Perfect-Level Skill

Based on culinary use, a blacklip abalone is mainly divided into the liver, the frill, and the main meaty body.

The liver is boiled, mashed, and made into a sauce; the frill is stir-fried; the main meat is served as sashimi... It can also be steamed. Cooking methods for fresh, sweet seafood are actually all quite similar.

Generally speaking, it doesn't require a fierce flame, so preparing it at a campsite is perfectly fine.

Xia Lin noticed that Su Bai's knife skills were far from ordinary. His adept techniques were on par with the private chefs hired at her home... Then again, in the proper culinary industry, wouldn't someone of Su Bai's age usually still be an apprentice? The type who works as an assistant to a master chef.

Yet Su Bai already looked like a true professional.

If her mother saw the way Su Bai cooked, she would definitely be very pleased. Her mother always liked this kind of mature boy.

He first cut off the liver, gave it a simple wash, and tossed it into boiling water to cook. The water only had salt and lemon juice added to it. After it was cooked, he mashed it and added soy sauce, creating a very simple yet delicious liver sauce... Fish livers could all be processed this way, though not all fish livers tasted good.

He carved off the frill, chopped it up, and used it to make fried rice.

Fried rice actually tastes better when cooked on a large stove, but due to the limited conditions, making a wet-style fried rice was more appropriate. In this type of fried rice, the abalone frill essentially replaced king oyster mushrooms, and the texture was quite similar—it was basically a deluxe version of king oyster mushrooms.

As for the firm, bouncy meat, he sliced it thinly to taste first.

Xia Lin was eager to give it a try, but Su Bai stopped her, saying, "This needs to be chilled on ice first. If you eat it directly, it'll have a slightly fishy taste."

"Eh, is that so?"

"Restaurants always put abalone sashimi in ice water for a while to remove the fishiness. As a bonus, if the meat is slightly loose, this also gets rid of that problem... Of course, the meat of a blacklip abalone would never be loose anyway."

Su Bai explained unhurriedly, his hands never stopping as he finished chopping the ingredients for the stir-fry.

Carrots, onions, sausages... If this were a Michelin-starred Western restaurant serving you a blacklip abalone fried rice for over a hundred bucks, they definitely wouldn't add sausage. That would make the dish seem cheap, like a ten-dollar fried rice bought from a roadside food truck.

But then again, adding sausage actually made it taste better. Sometimes, great taste and presentation simply cannot coexist. Fortunately, neither Xia Lin nor Su Bai really cared about that.

Not only that, but Su Bai also added some tempura fish cakes...

In short, it was a pot of mouth-wateringly fragrant fried rice that whetted Xia Lin's appetite and made her mouth water.

"With cooking skills like this, you could attract so many young girls just by relying on your culinary prowess," Xia Lin sighed in admiration.

"Not necessarily. You have to show off your cooking skills at home, and a tent can technically be considered a mobile home... If you don't have the prerequisites, how can you invite a girl to your home in the first place?"

"True."

"The slices are chilled now. Have a taste first, dip it in this liver sauce."

Su Bai highly recommended this way of eating; it gave off a sense of using the original broth to digest the original food.

Not wasting a single edible part of an ingredient was actually a practice found in regions with thriving culinary cultures... The most typical example was Chinese cuisine, as well as French cuisine, which actually shared many techniques with Chinese cooking.

Before extensively coming into contact with it, Su Bai had known very little about Western cuisine. It was only recently, after more exposure, that he realized French and Chinese cuisine had a lot in common.

Taking a bite of the cold, fresh, and delicious abalone sashimi, Xia Lin narrowed her eyes in satisfaction. "Mmm... so good."

"How so?"

"I feel like this could get a Michelin star."

"I haven't even cooked this blacklip abalone at home since I got the stock. Xia is the first one to taste it."

"Haha, then I'm very honored!"

Xia Lin didn't know if that was actually true or if Su Bai was just talking nonsense. This guy had a very slick tongue and was full of sweet talk.

However, just hearing Su Bai say that made her feel so happy; her inner maiden's heart was completely stirred.

[Ding! S-class Goddess Xia Lin detected. Affection +1. Reward Skill: Technical Diving (Perfect Level).]

Good heavens!

Su Bai felt a bit surprised. So Xia was a holy vessel for dropping skills?

Thinking about it carefully, it made perfect sense. After all, she was a counselor, and a counselor had to guide students to improve. Just improving in that one aspect certainly wasn't enough; one had to learn real skills.

He had genuinely learned something this time... Technical Diving. Su Bai opened his status panel to check the detailed information. Unlike recreational diving that any tourist could casually enjoy, this, as the name implied, was much more technical.

Recreational diving was like an underwater sightseeing bus, admiring the scenery along a fixed route.

Technical diving, on the other hand, was like an underwater special scientific expedition, with clear scientific, exploratory, or challenging goals. It required planning one's own route and dealing with all unexpected situations.

Usually, it required having extensive recreational diving experience first, followed by long, expensive, and high-intensity specialized training step by step.

The gas cost for a single technical dive (especially mixed gases containing helium) could be as high as several thousand yuan.

Su Bai didn't care about that bit of money; the main issues were the time, the risks brought by the training, and the time consumed.

It seemed the System Bro's inclination was very obvious: whenever it was a project that required enduring hardship, it would use the power of the System to help Su Bai skip it.

Skipping the useless, torturous parts was definitely the most satisfying.

A Perfect Level skill was clearly more reliable than the Normal and Expert level skills Su Bai had obtained before. According to System Bro's detailed introduction, Perfect Level skills contained some auxiliary functions on the level of causality...

Auxiliary functions, huh? Why did that sound like using cheats in a game, like plugging an AMD backwards?

Closing his eyes, Su Bai quietly felt the changes in his body.

His control over various small muscle groups and his perception of the surrounding environment had both gone up a level.

His sense of balance also seemed to have improved.

The personal attributes displayed by the system also proved that Su Bai's feelings were not false.

His Physique attribute increased by two points, reaching 140 points.

His Mind attribute even increased by five points, and was now at a solid 100 points.

It made sense. Diving was a technical job after all, involving a lot of theoretical and experiential knowledge. It definitely wouldn't work if one didn't have a good brain.

At this moment, with a slight thought, numerous diving experiences surfaced in Su Bai's mind.

Not bad.

He really didn't expect to have such a harvest from going camping with Xia Lin.

"By the way, Xia, have you ever been diving?"

"Of course I have, haha. Diving is basically a fashion item for young girls nowadays. Everyone likes to go travel to Southeast Asia and play around with diving and stuff... You just have to find a reliable instructor; a lot of the local instructors there are huge scammers."

"Then where did Xia find her instructor?"

"Someone my mom knew, she brought me over... Why, do you want to try diving too? I can go with you."

Xia Lin's eyes flickered with a gentle light as she immediately took this task upon herself.

Wearing sleek, form-fitting wetsuits with Su Bai, swimming hand in hand near the coral reefs, watching little fishes swim past them... Ah, just thinking about it felt so romantic.