Night had teeth.
Lantern light boiled on the eaves. Wind moved through the pines in long, whispering fingers. Inside the inner kitchen compound, every window had shutters closed; torches were clipped low; two rings of watchers paced the courtyard like slow-moving knives. Even the moon seemed cautious, half-hidden behind clouds as if it had been warned not to stare.
Yan Chen tightened the silk band around his wrist until it was snug. The spoon in his pocket thrummed like a living thing—an anxious heartbeat that matched his own. The coin the masked intruder had left in his palm glinted on the table of Master Gao's private training room, kept under cloth and two seals. Tonight they expected trouble. Tonight they had a plan.
"Remember," Master Gao said in a voice that was softer than the scrape of a cleaver but carried more weight, "they will test your patience as much as your speed. A thief will look for noise, for flash, for the easy path. Make the easy path a liability."
Bai Yun, wrapped in darker cloth than usual, handed Yan a small leather packet. "Spice satchels," she said. "Not for eating. Throw them at a pursuer's face and they'll be seeing stars for longer than you can run. Use sparingly. Save the phoenix dew for later—don't be a greedy chef tonight."
Yan slid the sachets into his belt. He nodded. He felt ridiculous and oddly dignified at once: a would-be chef-turned-watchman, armed with pepper pouches and a cursed golden spoon.
Outside, the guards were arranged in concentric patrols. Old Taste supervised the outermost ring with the impatience of someone who'd lost his temper before and gained nothing. Elder Su manned the kitchen gate; Master Liu watched the pathways like a hawk who had read too many histories. The Enforcer—stern, silent—stood a step behind them as a final punctuation.
The first half of the night passed in dull, simmering anticipation. Yan did rounds in three-hour watches as ordered. He slept in the inner training room on a thin pallet while Master Gao dozed in a chair, the man's chest rising and falling in slow, professional rhythm. Each time the spoon hummed, Yan woke; each time the spoon fell quiet, he slept. It was less sleep than survival.
At two bells past midnight—after two hours of watch and with three nights becoming two in his head—Yan heard the faintest sound: not footfall, for the mountain's guards had boots that clomped like thunder; not a whisper, either. It was the subtle soft scrape of cloth on wood, a practiced hand reading a lock by touch.
He rose.
The air tasted of iron and old oil. He moved through the training room with the small, sure steps of someone who had learned to walk in kitchens: quiet, economical, aware of the weight of every object. The spoon in his pocket stilled like a mouse holding its breath.
At the Vault corridor, the two nearest guards stood in a loose formation—the outer patrol sleepy, the inner alert but confident. Yan slipped across shadows, the way a ladle glides through steam, one breath at a time.
Near the vault's side-hatch—where the small box with the phoenix pepper dew sat under layers of wards and lotus leaves—someone worked with surgical patience. A figure in black knelt, gloved hands moving with the finesse of someone who had been doing this job a long time. Tools glinted: a set of fine picks, a ribbon of soft steel, a fan of folded paper with calligraphy. The masked intruder from before, without a doubt.
Yan's pulse spiked, but his hands were steady. He could raise an alarm, but the Enforcer had warned them: thieves of the Vault often worked in tandem. Create noise and the other half would strike somewhere else. So Yan followed the thief the way he followed the heat of a pot—careful, tracing the direction of the steam.
He crept closer and saw the intruder's mask was half ceramic, half cloth—a white face painted with a single streak of black like spilled ink. The movements were quick, threadlike, practiced. Yan could have struck. He could have lunged and grabbed the cloaked sleeve. He didn't—because the cookbook's margins had shown him a line of script last night: "Cloaked hands taste fear—do not be their spice."The book had become a quiet teacher, full of cautions.
The thief's gloved fingers slipped a pick into the hatch's seam. A familiar metallic scent—oil and old iron—filled Yan's nose. He closed his eyes and felt for the taste thread, a tiny memory he could use as bait: the first time he'd warmed a bowl of porridge for a street dog to see it wag. Not a heroic recollection. A small, humane one. He layered it into the air by letting a breath out slow, embedding intent into the night.
A shadow turned its head.
The intruder looked up, and for a heartbeat their eyes—pale as churned milk—met his.
