218: Chapter 16 These Are Just Precautions 218: Chapter 16 These Are Just Precautions Mu Yuming returned home and as soon as he entered, he smelled the aroma of food.
The house was unusually quiet, his daughter was there, and his wife wasn’t going crazy, which was very abnormal.
He noticed a small figure bustling around in the kitchen.
“Madam, this is mung bean soup.”
Jiang Yinyin carefully carried a bowl out of the kitchen and placed it in front of Li Ya.
In those days, not every family could afford meat and fish at every meal.
As May arrived and the weather grew hotter, sweet desserts that cooled one off and quenched one’s thirst naturally became more popular.
Wealthy families had their own luxurious foods, while ordinary families had their traditional methods.
Ordinary people couldn’t expect to use snow from plum blossoms to make tea.
The most common summertime refreshment in average households was mung bean soup.
This mung bean soup also had its intricacies; the correct way to make it was to simmer the mung bean water, a method devoid of any technical complexity.
However, there was also an easy and quick shortcut that involved dissolving mung bean cake in water, stirring, and turning it into a mung bean puree.
This wasn’t the modern type of mung bean cake that contained so much butter one couldn’t taste the mung beans.
The traditional northern style of making mung bean cake involved layering green bean flour on a steaming rack.
It wasn’t refined but was rather soft and dissolved immediately upon contact with water.
Using cold boiled water to make it was truly refreshing, but also a bit too cold and damaging to the stomach.
Boiling water first, stewing pitted jujubes until soft, then adding some goji berries, a bit of osmanthus sugar, and the mung bean cake would result in a perfect dessert.
Even with Li Ya’s character, who would nitpick flaws in an egg and make trouble without cause, she couldn’t find any faults with it.
“Wow!
The breadwinner has returned!”
Li Ya set down the bowl, satisfyingly licked the spoon, and then looked up at Mu Yuming, “This is a girl Mumu bought, named Yinyin.
She is well-behaved, can cook, and do laundry, so you won’t have to cook anymore.”
“Bought?”
Mu Yuming sized up the new little girl.
She was young, seemingly nervous, but didn’t appear to be naive.
“Hello, sir.”
“Mm, hello, Mumu has good taste.”
Mu Yuming turned to look at Li Mumu, “How much did you spend?”
Li Mumu giggled and held up two fingers, “A monthly salary of twenty!”
“That’s a bit low.”
Mu Yuming nodded, without asking further, opened his wallet, pulled out a fifty-dollar bill, and handed it to Jiang Yinyin, “She’s so young; don’t let her do the heavy work.
We don’t have an extra bed, so you’ll need to get one later.
Also, find another older maid who can do the heavy lifting.”
Jiang Yinyin was stunned.
Was this what they called a grand household?
Calling twenty a low salary?
Handing out fifty money upon meeting?
What kind of immortal Bodhisattva was this!
“Thank you, sir!”
Under normal circumstances, Mu Yuming certainly would have sat down to inquire properly about her family background, but he wasn’t in the mood now.
He opened the food container, took out noodles, went into the kitchen, lit the gas stove, and sat a pot full of water to boil.
Mu Yuming turned, took a handgun from the rice bin, quickly checked the bullets, and pocketed it.
Now with a new little girl in the house who could cook, hiding things in the kitchen was no longer safe.
It wasn’t that he feared her seeing it; these days, it wasn’t surprising for wealthy families to have a couple of guns.
The main concern was her accidentally firing it off and causing a fatality.
While waiting for the water to boil, Mu Yuming stood by the kitchen window and looked outside through a gap in the curtains.
…
Wang Yunxiao executed a swift somersault and landed silently from the top of the wall.
He had originally planned to give up when the other party got on the rickshaw, but the rickshaw puller didn’t run fast, probably to avoid spilling the newly bought groceries, so with the mindset of ‘whether there are dates or not, hit three times with a pole,’ he followed.
It looked familiar; if it had just returned from overseas, it was very likely to be a passenger from the Cosmos.
Plus, with a daughter at home and not cooking noodles by themselves, it indicated they were quite wealthy, which made them even more suspicious.
Using the word ‘suspicious’ might not be quite right, but in future generations, when police deal with criminal cases and conduct major investigations, this is the strategy they use.
There aren’t that many schoolchildren who can play football and solve the case for you at a glance.
The proper case-handling procedure is that plain and dull; if the suspect isn’t locked down immediately, you have to go through all kinds of evidence and clues to list names and check them one by one.
The advance of science can only simplify and shorten this process, not completely cancel or replace it.
At least in Wang Yunxiao’s memory, by the time he had crossed over, human technology had not developed to such a science fiction level.
It was indeed a bit coincidental; Wang Yunxiao had to admit that.
But even without this coincidence, he’d be able to find clues by going to Nanshi tomorrow with his sketch portrait and asking house by house.
The other party was not a professional criminal and probably didn’t have such a strong anti-surveillance awareness.
It was just quite hard on the shoe soles, so afterward, he wouldn’t let Zhou Qing get away with just one meal; she would have to buy him a pair of shoes as well.
He watched the rickshaw stop at the entrance of an upscale residential area—the kind of Western-style apartment buildings erected on the ruins after the war were slightly less prestigious than detached villas or small Western-style buildings, but still not something the average person could afford.
This area was good both in terms of security and the environment, and even had a team of security guards that patrolled the vicinity.
The rickshaw puller reached his destination, squatted down to wipe off his sweat with a towel, and rested.
At this time, if he approached with an excuse and chatted, he could easily elicit a lot of valuable intelligence.
But Wang Yunxiao didn’t do so.
He walked to the building’s ground floor and stood in the darkness, observing the lights in the building carefully.
There were lights on the right side of the first floor and the left side of the third floor, but there was no movement on the first floor.
Instead, sounds of pots and pans faintly traveled down from the third floor.
Wang Yunxiao glanced at the exterior wall; it wasn’t high and would be easy to climb but was not particularly graceful.
The person wasn’t a real criminal suspect, and there was a woman at home, no need to be so sleazy.
Checking that there was no one around, he directly entered the stairwell.
Tiptoeing to the third floor, Wang Yunxiao leaned against the dark stairwell, inching close to the door crack to eavesdrop.
Doors in those days weren’t great at soundproofing, nor were they particularly sturdy.
Most households didn’t even need iron doors.
There were indeed women’s voices inside the room, and more than one, chattering and laughing as if they were completely unguarded.
Wang Yunxiao reached behind his back with the opposite hand and drew a pistol from his waist.
It was the one he had acquired during the last dungeon run, which Nurse Liu got back for him as a new piece after he had turned in the original.
Wang Yunxiao had never used it before, or rather, he hadn’t encountered a situation where he must use a gun.
Even when he was pulled to the front lines by the Special Service Bureau, against those monsters, a small pistol was nowhere near as useful as Big Spear.
He didn’t use it, but that didn’t mean he didn’t need it.
After all, when out and about, one could inevitably run into some stubborn folks with tempers, who just couldn’t understand plain talk.
Especially for people like Mr.
Tong, when it wasn’t appropriate to just physically assault them, a gun could add a lot of persuasive power.