The Legend of the Condor Heroes: From Being Expelled from Peach Blossom Island

Chapter 154 Technology and Ruthless Work

West of West Lake in Hangzhou lies Langdang Ridge, which also belongs to the West Lake Scenic Area in later generations. It is a continuous mountain range with an average altitude of 200 meters. It is not high, but the peaks are beautiful and varied. In modern times, there is also a place called Meijiawu, which is named for its beautiful scenery and the production of Longjing tea.

Meijiawu was gradually formed around 1400 AD. In the late Southern Song Dynasty, it was a sparsely populated area, but there was a sizable manor there.

The manor is magnificent and exquisite, with typical Jiangnan gardens inside and the beautiful scenery of Langdang Ridge outside. It can be considered a top-notch resort, and naturally it is not something that ordinary people can own. In fact, it was the private garden of the Southern Song emperor, and ordinary people had no way of knowing about it.

However, just half a month ago, a Jin Dynasty delegation moved in here, turning this elegant place into a chaotic mess.

Especially in the last two days, half the manor smelled of barbecue. The smoke and fire were so intense that the grease from the barbecue dripped onto the ground, and the pungent smell of meat filled the air. It was like a handsome young man with a tall and elegant figure, but without any makeup, he was infuriatingly greasy.

"Aqing, hurry up and grill it. We Jin people don't need it cooked too well. It's more tender if it's still a little bloody. The key is to have good ingredients."

Your family's barbecue seasoning is amazing! I've never had such tender barbecue in the Jin Dynasty. In your Song Dynasty terms, this is truly a dish that leaves a lingering fragrance on the lips and teeth.

"Since you came to stay with us, we've finally been able to eat our fill these past two days."

A group of people dressed in Jin Dynasty clothing were gathered outside the manor's kitchen. In the open space in front of the kitchen, a simple barbecue grill had been set up with stone slabs, and more than a hundred mutton skewers were being grilled over charcoal.

A burly, dark-skinned, honest-looking middle-aged man, with a submissive smile, was grilling meat, his brow beaded with sweat.

More than a hundred pieces are grilled at a time, and they are all snatched up before they are even fully cooked and still bloody. This is the third round.

There were a total of more than twenty Jin people, who simply gathered around the oven, drooling with desire, and couldn't get enough of eating.

Wu Chengyu was the one who did the grilling. A few days ago, he learned on a painted boat on West Lake that Shi Chang was looking for a suitable grilling chef for the Jin Kingdom delegation, and he immediately came up with a plan.

Whether it's Shi Miyuan or the Jin delegation, he needs to find at least one of them first.

Compared to Shi Miyuan, the Jin Kingdom delegation of a full hundred people was a bigger target. As long as they kept an eye on the delegation, they would naturally see the real Shi Miyuan one day.

The Shi family had a large business in Hangzhou, and they owned several restaurants. Wu Chengyu spent the next day loitering in front of these restaurants. Sure enough, the largest restaurant posted a notice that morning recruiting a barbecue chef.

Wu Chengyu, using the alias Liu Qing, simply impersonated a barbecue chef from Northwest China. In his previous life, he frequently traveled to Northwest China for research and even had a girlfriend from there. He had practiced his spoken language diligently, so it was easy for him to adopt a Northwest accent, and he quickly qualified for the interview.

Wu Chengyu was already an exceptional cook, and he often discussed grilling techniques with Yu Xiaowu. With the addition of the Thirteen Spices, he immediately outshone everyone else and had no rivals.

In addition, his kind-hearted face was so honest that it was hard for anyone to suspect him, so the restaurant owner immediately took a liking to him and kept him on.

That evening, Wu Chengyu was blindfolded, put on a carriage, and bounced around for an unknown amount of time before finally being brought to the royal manor.

Fortunately, Wu Chengyu had traveled to Hangzhou many times in the past and often went to Meijiawu for tea, so he was very familiar with the mountain scenery around Meijiawu, which helped him pinpoint his location. For the next two days, Thirteen Spices continued its impressive performance.

His roasted meat was immediately welcomed by all the Jin delegation members, including Wanyan Qing, who liked to mix dog blood with rice. These past few days, he had nothing to do, and before mealtime, a large group of people would swarm into the kitchen to have Wu Chengyu roast meat on the spot.

This gave Wu Chengyu a bit of a headache. He spent most of the past two days in front of the oven, roasting no less than five fat sheep. He smelled himself and found that from his toenails to the strands of his hair, he smelled of roasted mutton. It was thoroughly marinated.

He could only use the night to secretly find out the terrain of the manor, including the residence of the Fourth Prince Wanyan Hongyu. Although he was heavily guarded, no one ever discovered Wu Chengyu, which meant that there were no experts at the level of the Subtle Realm in the manor.

However, despite serving these Jin people, Wu Chengyu did not feel wronged. The more Jin people ate, the happier he became.

After all, since arriving here, he first asked the kitchen to prepare various seasonings and medicinal herbs for him, and then created a version from a long time ago. The bamboo slip's evaluation was that it was "Thirteen Spices (fake)," which he himself called the "Thirteen Spices Technology and Ruthless Technique, a version with long-term latent toxicity."

Back in Gushan, his left leg hadn't fully healed, and he was bedridden every day. Plus, he needed to clear his head every day while studying internal energy cultivation, so he was always thinking about creating a seasoning that was even more potent than Thirteen Spices.

Besides the usual seasonings used for cooking and grilling meat, such as cumin and pepper, he felt he needed to make bold assumptions and break with convention.

He bought a large number of medicinal herbs from the pharmacy that he didn't recognize at all, including aconite, cinnabar, tripterygium wilfordii, pinellia, strychnos nux-vomica, and realgar.

It can be said that he dared not add any of the medicinal materials except for arsenic, and he boldly hypothesized about all the other ingredients, and even came up with various different combinations, which was more ingenious than those fake old Chinese medicine doctors.

Of course, most of them failed, and only two recipes were successfully developed. One of them was specifically for stewing and braising meat, which was considered acceptable.

The other one definitely achieved its initial goal. Its flavor is even more domineering than Thirteen Spices. It's the kind of flavor that can instantly conquer people's taste buds and make them unable to resist it.

Moreover, this formula has other functions as well, such as turning dark red spoiled meat bright red, inhibiting bacterial growth, and extending shelf life.

For example, it can mask the smell of rotten meat and enhance the charred aroma after grilling.

In addition, it can make the meat plump and juicy, more tender, and the meaty aroma last longer, etc.

In short, using this formula is equivalent to using all the modern technologies and ruthless techniques, such as nitrite, ethyl maltol, hydrogen peroxide, tenderizing powder, and sodium bicarbonate, on meat, and the harm to the human body is even more serious.

According to the evaluation in the bamboo slips, this formula can be called "all-purpose incense." Long-term consumption will inevitably lead to the risk of poisoning. In particular, once ingested, the toxins will lurk in the body, become deeply rooted, and continuously damage the human immune system.

In short, they don't need to eat too many times. Like these Jin envoys, each person eats two meals a day, with an average of thirty or forty skewers per meal. They have been eating like this for two days in a row. These toxins are already irreversible, and because of the long incubation period, they are difficult to detect.

However, within two years, the toxin will inevitably take effect, and the names of those who ate Wu Chengyu's specially prepared kebabs will soon be crossed off the list of life and death.

(End of this chapter)