Everything moved.
A hand darted out and swept at Yan's wrist—fast as a flung chopstick. Yan dropped, rolled, and slid, catching the thief's sleeve on the way with his little finger. Fabric tore. A thread of black cloth fell to the ground.
The thief's other hand moved, blade flashing. Yan flinched, but not enough. Master Gao's training came back to him like a recipe: redirect, don't block. He pivoted, letting the blade's arc pass by his shoulder, then shoved a spice satchel low into the intruder's knee. The sack burst on impact—a cloud of crushed dew-pepper filled the air, exploding tiny motes that hit eyes like needles. The thief staggered, gagging.
That was the opening Yan needed.
He dove for the side-hatch latch with fingers that had learned to grab hot pots and hold. His hands clamped the metal. He felt the rush of the Vault's wards at the edge of the lid—cold, like the taste of ice on tongue. A thin ring of green light blinked around the box's seam as if reacting to pressure. Yan heard a hiss—then a soft crack.
The intruder recovered quicker than Yan expected. A gloved fist grabbed his wrist, hard enough to bruise. Metal kissed skin. The thief's knees were light; their body moved with a feral grace. They twisted and shoved Yan aside, then reached for the little box with a speed that made the world slow.
Yan was not built for wrestling. He was built for stirring, for delicate coaxing, but the panicked adrenaline turned his movements into better improvisation than technique. He seized a ladle from a nearby rack. It was heavy at the handle and cheap in the weigh, but it could bruise. He swung, not to kill, only to distract. The ladle's arc caught the intruder's forearm; a metallic clang sang. The thief hissed, stepping back.
They looked toward the Vault's corridor mouth—and that's when the second strike began.
Across the compound, three figures emerged from shadows—silent as a kitchen knife slipped into the drawer. They were not in black. They were wearing thin, charcoal fabrics that shimmered like wet tofu. One moved like a shadow puppet with long, whip-like chains. Another carried a fan—folded now, but Yan knew the fan pattern with the black petal ink. The third wore a mask with a serpent coiled across the cheek.
Bai Yun stepped out of the darkness behind Yan as silver as a moonlit spoon. She tossed a small pouch with an arc of practiced grace. It shattered near the intruder's feet, releasing a ring of steaming vapor that smelled of lotus and green tea. The three masked attackers flinched, hissed—the fan wielder coughed—and the thief took advantage of the confusion.
For a heartbeat, all was orchestrated chaos. Yan lunged for the intruder's cloak to hold them, but the thief's knee struck his stomach. He doubled, air knocked out. The thief twisted—fast as a gust—and darted into the deeper shadows between trees.
"You go after them!" Bai Yun snapped. Her voice was a blade. She shoved past Yan and sprinted, a shadow in motion. The other two masked men carved into the dark like knives.
Yan grabbed his spoon and followed. It was not a chase of speed—he was no runner—but of corners and tactics. The pines turned the world into stuttering sight: one instant a throat of moon, the next a black seam of leaves.
They reached the ridge where Yan had once seen the intruder slip away days before. The ground here was mossy and soft; the air smelled of ash and old rope. There, on the ground, lay a glove—black, edged with fine, silver stitching. A scrap of cloth, caught on a root, bore the same painted streak the thief's mask had: the spilled-ink mark.
Yan stooped for the glove. On its palm, pressed into the leather, someone—or something—had stamped a small symbol in dark pigment: a serpent coiled around a wok. It was the same sigil as the fan image they'd seen in the vault hoarder: the guild mark.
Bai Yun crouched beside him, her breath fogging in the night. "They're marking territory," she muttered. "Serpent Wok. A name whispered in the under-quarters since before I had hair."
Yan's chest tightened. The Serpent Wok—rumors of them had once reached the Inner Mountain like a bad smell. A network of cooks and smugglers, some said. Others claimed they were worse: dealers in cursed spices, brokers who sold fortune and death. If they were involved, the masked thief was no mere brigand.
He lifted the glove and saw a faint smear of blood inside the seam. Not much—an abrasion. The intruder hadn't folded their cloak properly; perhaps they'd grazed a branch. A thought pricked him like a thorn: they were not invincible. They were careful, but not perfect.
