The stone steps to the Inner Mountain felt older than time itself.
Lanterns—simple ones at the bottom, then more ornate as Yan Chen climbed—cast long, patient shadows. Every step was a little quieter, as if the mountain listened. The air grew thinner, but sharper; it tasted like iron and old herbs, like rain on dried chili. Behind him, the sect's terraces shrank into the mist. Ahead, the Vault's gate loomed: a semicircle of carved wood and bronze, inlaid with faded culinary sigils that hummed faintly with age.
Yan's token burned in his palm like a promise. Master Gao had walked him to the base of the climb and then left him with two words: *Be true.* They echoed more comforting than any armor.
Bai Yun walked at his side, light and steady, a contrast to his clumsy, excited strides. She had insisted on accompanying him—partly because she'd wanted to see the Vault herself, partly because she enjoyed watching Yan scramble through serious things with casual incompetence. Qi Hu had been politely denied access; the elders did not trust his motives enough to hand him a token. Qi Hu's mouth had made a thin, angry line when he'd left.
"You seem… calmer than I expected," Bai Yun noted, watching him tie and retie a strap on his apron. Her voice held the kind of teasing that didn't pull punches.
Yan answered without thinking. "My heart's steady. My knees? Maybe not."
She snorted. "You'll manage. The Vault favors determined souls, not perfect knees." She looked at him more seriously then, jade eyes like burnished porcelain. "Don't be hasty. The Vault recognizes motives. It doesn't like showmanship."
Yan swallowed. "If it were about showmanship, Qi Hu would win everything."
Bai Yun's mouth quirked. "If Qi Hu really were winning everything, I'd be out of a hobby."
They shared a brief laugh. Up here, among the pines and the smell of creosote, their banter felt like a fragile truce against the mountain's gravity.
At the Vault gate, Elder Chen Jin waited in his long blue robe, hands folded. Master Liu and Old Taste stood to either side, impartial as carved statues. A small alcove held the Vault's intake—an obscure slot the size of a chopstick and a bowl carved for humble offerings. The gate itself was a monolith of intertwined spoon and leaf motifs; the inlaid sigils pulsed faintly as Yan approached.
A guard in plain, unremarkable grey opened the gate with a key that looked older than the sect library. He took Yan's token, studied it, then turned toward the bowl.
"You may present one item to the Vault," the guard intoned, "and one item only. That item will mark your intent. If the Vault accepts, it will grant one suitable ingredient. Choose wisely."
Yan's breath thinned. *One item.* He had imagined all manner of dramatic offerings—lotus oil, a piece of his golden spoon, even a tear of joy. In the end, he reached into his apron without fanfare and withdrew the cookbook.
Gasps scattered like startled sparrows.
"No," Elder Chen Jin said sharply. "Do not—"
The guard's hand hovered, then steepled. "The Vault accepts written intent as symbol." He nodded to Yan. "Place it in the bowl."
Yan's fingers shook. He laid the heavy tome gently in the carved bowl. The book's leather seemed to sink, not with weight but with welcome. The entire mountain hummed like a living instrument. Bai Yun's hand found his, a quick, grounding squeeze.
"Wrong choice," someone muttered behind him—Qi Hu's voice, impossibly close, as if he'd snuck along the path. Yan's skin prickled with annoyance at the idea that Qi Hu might be lurking here, but he kept his eyes level and his fingers steady.
The guard—old, with eyes like flint—took a single feathered brush and dipped it into a jar of ink. With deliberate care, he wrote a single calligraphy character on the outer rim of the book's exposed page. Then he closed the book and placed a slender silver lid over the bowl.
A low rumble started beneath their boots. The Vault door's sigils brightened, green veins like sap.
"Those who seek the Vault must reveal purpose," Master Liu intoned. "Chief elders will now observe your spirit. Stand back."
They stepped away. The metal lid shivered. A single steam of jade smoke rose and formed characters in the air, curling into script no one present could read aloud. The Guard read instead to the elders: "Purity of flavor. Intent of nourishment. Will of the maker." The words echoed like a struck gong.
Yan's head throbbed. He felt the spoon in his pocket vibrate in sympathy, as if it too listened to the air. The Vault test, whatever private code it employed, was clearly more than lock and key. It read hearts.
