AITFYMIBP Chapter 78.2

TL: Hua

[Son, you just figured it out? Is your status anywhere near Teacher Gu’s?]

[Hahaha, someone play ‘Know Your Place’ for Gao Zitai.]

Once the laughter subsided, the director shot down Gao Zitai’s ridiculous guess and announced the real rules.

“It’s getting late, so we’ve arranged a lavish dinner for everyone.” The director paused, pointing at the screen. “These fifty dishes are tonight’s dinner menu.”

He Yawen joked, “It doesn’t need to be that lavish. Our stomachs aren’t big enough for fifty dishes.”

The director chuckled. “Of course, we can’t waste food. This menu is just for you to order from.”

Song Zixuan raised his hand. “Are there requirements for ordering?”

The director nodded. “Yes. The only requirement is that the Red, Yellow, and Green teams can only order dishes that match their team color.”

Staff members handed an iPad to each group.

Lin Yanran scanned the names but didn’t rush to pick. He waited for Gu Siye to finish looking before consulting him.

“How many should we order?”

He asked how many, not which ones.

Gu Siye looked at the menu again, thought about the director’s words, and estimated a conservative number.

“I don’t think it’ll be that simple. How about two dishes and a soup for now?”

Lin Yanran nodded in agreement.

Three minutes later, the groups announced their choices.

Siran’s group ordered three dishes: scrambled eggs with tomatoes, braised beef with potatoes, and stewed pork ribs with lotus root.

The dishes were all simple, home-style cooking.

The beauty group ordered braised chicken with chestnuts, mung bean porridge, and stewed cabbage with tofu.

The Gemini Duo ordered noodles with soybean paste, fish head with chopped chili, spicy diced chicken, shredded pork with celery, and cola chicken wings.

After announcing the menu for each group, Gao Zitai looked at Lin Yanran’s list.

“That’s all you’re eating? No wonder you’re so thin…”

Lin Yanran shook his head. “I’m afraid they’ve set a trap.”

Upon hearing Lin Yanran’s reminder, Gao Zitai, who was clueless about variety shows, suddenly realized that he might have fallen into a trap.

Sure enough, the director announced the rules immediately after the menus were finalized.

“The menus have been submitted to the chef. However, the chef says the pantry is empty. To get the ingredients for tonight’s dinner, you’ll have to retrieve them yourselves.”

After the director finished speaking, several surveillance cameras immediately appeared on the big screen.

Several shots were shown, revealing a huge warehouse divided into various rooms like a maze, with all sorts of vegetables neatly arranged on low shelves in some of the rooms.

“Everyone, please follow your own menus and retrieve the main ingredients required for each of your dishes. The time limit is ten minutes. If ingredients are insufficient, or if you take the wrong items or too many, that dish will be disqualified. If everything you retrieve is incorrect, your dinner will be cancelled.”

“The team with the highest completion rate in this round will take first place and receive priority selection rights in the next segment.”

After hearing the rules, the smiles on Gao Zitai and Song Zixuan’s faces instantly froze.

It turned out the trap wasn’t in memorizing the dish names—it was right here!

With a strict time limit and a maze to navigate to find the ingredients, it was obviously easier to win with fewer dishes!

Realizing the trap, the two immediately started shifting the blame to one another.

Song Zixuan: “I told you to pick less, but you said you could finish it all! You pig!”

Gao Zitai: “Wasn’t that Spicy Diced Chicken your favorite? And weren’t the Celery with Shredded Pork and Cola Chicken Wings the ones you wanted to eat? I was just looking out for you!”

Chu Shiyu from the beauty team was dying of laughter and decided to add fuel to the fire.

“You guys are still young and growing—it’s fine to eat a bit more.”

Song Zixuan huffed and rubbed his face. He looked at the dishes the other two teams had ordered and asked curiously, “How did you guys know to order so little?”

He Yawen: “Eating too much makes you gain weight.”

Lin Yanran: “The director gave a reminder—we can’t waste food.”

Gao Zitai: ???

“He said that?”

The director nodded. “I did give a hint.”

Gao Zitai was speechless.

Who could have guessed you’d give a hint like that…

He glanced at his menu and felt that there were simply too many items. He sneakily ran over to the Siran Team and asked Lin Yanran, “Look, for the sake of our brotherhood, how about this: I’ll give the Celery with Shredded Pork to you.”

He patted Lin Yanran on the shoulder. “You’re too thin; you need more meat to fuel up.”

Gao Zitai had only patted him twice before he felt his hand being brushed away.

Gu Siye then naturally extended his arm and lightly draped it over the spot Gao Zitai had just touched. “He’s allergic to celery.”

Gao Zitai: ….

My mistake!

After the rules were announced, the guests were led to the entrance of the maze.