Bai Yun's hand found his shoulder. Her grip was steady. "This is trouble," she said. "They took a risk tonight. Either they wanted the vial and chickened out, or they were testing our defense. Either way—this means they'll return. Worse."
Yan's mind buzzed, but one bright corner of his thinking held like sugar in tea: the vial had not been taken.
A small blessing, threaded through the night.
He exhaled so hard his breath fogged. "They did leave something else," he said, showing her the glove. "And a coin."
She looked at the coin in his palm—no, the coin in his pocket—the tiny token the thief had left earlier. He pulled it out; it lay cool and metallic. This one had been stamped with Five Nights Left; but tonight, this new glove had a scrap of paper tucked into its wrist. Yan unfolded it. Ink bled like old soy.
*"Four nights," it read, in the same serrated hand. "Prepare to pay what the Mountain owes."
Bai Yun read it slowly and then folded it back into his hand as though the letters might be sharp. "They're reducing the time," she said. "This is intimidation—but precise. They keep control of the script."
They heard a soft scuff a few paces away. A figure crawled from behind a boulder—a night porter, face pale and eyes wide. He fell to his knees before Yan and Bai Yun like someone who'd mistaken the mountain's hunger for his own.
"Master Yan—Miss Bai Yun—I didn't—" he stammered. "I was paid. A coin. A purse. They told me to leave the door unlocked for a minute."
Yan's face went cold. "Who paid you?"
He pointed, shaking. "A cloaked rider on the road, near the service gate. He said—he said to open the side hatch for the man with the white mask and the fan. He handed me this token." He showed them a small, dirt-smudged coin—one small, grubby fiat that matched the ones left previously. His hands trembled.
Bai Yun's jaw tightened. "Inside job then."
"Or a man on the road with certain knowledge," Yan said. "Either way, someone's feeding them what they need."
The porter sobbed, and later confessed he'd taken a small purse—just a few coins—for his silence. It was petty crime amplified into bigger danger. He had not expected to assist a guild. He had only thought of his empty stomach.
Yan's fists clenched and slackened. He wanted to curse, to smash something, to show the mountain he was not a man to be bought. But the other thought, quieter and not less urgent, arrived: Find them. Learn them. Don't let the Vault's gift be snatched.
Back at the Vault, Master Gao's hand clasped Yan's shoulder. "Good work," Gao murmured. "You engaged the intruder and didn't go for blood. That saved us."
Yan's leg was bruised where the thief's knee had struck, but he grinned through it with a boyish, tired pride. "I am a cook, not a fighter," he said. "But I can be dangerous with hot oil."
Master Gao snorted softly. "Hot oil will do."
They placed the stolen glove and the note under the elders' inspection. Old Taste tapped the glove like a man testing a turnip. "This mark—very old. The Serpent Wok keeps their herald like a seasoning packet. They leave it to claim debts. If the guild's engaged now, we're in a stew deeper than we guessed."
Elder Chen Jin's expression was stony. "Then we must prepare. Double watch. Secret messengers. Master Liu will contact the outer sects to place discreet warnings. And Yan—" he paused, looking not like a judge but an uncle with a stern spoon—"the Vault's vial is precious. Do not tempt the guild by showing it. Hide your movements, learn to move like a steam whisper."
Yan nodded. He slid the coin into his palm and felt its cold weight. The nights had shrunk, the threat had grown, and the mountain had declared its taste for drama. He had engaged and survived his first real test outside the training floor; he'd seen the guild, he'd felt their speed, and he'd found a clue.
But a clue was not an end.
Outside the inner compound, the pines rustled and the intruder's silhouette spread through the dark like ink in water. Far off, the river laughed in its bed and the moon, offended, drew the cloud back over its face.
Yan slid a hand into his apron and felt the spoon's warm hum. He closed his fingers on it and whispered into the night, not to the kitchen, not to the elders, but to whatever small, stubborn thing kept him human:
"I won't let them have it. I'll make something worth more than a debt."
Above, in the pines, someone—somewhere—laughed softly, like a kettle coming to boil. The coin in Yan's pocket felt heavier with every heartbeat.