"Now," Old Taste said, voice like dry oregano, "we wait."
The elders' faces creased with age and interest. Bai Yun's heartbeat in his hand was a steady metronome. Yan waited. The mountain breathed. The Vault gate thrummed.
Then, with a sigh like a soft kettle, the bowl's lid lifted. A thin ribbon of smoke poured upward and shaped into a figure that looked for all the world like a chef in mid-stir: arms flowing, a head bowed, a hat rising into a lotus. It was nothing—and everything—an echo of the sect's oldest kitchen spirit.
The apparition turned its non-face to Yan, and a voice like water over pebbles whispered inside his head: *"Spice binds memory. Memory binds soul. Prove the taste that binds you."*
Elder Chen Jin's brows raised. "A judgment."
The Vault had spoken.
"Prove the taste…" Bai Yun repeated softly. "You must offer a dish."
Yan's heart lurched. He had expected a test—a vision, a riddle, perhaps a line of script. He had not expected to be asked to cook. Up here. With nothing but the bowl's faint steam and the cookbook lain in the offering bowl.
He looked at the elders, then the mountaintop, then Bai Yun. The spoon in his pocket buzzed like a trapped insect, as if urging him on.
"What do I have?" he whispered.
Master Gao—who had come as a spectator at the behest of Chen Jin—stepped forward, offering a cart laden with three humble items: a single lotus bulb, a strip of dried mountain fish, and a handful of ordinary field herbs. "You may use these," he said. "No additional spice. No borrowed power. Show us the flavor that is yours."
A simple test. A simple root, fish, and herbs. Yet Yan felt the weight of the Mountain in those words. The Vault demanded *truth*, not fireworks.
"Do it with intent," the Vault's apparition seemed to murmur.
Yan set to work. He'd thought about this a thousand times on the climb—what he would pull from the Vault, which ingredient could change the course of his future. Now there was no choosing. He had to make everything from nothing. It was… a better test than he expected.
He peeled the lotus bulb with slow, reverent fingers. The petals slid away like pages. He sliced the mountain fish into thin slivers with a precise wrist, each motion practiced a thousand times over in the inner kitchen. He crushed the field herbs between his palms until their scent rose like a memory.
But mere chops and simmers would not suffice. He needed to thread memory—and this time he had to do so without the old-world crutch of city smells and ramen nostalgia. Control, Master Gao had said. Focus, Bai Yun had said. Intent, the Vault had said.
Yan bowed his head. He searched inward for a memory that wasn't shame or hunger—a memory of purpose. He found a sliver: the first time he'd watched a bowl of soup bring a friend to tears—not from spice, but from warmth. The image was small: a nighttime kitchen, laughter, a hand wiping a salt-swept brow. He fashioned that memory into the umami thread, a silver seam.
He breathed in, exhaled, and began.
The broth was humble. No golden flourishes. He simmered the lotus bulb in plain water until its starch softened and released a pearly sheen. He added the mountain fish slices so they would surrender their marrow slowly. The herbs he folded in at the last, coaxing their green sweetness out rather than forcing it. Each movement was measured, a meditation.
Above the pot, the Vault's apparition watched, a silhouette of steam.
Minutes crawled like rice in a pot. The elders stood impassive, inscrutable. Bai Yun's fingers twitched at her side, as though she wanted to reach in and stir. Qi Hu's shadow—always a presence—hovered at the edge, nostrils flared like a cornered boar.
When Yan finally ladled a spoonful and lifted it for tasting, the world seemed to pause. The spoon caught the light in the same warm way his golden spoon had, and he felt the spoon in his apron thrum back to life as if in kinship.
Master Wu tasted first. His eyebrows twitched once, slowly, like a metronome of surprise. Old Taste's hand lifted to his lips and stilled. Then Chen Jin inhaled, and for the first time since Yan had arrived, one of the elders let a small, genuine smile unfurl.
The Vault's chef apparition bowed. Smoke swirled and wrote characters in the air—an old blessing, a word for *nourish*, and something like *welcome*. The green glow around the Vault's sigils brightened.
