"Eek — that scared me!"
Just as Chen Qi was about to make his move, Xu Lu startled and pulled back.
He reached over and caught her hand. "It's okay, nothing scary about it."
Her hand was delicate and impossibly soft — smooth in a way that made it hard to let go.
She didn't pull away. She left it in his.
Around them, the other couples in the back row had already started making good use of the darkness. The atmosphere shifted into something unmistakably charged.
"Look at them," Chen Qi said. "Shouldn't we be doing something too?"
"Big brother, they're couples."
Xu Lu wasn't ready for things to move this fast. A kiss on only their second meeting felt too soon. Plenty of women would go further on a first encounter, but that wasn't who she was.
Chen Qi, for his part, had been carried along a little by the mood and her perfume — but not to the point where he'd lost his head entirely.
The film ended right at dinnertime.
"Let's get food. What are you in the mood for?"
The coffee Xu Lu had picked earlier hadn't quite been to Chen Qi's taste, so she decided to let him choose this time.
"What do you want, big brother?"
I've actually been thinking about that Michelin place — the two-star one.
Chen Qi had always hated the "what do you want to eat" back-and-forth. Every outing with Li Ting had turned into a twenty-minute negotiation where everything was either too expensive, too greasy, or not the right vibe.
This time, he already had the answer.
"Let's do Socrates. The two-star Michelin."
Xu Lu looked genuinely surprised. She took his arm. "How did you know I wanted to go there too?"
"That's what being in sync feels like," Chen Qi said.
It wasn't that Chen Qi couldn't afford a three-star — it was that Donghai City only had one Michelin-rated restaurant, and it was a two-star.
Then Xu Lu thought of something.
"Big brother, Socrates requires reservations. It's already past five — there's no way they have tables. Should we go somewhere else?"
She'd been taken there before, by previous admirers and her ex. Getting a reservation had always been an ordeal.
"Let me make a call."
The presidential suite at the Hilton came with a personal butler — Manager Li — who had mentioned early on that if the in-house dining ever felt unsatisfactory, he could arrange for Socrates to deliver directly to the suite. It was a white-glove service arrangement: Michelin restaurants partnered with top-tier hotels to accommodate their most exclusive guests.
"Manager Li, I'd like a table at Socrates this evening. Any chance you can sort that out?"
"One moment, Mr. Chen. I'll call you right back."
About a minute later, Chen Qi's phone rang. He turned to Xu Lu with a quiet smile.
"Done. Let's go."
"Big brother, you're incredible. That place is impossible to get into and you sorted it in one phone call."
Chen Qi had half expected the system to register a favorability bump. It didn't.
Of course. A woman who'd seen the world had a higher threshold. One phone call wasn't going to move the needle.
Twenty minutes later, they arrived at Socrates. Chen Qi gave his name, and a server led them to a window-side table.
He'd seen the restaurant on TikTok — the interior was designed like an aquarium, the kind of place where eating dinner felt like dining on the ocean floor. From their window seat, sharks glided silently past in the glass behind them. It was quietly extraordinary.
Chen Qi picked up the menu and felt his eyebrows rise slightly.
The prices here were genuinely unreasonable. A seafood fried rice that would run 300 yuan at a five-star hotel was listed here at 900.
"Lu Lu, you order. Get whatever you want." He passed her the menu.
"I'll pick, but if there's anything you don't like, just say so."
"Don't worry about it. Order freely." He said it like he meant it.
Xu Lu had already seen what Chen Qi was capable of. When he said order freely, he wasn't being polite.
"Then... the French Blue Lobster sashimi."
The French Blue Lobster was among the rarest creatures in the sea — statistically, only one in every two million lobsters is born with that distinctive blue colouration, placing it alongside living fossils in terms of rarity. Prepared by a Michelin-starred chef, the sashimi was listed at ¥4,288.
"Alaskan King Crab — three preparations. Canadian geoduck clam sashimi. Black truffle. Matsutake mushroom..."
Xu Lu worked through the menu methodically and settled on six dishes, totalling roughly ¥18,000.
"Big brother, does that look okay?"
"More than okay — but it's not enough. Add one or two more."
Chen Qi scanned what she'd ordered — mostly seafood — and added two portions of Kobe beef and a tin of caviar.
"Sir, our caviar is priced by the gram — ¥100 per gram."
"Do you sell it by the tin?"
"We do. A full tin is ¥25,000."
"One each, then."
The server kept his expression neutral — five years at this restaurant had given him plenty of exposure to Donghai City's wealthy clientele. What Chen Qi had just ordered wasn't even close to the most extravagant he'd seen.
¥25,000 caviar — one tin each. My god. Is this just how rich people live?
That must be pushing ¥70,000 by now. I need to get some photos tonight.
"And would you like to select a wine, sir?" the server asked.
Chen Qi knew nothing about wine, let alone the kind of bottles a place like this stocked.
"Do you have a recommendation?"
"We received a small shipment from France last week — a Château Pétrus. Same region as Lafite, but the palate is considered superior. Slightly higher in price."
"How much?" Chen Qi was curious to hear it.
"$3,038 USD."
Xu Lu quietly pulled out her phone and ran the conversion.
Just over ¥22,000. One bottle. A dinner pushing ¥90,000.
[Xu Lu's favorability +2. Current favorability: 25.]
Of course, Chen Qi thought, catching the system's notification. Romance is the surest way to a woman's heart.
He paused.
Actually no. Let me correct that — money is the surest way to a woman's heart.
At Socrates, each course arrived individually — no dish appeared until the previous one had been finished. Chen Qi and Xu Lu spent over two hours at the table, watching fish drift past the glass behind them, listening to a live pianist play somewhere deeper in the room. It felt, in the best possible way, like dining aboard the Titanic — only with considerably better prospects.
"Big brother, can you take some photos for me?"
"Of course. Here, give me your phone."
Chen Qi rattled off a series of shots. His photography instincts had been sharpened — somewhat involuntarily — during his time with Li Ting. She'd had very particular opinions about angles and lighting, and she'd expressed those opinions loudly.
Not my problem anymore. Now, if someone complained about his photos, he'd simply stop taking them.
"These are amazing, big brother!"
Xu Lu scrolled through and was genuinely pleased. A light touch of editing and they'd be ready for her moments.
"You've got it backwards — you look amazing, so the photos look amazing. When someone's naturally this beautiful, any angle works."
"We haven't even gotten to dessert yet and your mouth is already this sweet."
Xu Lu sent the photos straight to her group chat.
"Girls, you won't believe this — we just had a dinner that cost over ¥90,000."
Zhang Jie: Lu Lu, is this the guy from yesterday?!
"Yes! This afternoon he asked me to come with him to buy a car, and he paid ¥4.38 million on the spot — Ferrari 488. Then we went to the mall and he bought me ¥66,000 worth of La Mer. Now we're at Socrates — one bottle of wine was ¥22,000, caviar was ¥25,000."
Xiao Jing: Oh my god, Lu Lu — this man is a golden catch among golden catches. You are so incredibly lucky. I'm genuinely jealous.
"I honestly didn't see it coming. He just... throws money around like it's nothing."
Zhang Jie: Is he the son of some listed company chairman or something?
"I have no idea. He hasn't said anything about his family."
Dining at a Michelin restaurant was its own kind of ritual. Each course came with a full presentation from the server — the origin of the ingredients, the technique, the story behind the dish.
By the time they finished, two hours had slipped by without either of them noticing. The sharks still moved silently behind the glass. The piano still played. For a brief stretch of an ordinary Saturday evening in Donghai City, it felt like the whole world had slowed down.