Dawn arrived like a blunt spoon—slow, inevitable, and with the appetizing smell of someone else's breakfast. The compound still smelled faintly of last night's dumplings and the more recent string of worry. Yan Chen had been up polishing spoons and not sleeping like a sensible person; his eyes felt like two overused ladles. Still, he moved fast enough to find the gate already crowded.
A cart waited in the entrance, ridiculous and theatrical—a crooked thing with one wheel that had clearly been refurbished three times with too much enthusiasm. A donkey blinked at the crowd as if to say, "I am here for transport, not drama." On the cart sat a single, massive iron pot whose lid trembled with a sound like a throat clearing. A knife—clean, cruelly sharp—had been stabbed into the cart's side like a stake through a forgotten recipe. A slip of paper fluttered from the blade.
Bai Yun arrived at Yan's shoulder, hair unbound and expression serious enough to make even the donkey feel judged. "If that pot opens and a polite little demon steps out asking for a name," she said, voice low, "I will personally rename it."
Yan reached for the paper with ceremonial caution and read aloud:
> Your broth soothes the frightened, but can it quiet the starving? Deliver the phoenix dew at Hollowed Gorge or we season the air with your children's names. Three nights remain. Choose.
There was a flourish to the handwriting like a man who practised dramatic flourishes between crimes. Qi Hu, who'd wandered in with a dumpling stuck to his cheek, peered over Yan's shoulder and made a disgusted noise that read like a man offended by both cruelty and bad penmanship.
"They're getting poetic," he observed with the kind of solemnity reserved for men reading bad horoscopes. "Never a good sign."
Yan glanced at the pot. Steam leaked from around the lid in fragrant ribbons that smelled wrong—pepper and something floral and a hint of metallic tang that made his teeth itch. He almost laughed from reflex—then remembered the children they'd rescued, the emptied granaries, the barbed note pinned to the gate—and the laugh died in his mouth like a dumpling dropped from a roof.
"Do we open it?" he asked.
Bai Yun's eyes were a shard of gray. "Do you want the answer to a question that might eat your face?"
Yan paused. "On purely professional grounds as a chef, not opening a pot makes me feel… betrayed. But yes—on tactical grounds, perhaps we should not."
Qi Hu made an awkward show of backing away. "If something jumps out and bites my nose off, I'm haunting all of you."
Master Gao arrived then, hair disheveled in a way that suggested he'd slept poorly on purpose, and peered into the pot like a man checking a simmer. He emitted a long, exhausted sound. "Showmanship indicates escalation," he said. "Either they're desperate or dangerously confident. Both are ugly."
Yan lifted the lid.
Steam burst out, smelling at once of spice and threat. The pot was not filled with soup. It was jammed with glossy black petals, hundreds of them, floating in a dark oil that moved like a bad omen. At the center, like a tiny, obscene truce, sat a pale dumpling. Someone—carefully, terribly—had carved a single character into the dough: **Choose.**
Qi Hu sniffed, then started to drool a little. Bai Yun thunked him on the head with the flat of her palm. "Congratulations. You're now both a dumpling thief and a delicacy critic," she snapped.
Later, the dumpling and its oily tide sat in the Hall of Steam under a reinforced glass jar and a dozen squinting eyes. The elders moved around it with the kind of reverence one reserves for an angry relic or a complicated stew.
"This is not intimidation only," Grandmaster Ye said, voice dry like a kettle left too long on heat. "It is a test. They think their theatrics will tilt our resolve."
"Of what?" Yan asked. The spoon at his hip hummed in a restless, private song.
"Of nerve," Master Liu replied. "And of whether we will act to protect the vault or fold under pressure."
Old Taste chewed. "Or," he said slowly with the guilty pleasure of a man who loves both trouble and well-cooked things, "someone sends back a *dish* they cannot swallow. Let us consider cooking not surrender."
Bai Yun's eyes sliced through the room. "You've been training us to mend and strengthen. Now, Yan—if the Serpent Wok wants a plate, do you believe you can prepare something that bites back?"
Yan looked at the jar, at the black petal visible through the glass like a bookmark in a bad book, and felt a heat that had nothing to do with the pot. "If they want us to choose, then we'll choose something that tastes like regret."
Qi Hu finally raised his head, face bright. "Violence I can eat. Preferably with a side of humiliation."
Master Gao folded his arms. "If you intend to cook a weapon, know this: some ingredients are forbidden in the inner kitchen. They carry histories. They carry teeth. We will fetch what we must, but quietly."
Grandmaster Ye's gaze was cold and steady. "Send for them. Use trusted hands. Prepare the kitchen as if to celebrate a feast. If we must feed war, let us serve it without apology."
Yan's spoon pulsed at his ribs as if eager, like a blade in a sheath singing under the hand. Three nights remained. The knife in the cart looked like an invitation and the note—coarse, black-mouthed—was a countdown.
---
The next hours were a messy choreography. Messengers moved like furtive steam across the mountain—two riders to the eastern terraces, a cloaked apprentice to the old spice-merchant beyond the pass, an envoy to the sect's librarian for dusty herbal texts. Master Gao gave orders as if extinguishing a stubborn boil: precise, clipped, efficient.