A small hatch at the side of the Vault gate clicked open. Inside, like a treasure in a plain wooden box, lay a single vial wrapped in cloth: the Vault's gift. It was small enough to fit in a palm, no larger than a spice jar, but when the guard lifted it, the crowd inhaled as if someone had opened a door to a secret cellar.
The vial shimmered with a color Yan had no name for—part sunset saffron, part phoenix flame, part moonlit dew. It smelled of summer thunder and a lullaby.
"That," Master Liu murmured, "is… phoenix pepper dew."
A silence fell like a lid. No one expected such a rare preserve to be given to a novice. Phoenix pepper dew—only legends spoke of its power. A single drop could sharpen the essence of a dish beyond mortal reach. It was both dangerous and glorious: a spice said to awaken latent qi and ignite breakthroughs.
Yan's fingers tingled. He extended a hand, and the guard nodded, placing the vial into Yan's palm. It felt heavier than it looked, as if some weight of story had been bottled.
Bai Yun's hand brushed his briefly when she clapped lightly, eyes bright. "You did well," she said, voice a whispered bell. "This will change your path."
And then, as if the mountain had decided to remind them that gifts did not come without price, a low, resonant sound issued from the Vault's heart—a note of caution.
The spoon in Yan's pocket screamed.
Not with sound but with a violent tremor. The golden utensil's hum shot up the inside of his chest like an electric thread. He yelped, nearly dropping the potion.
At the same time, a figure darted from the pines on the far ridge—a shape Yan had glimpsed days ago, masked and fleeting. Now it moved with purpose, not merely watching but acting. The silhouette contorted, and as it sprinted, its cloak flashed a silver edge—an insignia Yan did not recognize: a serpent coiled around a wok.
Qi Hu's eyes narrowed. He followed the figure with a curse. "Who—?"
Before anyone could react, the masked watcher sprinted forward and, with impossible speed, dove toward the Vault gate. In the same instant, several of the sect's outer guards heard the alarm and took off, but they were too slow. The masked figure hit the gate with a momentum that made the ground quake like a dropped mortar.
For a heartbeat everything slowed: the green glow flared, the pillars sang, and the spoon in Yan's pocket resonated like a struck bell.
And then a sound like tearing silk—no, like stone grinding on stone—erupted. The Vault's side hatch slammed, the small vial in Yan's hand seared like it had been struck by lightning, and a dark shadow spilled out from a crack in the Vault's inner seam—an oily darkness that smelled faintly of char and old blood.
A single, unnatural petal fell from the shadow, black at its edges yet glowing at its veins, and it hit Yan's palm—on top of the phoenix pepper dew. The petal sizzled faintly and left a smudge on the vial's cloth.
People screamed. Bai Yun's face went white. Master Gao had one hand on Yan's shoulder, the other reaching for the vial.
The masked figure scrambled to its feet. From beneath the hood came a voice—sinister, smooth as soy—"You sought the Mountain's favor, cook. The Mountain always charges its debt."
Before any elder could step forward, the shadow lunged again, and the Vault's gate slammed shut with a thunderous boom that reverberated through the mountain. The carved sigils flared green, then snapped into silence.
The spoon in Yan's pocket stopped crying. For now.
Yan stared at the masked intruder, breath shallow, phoenix dew and the black petal trembling in his palm. Around him, the elders were already moving—Chen Jin barked orders, guards swarmed—but Yan felt something cold coil in his gut.
He had thought the Vault's prize would be the most dangerous thing he'd encounter that day. He had not expected the price that had come with it.
The masked figure pointed a gloved finger at Yan and said, loud enough for the whole court to hear, "You are chosen by the Core…and by me. Your first test has begun."
Bai Yun's hand tightened around his arm. Qi Hu's jaw worked like a broken cleaver. The elders called for the guards, but the masked figure vanished in a flash of smoke—leaving behind the black petal and a wind that smelled of iron.
Someone gasped behind him. "That sigil… it's not from the sect."
Yan stared at the black petal in his hand. The phoenix dew's vial had a faint crack now, a hairline scar across the glass.
He had just received a gift from the Vault—and stamped upon it was a shadow's claim.
The mountain, it seemed, had more appetites than he'd imagined.