"What did you just say?"

"..."

Ms. Ren took a deep breath; she was more or less used to her son's unreliability.

After that, she went to the room to put things away.

Later, she came out and casually opened the refrigerator.

"What's in these two bags?"

"Dried fish and cured meat."

Ms. Ren took them out and looked at them, "They look quite appetizing; I love cured meat the most, Xu Lin, you know it. Your grandma used to make it a lot, but I haven't had it in years."

Towards the end, Ms. Ren sighed.

Xu Lin's Grandma passed away a few years ago, without any illness or calamity, in her early eighties, so she passed away peacefully.

Ren Yan is the youngest in the family, with two older brothers and two older sisters.

And Xu Lin's Grandpa is almost ninety years old.

"Xu Lin, let's visit Grandpa over there this New Year!"

Ren Yan said somewhat sadly, "He recently said he often sees you on TV and asked if you were on TV."

"Alright."

Grandpa had a stroke not long after Grandma passed away; he has been in a wheelchair since, and later developed dementia. He always liked the mischievous Xu Lin. Over there, Xu Lin's Grandpa came from a scholarly family, for instance, Ren Yan graduated from a top university, and Xu Lin's uncles and aunts weren't lacking either; they all completed university in that era. His cousins have even more impressive academic credentials, with two cousins and one cousin having graduated with a Ph.D.

Maybe because the family produced studious people, Grandpa especially liked mischievous kids like Xu Lin.

After the stroke and dementia, while watching TV, he'd think any young man he saw was Xu Lin.

However, that's how it is with elderly people; not many can pass away truly peacefully when aged. Most elderly suffer from various ailments until life's end, which seems to be the rule of nature, even for those with money; it's hard to avoid ending life painfully. Only a few can leave without illness or calamity.

Shortly after Ms. Ren returned, she began cleaning.

Xu Lin didn't want to clean at first, given how clean the house already was, but his mom insisted on tidying a bit, so Xu Lin had to help.

She has OCD; she feels uncomfortable without cleaning whenever she gets home.

By nightfall, it was finally done.

As darkness fell, Mom went to cook.

She had some culinary skills, and tonight, Ms. Ren chopped all the remaining cured beef, five ounces of cured pork, and four ounces of cured fish.

Adding other dishes, braised pork, mushroom chicken, along with a serving of oil wheat vegetables, tonight's dinner was quite bountiful.

Xu Lin's appetite was whetted.

"This cured meat is really delicious, has a great texture, where did you get it?"

Ms. Ren couldn't help but ask.

Xu Lin hadn't mentioned Ning Yuhuan, to avoid Ms. Ren's nagging.

"A senior sent it to me by express, her family made it."

"What senior?"

Ms. Ren quickly asked.

"A senior I'm very close to."

"What is her personality like? What about her character? And..."

Ms. Ren asked several questions directly; she was cautious about her son finding a partner. She knew how excellent her son's looks were. This kind of boy or girl wouldn't lack various suitors, so she needed to be cautious, afraid he might meet the wrong person.

"Let's talk about it later. The dishes are getting cold."

"Oh."

Ms. Ren looked at her son and said no more; after children grow up, a gap between parents becomes inevitable, unlike when they were young and asked their mothers about everything.

At night, Xu Lin returned to his room.

Today was the fifth, because Xu Lin planned to launch on Mid-Autumn night, meaning tomorrow night, estimated to be around eight or nine o'clock.

Xu Lin checked the situation.

He wasn't very concerned about the book's performance, just scheduled the chapters and updated them on time every day.

Xu Lin logged into the author's backend to check the current performance.

Favorites: 1,473,658?

Over 1.47 million!

On the 1st day, favorites had already exceeded one million; now five days have passed, and they increased by over 400,000 in total, the speed has slowed overall, and it's impossible to say the favorites will increase limitlessly.

But Xu Lin understood it was due to short video promotion.

In this era, traffic is the most magical thing.

On the Internet, many people who didn't attend much school can drive luxury cars and live in mansions; meanwhile, countless people with similar education levels are still struggling in factories, and even those with better education are doing mundane jobs. Most ordinary people toil and hustle for a lifetime, which is the norm among the masses.

And the short video era has created many myths.

This is the magic of Internet traffic.

Of course, this is rare.

Because most internet celebrities actually have a tough time; survivorship bias doesn't offer much real-world reference. Studying is the optimal solution for all ordinary people.

Xu Lin's current book is a beneficiary of the traffic era; although the book indeed has high quality, it also leveraged the momentum of short video traffic for takeoff, and it's impossible to say how far it will fly further.

"How many reads are there in these favorites?"

Xu Lin clicked on the reads, checking the data from the day before yesterday when it had slightly over 1.2 million favorites.

700,000 reads!

Xu Lin knew these weren't effective reads, as a large portion of them were free reads.

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