Yan was allowed to accompany the envoy for one reason and one reason only: because he had convinced the Grandmaster the spoon was more a key than a toy, and the elders wanted him close to any ingredient that might be cursed or sing. That, and Bai Yun's expression when she said, "If you break something invaluable, I will peel you like a dumpling." She didn't so much threaten as promise.
Their first stop was Old Taste's private storeroom, a place where the air smelled of cured roots and mischief. Old Taste produced a small, puckered jar, its lid sealed with wax. "Mirror-moss," he announced grandly, offering it like contraband. "Reflects what your food shows. Useful when you need thieves to taste themselves."
Yan took the jar like a student taking confetti in a war. Mirror-moss had been talked of in legend: a fragile herb that sharpened self-recognition—dangerous when misapplied, powerful when used with care.
Next, in the spice-merchant's stall beyond the pass, a woman with a permanent frown and a ledger that had seen many bargains handed over a sliver of something wrapped in lotus cloth: powdered lotus-ash, a warming agent that could steady meridians and, in small doses, harden resolve.
"You've an odd order," the merchant said. "A dish to wound the soul? People will ask questions."
"Make the ledger ask less," Bai Yun said curtly, and they left with pockets heavier and conscience lighter.
Lastly, the librarian—a thin, spectacled man who always looked as though he'd misplaced his beard—threw a scroll onto their hands. It detailed a technique buried in the cookbook's margins: the *mirror-glaze method*, a finishing technique designed to reflect a memory back into the taster. "It must be bound with care," he warned. "A mirror shows truth. Sometimes people don't like what they see."
On the ride back, Yan tasted the air like a man sampling a broth—mirror-moss and lotus-ash were faint on the wind, but there was another thing below it: the memory of a feast eaten too quickly, of celebration collapsed into silence. It tasted of metal and old paper. He swallowed.
"You look like a man who ate a lemon," Bai Yun teased, but there was no real humor in it. "We have a weapon to make and a mountain to preserve. Do not fail us, Yan."
"Right," he said, thinking of the children who'd been taken and the black petals that tasted like ledger notes. "I will not fail."
He might have added "and I will not be arrogant," but the spoon's hum answered with a warmth that felt like encouragement and a whisper—sometimes you must be both careful and bold—and he didn't trust himself not to be tempted.
---
Back in the Hall of Steam, the kitchen transformed into a war-room that smelled suspiciously like a bakery. Apprentices rolled dumpling skins with hands that shook less and steadied more; a pair of grizzled cooks sharpened knives with the look of men who sharpened both steel and wit. Master Gao arranged the pots like siege engines. The elders read through the scroll with faces that could pass for funeral menus.
They worked in two parallel lines. One team—led by Master Gao—developed the protection (wards and rations). The other, under Yan and under Bai Yun's precise eye, built the dish that would bite: a controlled mirror-glaze broth finished with mirror-moss and a lotus-ash binder, served in a thin, steam-wreathed dumpling designed to carry the internal reflection into the mouth.
It was equal parts chemistry and ethics. The mirror-glaze was dangerous: if a thief tasted himself and recoiled, they might flee. If he tasted himself and sharpened his hunger, they might become more dangerous. They layered safeguards—warded dumpling skins, counter-siphon seals painted on the bowl's rim, and a tiny charm of jade dust hidden under each dumpling that would choke the memory if it ran toward violence.
Young apprentices took to the work with the fever of people who preferred making things to thinking about why they had to be made. Qi Hu attempted theatrical flips with the dumplings and only succeeded in splattering glaze on Master Gao's sleeve. Yan laughed—short, surprised, and clean—and for a moment the kitchen felt like what it used to be: a place where laughter rose with steam.
The lightness didn't last. The jar of black petals on the table seemed to watch them like a judge. The note pinned to the cart gnawed at the edge of their efforts. Each dumpling was proof of defiance and temptation at once.
When the first batch was ready, Bai Yun tested one, face unreadable. She chewed slowly, eyes closed, then opened them. "It works," she said, voice small, fierce. "It shows you your appetite. And it puts a little mirror behind the eyes."
Master Gao nodded. "Good. It's dangerous, but not a weapon in the hand of a fool."
They packed crates with the fragile dumplings and the vials of mirror-glaze, sealing them with ink runes and tape that had been blessed and then cursed for insurance. A team would carry the dish out to Hollowed Gorge under cover of a supply run, protectors disguised as porters. It would be the trap.
Outside, the cart still waited, the donkey flicking an ear with philosophical disinterest. The knife lay in the wood, gleaming like a punctuation mark. The elders' plan smelled of smoke, spice, and the iron tang of resolve.
Yan held the spoon in his hand as if testing its balance. "If this ends badly," he murmured, half to himself, half to the metal, "let the mountain remember we tried to feed it courage, not fear."
Bai Yun slipped beside him, shoulder brushing his own. "If this ends well," she said, "let the Serpent Wok remember they ever thought they could write our ledger."
He laughed then, a small, nervous thing that felt like a pinch of pepper. "Either way," he said, "we'll have interesting stories to season our soup."
They walked out into the waning light together, baskets of dumplings between them and the knife in the cart like an unwelcome bookmark. Three nights had become the pressure of a lid on a pot. The mountain waited, hungry, patient, and very, very watchful.