”
Feng Zixiao gulped. Xiao Luo and Gu Qianxue’s physical condition was much better than his, despite his credentials of being ex-special forces. He could only gasp in admiration.
Motherf*cker!
Yan Wang was beginning to feel his authority as the resident training officer slip. Thanks to these two, it was taking a devastating blow. He convinced himself that he needed to take action to restore his status.