Apparently, in some fever dream, Tang Fan has made up some monster of a dish that requires ingredients that can only be bought from markets located at four different corners of the city, all needing to be used within a specific period of time before they go off. When awake, he needles and needles Sui Zhou so much that in a fit of annoyance of wanting to just get Tang Fan off his back, Sui Zhou makes the terrible decision of agreeing to test out the dish for real, because Tang Fan wants to sell the recipe to Dong Gu and have the dish be served there at the restaurant as some sort of hare-brained promotion scheme for his next book.

As he rolls out a map of the city and starts to calculate the relative travel times of Dong’er, Pei Huai, Tang Fang, and Wu Yun to plan how they would go about obtaining the ingredients for this insane recipe that probably has a ninety percent chance of failure, Sui Zhou vows to send Tang Fang on the most prolonged wild-goose (literally) chase ever – he deserves to earn his dinner for once, because even Embroidered Guard raids never required this much careful planning and the use of the actual freaking Art of War!