The road down to Hollowed Gorge smelled of wet stone and old promises.
Dawn was a pale smear on the horizon when the little convoy pushed off: three carts disguised as mundane supply—pickled roots, salted fish, a cask of "repair oil" that actually hid the mirror-glaze vials—and a pair of porters whose shoulders were straighter than porters usually allowed themselves to be. Yan rode beside the cart, spoon tucked inside his sleeve like a cheeky secret. Bai Yun walked ahead, blending into the morning like a shadow at dawn. Qi Hu rode behind them, trying to look unbothered and failing spectacularly; he spent most of the ride practicing a dramatic glare in any reflective metal he could find, which made him look like a nobleman having an identity crisis.
"Remember," Master Gao had said the night before, "this is not a fight. It's a mirror. You do not stab with it; you let the dish reflect."
"Mirror therapy," Yan muttered. "Got it. We stab them with self-awareness."
Bai Yun shot him a look that could peel garlic. "Don't make philosophy out of a dumpling."
Qi Hu choked, almost flipping his horse. Yan grinned. Humor—small salt to keep nerves from curdling.
They reached Hollowed Gorge when the sun was still polishing the sky. The Gorge itself was a throat in the mountain—steep cliffs, a narrow path, and always that echo that made brave men sound like they were apologizing to the world. The Serpent Wok had asked to meet them here. That in itself was a display: challenge laid across a public place. The elders had chosen it deliberately; anyone watching could testify to who moved, when, and why.
The cart was parked in the middle of the path, the cask covered with a tarp. Bai Yun stepped forward and set the offering on an old flat stone. "We honor the truce," she announced, voice carrying easily. "One exchange. One token. We hand over a decoy bowl in trade for your assurances."
From the treeline, copper-haired stepped out first, then the iron-eyed youth and the others Yan had seen in the lower market—well-dressed brigands who looked like they'd all gone to the same school of stylish menace. They arranged themselves like a curious audience, fans folded and smiles too sharp to be kind.
"Simple and honest," copper-haired said, eyes flicking to Yan as if testing the ladle on a pot. "We accept. The bowl?"
Bai Yun nodded, and the porter lifted the crate. Under the lid were the mirror-glaze dumplings, wrapped in lotus leaves and sealed with ward-ink. The courier set down a single bowl of decoy broth in exchange—a shallow offering designed to look like worth.
Copper-haired's fingers brushed the bowl and a lieutenant signaled. A small circle of masked men stepped forward and tasted the broth, faces polite, performance perfect. They smiled, made show of complimenting the faux-dew, and the exchange looked official—until the lieutenant motioned and a pair of thieves lunged. The ambush came not with trumpets but with the sharp whisper of blades and fans.
That was the plan. Not in the Serpent Wok's favor.
Bai Yun had placed scouts in the trees; the Enforcer's men were spread like iron ribs under the ground. Yan, heart thudding like a turned drum, stayed near the cart like a man who knew his dumplings should not be abandoned.
The first move flickered—masked thieves collided with guards, fans opened and closed like predatory flowers. Qi Hu, who'd bragged earlier about staging the dramatic glare, now flailed in an unexpectedly useful way: he tripped over a root and landed between two attackers, inadvertently knocking them into one another. He leapt up and swore, which was almost heroic if you squinted.
Yan's motion was simple. He stepped forward with the smallest bowl—the one with a single mirror-glaze dumpling presented on a lotus leaf—and offered it not as bait, but as invitation. The fan-wielding youth glanced at him, eyes mild, and lifted the dumpling as if to taste a rumor.
That moment—the exact breath before ingestion—stretched like a long noodle.
The youth bit.
For a second, nothing happened. Then his expression shifted: confusion, then a flicker of recognition, then a sudden, angry laugh that had the edges of something tight and painful. He let out a sound like a man who'd seen himself doing a ridiculous thing in a stranger's mirror and discovered his nose was on fire.
The mirror-glaze worked.
Two of the Serpent Wok's men froze mid-lunge, reeling as some private memory the dumpling returned to them. One clapped his hands to his face, dizzy with a private shame that uncoiled like steam. Another, older, sudden shifted to anguish—something the mirror showed him cut to the quick—and stumbled back, eyes wet.
The ambush faltered. The Enforcer's men surged forward and took advantage. The Serpent Wok fighters were practiced and vicious, but suddenly they were fighting with one hand tied: their own reflected doubts. Where doubts raked, the guards struck.
For a beat the exchange looked like victory's small riot. The Serpent Wok withdrew, dragging their wounded, and for the first time since the start of this conflict, Yan felt a hopeful flare: the mirror-glaze could bite.
Then the throat in the mountain shivered.
A sharp, brittle sound came from the gorge's mouth—metal singing like a thin bell. The mirror-glaze had done something else. A note in the air had trembled, and a sudden tremor ran up the cliff-face: the vault's echo, perhaps, or a sympathetic chord the Serpent Wok had tuned on purpose.
Copper-haired had not been the one who took the dumpling. She had watched, hair like a banner, with the same unreadable smile. Her eyes flicked to the treeline as if reading a clock. "Clever," she said softly, and then her voice changed, as if she was choosing a sharper tool. "We will retreat. For now."
Her lieutenants obeyed. They vanished into the trees like smoke. The Enforcer's men breathed; the guards whooped; some apprentices laughed as if the weight had lifted.
