Chapter 1385 719: The Alliance Takes Action

Wu Mengting's cooking was actually quite good. She'd never made steamed rice cakes before, but after Sun Yanhong's explanation and live demo, she quickly grasped it.

"Thanks. If you hadn't told me all that, I really wouldn't know how to make these cakes. But you're from Xiu Zhou, right? How come you know how to make our Lu City rice cakes?"

Wu Mengting asked, deliberately sounding curious.

Sun Yanhong smiled and said, "My grandma was from Lu City. She raised me when I was little. She was very skillful with her hands and used to make these rice cakes for me all the time. Even after she passed away, the memory stayed with me. To remember her, I sometimes make them myself, and I also just really like eating them."

Put that way, it really did sound legit, not that she'd specially learned it because Chen Feng was from Lu City.

"So that's how it is." Wu Mengting nodded in sudden "realization," then slipped back into the posture of Chen Feng's girlfriend and said, "But still, you went out of your way to bring rice cakes over just for Chen Feng. That's very thoughtful. I'll thank you on his behalf."

With a perfectly natural smile, Sun Yanhong said, "You're welcome. He and I were friends before, and now we're neighbors too. Bringing over some food is normal. And this is a specialty snack from his side of Lu City. You can't buy it here in Xiu Zhou, so I just brought him a bit while I was at it. It's really nothing."

Wu Mengting said, half smiling, half not, "You're very thoughtful. But Chen Feng really has no sense of social niceties. You've brought him food twice and he hasn't expressed anything in return. That's not quite right. I'll send you a return gift for him another day."

Sun Yanhong's expression didn't change; she still wore that natural smile as she said, "I've known him for a while now. He's someone who's cold on the outside but warm on the inside. I figured that out long ago. You really don't need to send any return gift. What little food I brought over doesn't even count as anything."

"We still should, otherwise it makes us look like we weren't raised right, don't you think?" Wu Mengting insisted, looking serious.

Seeing her say it like that, Sun Yanhong finally said helplessly, "All right then. Just make it casual. No need to go out of your way to prepare anything."

Wu Mengting smiled and didn't respond to that, just shifted the topic: "Then I'll take these two rice cakes with me."

"Sure, of course. I'll pack them for you right away."

Sun Yanhong found a clean plastic bag, put the two rice cakes—already in clear food containers—inside, then quickly handed them to Wu Mengting.

Wu Mengting reached out to take them, smiled, and said, "Then we won't bother you any longer. Thanks again for the rice cakes. We both really like them."

"You're welcome. Next time if I make some again, as long as you don't mind, I can bring a few more over for you."

"Sure." Wu Mengting agreed readily, then added, "But next time you can just contact me directly. Chen Feng doesn't like checking WeChat. Even if he sees a message, he might not reply. We can add each other on WeChat."

As she spoke, Wu Mengting had already taken out her phone.

This time, Sun Yanhong's expression finally slipped for a split second—she stiffened—but she quickly recovered her smile and nodded. "Okay, I'll scan you."

The two of them took out their phones and added each other. Sun Yanhong even went a step further and added Sun Xiaorui, who'd been silent on the side, as a WeChat friend as well.

Then, maintaining a friendly attitude, she walked them all the way to the door and waved goodbye. "Come over and hang out again when you have time."

Out of courtesy, the two women, Sun and Wu, also waved back and said goodbye.

But as soon as they turned around, with their backs to Sun Yanhong, both sides' faces changed in unison.

Sun Yanhong's face turned as dark as water, mainly because she'd been angered by all the veiled barbs in Wu Mengting's words just now. Yet she actually had some scruples about Wu Mengting's status as Chen Feng's girlfriend, and didn't dare say anything too over the line.

Meanwhile, Wu Mengting was wearing the smile of a victor. In this round of verbal sparring with Sun Yanhong, at the beginning they'd been evenly matched, but very quickly Sun Yanhong had been forced onto the defensive and could only passively fend her off.

Sun Xiaorui, on the other hand, had a complicated expression. She'd basically been a background extra this whole trip, but watching the two of them go at it, her heart had been pounding the entire time.

She could only sigh internally that neither of these women was easy to deal with. Someone honest like her couldn't handle them at all and really couldn't afford to provoke them.

Before this, when she'd joined the "mistress alliance" and teamed up with Guo Mengyao and the others to scheme against Wu Mengting, that had been out of desperation. Now that she had Wu Mengting's promise, she was already thinking about quitting the alliance.

But joining that alliance was like boarding a pirate ship—easy to get on, hard to get off. She'd been worrying about this for the past two days.

Because in these two days, everyone in the alliance had been pushing her to quickly carry out the next step of the plan: think of a way to get Tang Jierui, that traffic-star idol, to ask Wu Mengting out.

At first, Sun Xiaorui could still say that after Wu Mengting met Tang Jierui, she hadn't taken any liking to him at all, so there was no need to waste money hiring Tang Jierui to seduce her, since it basically wouldn't work.

Guo Mengyao said money wasn't the issue. As long as they could arrange for Tang Jierui and Wu Mengting to meet outside and create an opportunity for someone to take "intimate photos" of them, that would be enough.

That put Sun Xiaorui in a bind, because if it were just arranging for someone to fake some "intimate photos" with camera angles, it really wouldn't be that hard.

Sun Xiaorui couldn't outright refuse, so she could only stall for time, saying she needed to contact Tang Jierui privately and talk things over, and that they might not even need to throw money at him, and definitely shouldn't let him know the truth, otherwise it might backfire.

So, Sun Xiaorui dragged things out for two more days, but by today, it was getting hard to keep delaying.

Not long after, the two of them returned to No. 8 Villa.

Chen Feng asked, "You didn't end up arguing with her, did you?"

He had followed behind them earlier, and after seeing them go into Villa D08, he'd gone back first.

Wu Mengting answered immediately, "No."

Chen Feng was a little skeptical, but seeing that they'd brought back two rice cakes in one piece, it didn't seem like they'd had a huge fight with Sun Yanhong.

"These rice cakes really were made by Sun Yanhong herself."

After putting the rice cakes she was holding on the coffee table, Wu Mengting sighed a bit and told the story about Sun Yanhong's deceased grandma. She ended with, "From what I see, it's going to be very hard to get her to give up on you. I can feel it—her obsession with you runs deep.

She normally doesn't even cook, yet she actually cooked for you. More importantly, these rice cakes have a pretty special meaning for her. I'm guessing whenever she made them before, she only made them for herself. But now she's sharing them with you. You should understand what that means, right?"

Chen Feng also felt that what Wu Mengting said made some sense.

"No matter how obsessed she is with me, I could never accept her. She's just a toad wanting to eat swan meat. She can keep dreaming."

When he dropped that cheeky line, both women froze for a beat, then didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"Okay, I'm going upstairs to meditate."

With that, Chen Feng went upstairs—for real this time, to sit and cultivate.

Seeing this, the two women each went about their own business. Wu Mengting watched TV; Sun Xiaorui went to wash the dishes.

In the kitchen, she had just washed a few dishes when a string of notification sounds went off on her phone, making her heart give a sudden thump.