“To test the chemistry between partners, one person must be blindfolded and enter to gather ingredients, while the other remains outside to give directions based on prompts.”

Hearing this, Lin Yanran immediately asked Gu Siye, “Brother Gu, who should go in?”

“I’ll go in. You direct me from the outside.”

“Alright.”

The two quickly settled their roles, and the staff brought over the blindfolds.

Gu Siye, Song Zixuan, and He Yawen put on their black blindfolds and were led to the entrance.

The remaining three were separated by the production team, each taken to a small room.

Lin Yanran found two screens in front of him.

One showed the maze’s surveillance feed, and the other displayed the prompting rules.

Prompting Rules:

When prompting your partner, you may only use the words “stop,” “left,” “right,” and the numbers 0–100.

No other words are permitted. Any violation will result in the disqualification of that dish.

Examples of forbidden words: “Here,” “Good,” “To the left,” “Go right,” “Above,” “Step back,” etc.

Special Note: Guests must only describe what they see and cannot use words that contradict the actual path.

Lin Yanran reviewed the rules and realized the task was harder than it seemed.

People naturally have verbal habits and “filler” words; now, he had to not only suppress those but also strictly adhere to the standardized vocabulary.

Even saying “Go right” was a violation.

Before the start, Lin Yanran began practicing the descriptions in his head.

Minutes later, the director’s voice came through the headset, and the monitor lit up.

However, Gu Siye’s personal feed didn’t appear; instead, a complete map of the maze was shown.

Then a red dot appeared at the entrance.

That was clearly where Gu Siye was now.

Coordinates also began to appear over the maze, roughly divided into zones A, B, and C, with numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

The other screen then displayed his specific prompts:

Tomato Scrambled Egg: A16B39

Potato Braised Beef: A22B11

Pork Rib and Lotus Root Soup: B03A33

In the livestream room, viewers were getting anxious. The clock was ticking, yet none of the commanding guests had spoken.

They didn’t understand what was happening until the camera cut to the guests’ screens.

[I thought it was simple, but directing involves solving a puzzle first…]

[What does ABC123 mean? Those numbers aren’t on the map!”]

Just as everyone was confused, Lin Yanran quickly circled six points on the screen.

The director prompted him via headset that he could explain his thought process to the audience; as long as the game hadn’t officially started, his voice wouldn’t be transmitted to Gu Siye and wouldn’t count as a penalty.

Lin Yanran began to explain the pattern he found.

“Zone A represents the vegetable area, Zone B is meat, and though I don’t have it on my screen, based on what the other teams ordered, I suspect Zone C is the snack area.”

After saying that, he pointed to the numbers 0–5 in each zone.

“0–5 should be the sub-sections within each area.”

“For example, ‘Tomato Scrambled Egg’ is coded as A16B39. Taking tomatoes as an example, its location can be broken down into A, 1, and 6. That means searching within sub-section 1 of the A-Vegetable zone. The last digit, 6, isn’t on the main labels, so it’s likely simple—it probably indicates it’s at the sixth position on the shelf.”

After hearing his brief explanation, the audience finally understood.

[I thought this was a test of friendship, but it’s actually an IQ test…]

[I used to think it would be easy to get such a small amount of food in ten minutes, but I was underestimating the difficulty.]

[Yanran is truly the God of Games!]

The logic wasn’t incredibly difficult, and most would have figured it out eventually, but Lin Yanran had decoded it almost instantly.

Including the explanation to the audience, it had taken him less than thirty seconds.

With the locations fixed, the rest seemed simple.

Their ingredients were concentrated in the adjacent A and B zones, which reduced the difficulty.

Watching Gu Siye standing perfectly still at the entrance, Lin Yanran prepared to have him head to Zone A for the vegetables. He spoke: “Left.”

Gu Siye, who had been waiting for the command, immediately took two steps to the left.

However, Lin Yanran quickly called out, “Stop.”

Lin Yanran frowned. Looking at the screen, Gu Siye had moved in the opposite direction of where he needed to go.

Confused, Lin Yanran repeated, “Left.”

Gu Siye’s red dot continued to move in the opposite direction.

Seeing this, Lin Yanran realized what was happening immediately.

The production team had designed a new obstacle for them. The screen the commanding guest saw was mirrored.

Consequently, the “left” and “right” on Gu Siye’s side were the exact opposite of what Lin Yanran was seeing.

After figuring it out, Lin Yanran prepared to have Gu Siye change direction and head towards the intersection on the right.

However, he suddenly remembered the “Special Note” from earlier.

He can only describe what he sees on the screen; he’s not allowed to use words that are the opposite of the actual path.

This rule meant he had to find a way to make Gu Siye realize on his own that the instructions were reversed.

Now, Lin Yanran finally understood why the director said this game was a test of their teamwork.