Yan let himself smile, small and ridiculous, until he saw the lieutenant who'd tasted the dumpling again—this time not shaking but steady, eyes clear and hard as knives. He'd recovered faster than any of them had expected. His mouth set into a line like a blade. He looked—terrifyingly—like someone who'd seen a mirror he did not like and chosen to fix what he saw.
"You think a dumpling can change everything," the lieutenant said, voice a slice. He swept through the clearing toward the treeline where a fan lay half-open. With a savage efficiency he flicked it open. Painted on the paper, in gleaming black ink, was a single symbol Yan had seen too often: the black petal.
The fan flapped once, twice, and then the air itself seemed to fold.
A ripple rolled through the clearing, not of wind but of appetite. The guards' breath shortened; their eyes gleamed with something like hunger. The mirror-glaze's effect curdled in an instant, not failing but flipping—reflecting not a shame but a sharpened need. Those who'd tasted the dumpling now looked at it, not with disgust but with a sudden, greedy focus.
Yan felt it first in the spoon in his sleeve: a jolt like cold lightning. The golden utensil hummed hard enough to prick his skin. The disk's echo answered, a note from the vault that was close to a name.
"Fan!" Bai Yun shouted, springing. She lunged for the brush-fan, and for a beat her fingers brushed the lacquer; the fan snapped, its painted petals flaring like a blossom. She cut the air and the painted symbol spun away into the grass.
It should have been enough.
But the lieutenant wasn't fighting fair.
From his sleeve he flicked a blade—a small, gleaming thing—and in its wake a fine dust sprayed into the air. Not poison, not in the sense of toxin. It was powdered mirror-moss—twisted. The Serpent Wok had their own variant: a mirror that didn't reflect truth but warped it. When it met the glaze's echo, the two magics threaded together and created a new effect: instead of self-recognition, each taster was shown the echo amplified—the desire reborn as hunger.
Chaos re-found its center.
Guards staggered, gripped their heads as if thoughts had been burned into them; one charged forward with a shout that was more animal than man. Qi Hu, who'd been trying hard to look tough all day, now looked terrifyingly competent: he kicked a thief in the ribs and then, with a flourish that would later make him brag, saved a potter from being trampled. Yan, heart racing, grabbed the nearest stack of lotus wraps and hurled them like nets while Bai Yun carved a path to get behind the lieutenant.
The fight stretched and snapped like dough. For every guard who fell into the trap of sharpened want, another held—discipline baked into their bones by Master Gao's drilling. The Enforcer moved like an immovable pan, and slowly, with grit and some luck, they forced the Serpent Wok into retreat.
When the dust cleared, the gorge looked like a kitchen after a riot: scorched leaves, broken fans, a few wounded, and one scene that stopped Yan cold.
At the heart of it, the lieutenant clutched at his chest and laughed—a hard, broken sound. Copper-haired was nowhere to be seen. A small, dull disc lay on the ground where he'd stood: a coin stamped with a serpent coiled around a wok. And pinned to it: a single, black petal.
The lieutenant fell silent, eyes rolling like a man who'd heard the wrong end of a spoon. He clutched at his head and, with a final, incredulous look, whispered, "We missed the main course."
Someone—one of the Enforcer's men—slid forward and cuffed him. He would be taken back to the compound for questioning. The lieutenant's recovery was too rapid to be natural; the Serpent Wok had adapted, and their adaptation hinted at someone with access to both mirror-glaze knowledge and a terrible will.
Yan sank to a rock, knees trembling. Adrenaline leaked out of him in little wet sobs of exhaustion. He'd helped cook a weapon that worked, and then the enemy had countered it immediately, with a poisoned mirror that turned reflection into hunger. It felt like the mountain had been outmaneuvered in a game of spoons.
Bai Yun came to his side and sat. "You did well," she said, voice rough. "You made a dish that hit them. They countered. We captured a lieutenant. That's information."
Yan wished information could be spoon-fed so it would taste more palatable. He thought of the golden spoon in his sleeve, the disk in the vault, the name he'd heard whispered that felt more like a summons than a title. He'd wanted to cook answers; instead he'd cooked a question and watched it step away with a mouthful.
"Did the lieutenant say anything?" Yan asked.
The Enforcer—grim, efficient—approached, wiping his blade on the grass. "Only that they have a patron outside the mountain. Someone with resources and a taste for spectacle. He mentioned an old trade route and an intermediary known as the Copper Broker. He coughed up one name when we pressed him—the fan-wielding youth. He's not just a thug; he's a scholar of mirrors."
Yan's jaw dropped. "So they've been planning this for longer than we thought."
The Enforcer nodded once. "And they adapt fast. We took a small win today, but it will cost us: a lieutenant, a burned terrace, three children frightened anew. The ledger grows."
Yan swallowed. The spoon in his sleeve hummed, tired and raw.
"We head back," Bai Yun ordered, voice now all business. "We patch. We question. We plan. They will come again—and harder."
On the walk back to the compound the sun climbed, indifferent and unstoppable. Qi Hu whistled a tune badly and then sang it worse. Yan laughed, a little hysterical and much needed. He had a head full of dumpling recipes and a map of enemies that were more dangerous than he'd feared. The Serpent Wok had a mirror, and they'd learned to polish it quickly.
As the compound unrolled into view, Yan thought of the vault's disk, of Lingmu, of names that tasted like appetite. The spoons in the inner kitchen seemed to hum in sympathy, like a choir not wholly reassuring.
They had won a skirmish, but the main course was being set somewhere darker than a gorge. The mountain's tongue was warm with it.