If he couldn’t give a direct hint, wasn’t it basically down to telepathy?

While he was lost in thought, a minute had already ticked by.

With time running out, Lin Yanran had to find a way to alert Gu Siye.

He spoke again, “Left. Stop. Left. Stop.”

Every time he gave a command, he immediately followed it with a “stop.”

After repeating this three times, Gu Siye sensed something was wrong and came to a halt.

Just as everyone thought Gu Siye was being dazed by these confusing instructions, they saw him suddenly turn around and walk toward the correct opening on the right.

The audience watching this scene was stunned.

[Holy crap, Teacher Gu reacted so fast!!]

[Was Yanran’s repeated “Left” and “Stop” a hint?]

[Probably!]

[To be honest, I didn’t even understand what Yanran meant, but Teacher Gu actually got it.]

[This chemistry is insane.]

[My husband and I don’t even have this kind of understanding.]

[Well, that’s because Gu Siye isn’t your husband, hehe.]

Once Gu Siye understood Lin Yanran’s meaning, the rest of the path was smooth sailing.

Although the warehouse had been turned into a maze, the paths weren’t made overly complex to avoid making the game impossible.

Lin Yanran quickly guided Gu Siye to collect all the necessary vegetables in Area A according to the logic he had deduced.

Afterward, Gu Siye headed to Area B, where he crossed paths with He Yawen, who was also looking for ingredients.

The beauty team, consisting of He Yawen and Chu Shiyu, also had quick wits. Once they grasped the pattern, they realized they had to move in reverse.

However, their only disadvantage compared to the Siran team was that Chu Shiyu couldn’t figure out a subtle way to signal her partner to do the opposite, so she blurted out a direct hint. Because of that violation, their mung bean porridge was disqualified.

Compared to the smooth progress of these two teams, the Gemini Duo faced much greater difficulties.

Blindfolded, Song Zixuan wandered aimlessly through the maze, sometimes even slamming himself against the wall with his face.

Under the guidance of game novice Gao Zitai, the entire session consisted of either his groans of frustration as he hit walls or his frantic questions to Gao Zitai, “Which way do I go??”

[I totally believe in your ten years of friendship now, haha!]

[Ten years as classmates—one in the front row and one in the back row, right? Dying of laughter.]

[If I didn’t know better, I’d think Siran were the ones who’ve known each other for ten years.]

The ten minutes passed quickly. The Siran team had zero fouls and collected all their ingredients, taking first place.

The beauty team lost a mung bean porridge due to a hint but won two dishes and got second place.

The Gemini Duo performance was a disaster of fouls and stumbles; although they picked many items, after the penalties, they were left with only a bowl of black bean noodles.

When the food was finally served, the two members of the Gemini Duo stared at their lone bowl of noodles.

Song Zixuan, having exhausted his energy, was starving. He picked up the bowl and started eating. “Just eat it. No point being picky; we’re lucky to have anything at all.”

Gao Zitai looked at his noodles, then glanced at the lavish dinner on Lin Yanran’s table with immense envy.

Seeing how pitiful he looked, Lin Yanran asked, “Want some?”

He offered to share some of his lotus root and pork rib stew.

Gao Zitai brightened up instantly and stood up to take it. “I knew you were my best bro!”

The director immediately interjected, “You are not allowed to eat another team’s food, or else you will be sleeping on the streets tonight.”

Gao Zitai: “…”

The reward for this round was priority in choosing accommodations.

The production team brought them to a homestay, but unlike typical homestays, there were no beds in the rooms…

They had to sleep on the floor.

The only difference was the size of the rooms.

Although Lin Yanran and Gu Siye won first place and could have taken the largest, nicest room, they declined and gave the spacious room to the ladies.

The two of them chose a smaller room, roughly only as wide as a single bed.

Meanwhile, Gao Zitai and Song Zixuan’s situation was even worse.

Their room was not only narrow but also short—no matter if they lay horizontally or vertically, they couldn’t fully stretch out their legs.

After seeing his room, Gao Zitai wailed in despair. He immediately grabbed his quilt and knocked on Lin Yanran’s door.

But the one who came to open the door was Gu Siye.

Gao Zitai poked his head in and asked, “Where’s Yanran?”

“He’s showering.”

Gu Siye stood at the doorway with no intention of letting him in. Instead, he tilted his body slightly to block Gao Zitai’s view of the room.

“What do you need him for?”

Hearing Gu Siye’s tone, Gao Zitai scratched his head, suddenly feeling a bit intimidated.

“Well… can I crash here for the night?”

Gu Siye’s gaze fell on Gao Zitai’s quilt, and he let out a low, soft chuckle.

Gao Zitai thought Gu Siye was about to agree. But in the next second, three words cut through the air.

“No, you can’t.”