The first thing Lin Fei learned about his new world was that getting trampled by a three-horned spirit deer really, really hurt. The second thing he learned was that the transmigration package deal apparently included a user manual, currently flashing in his vision like a migraine made of sapphire light. One moment he'd been sweating over a sizzling wok in his cramped Beijing food truck, the next—agony, damp earth, and the overwhelming scent of pine and something else, something electric and alive that prickled against his skin like static. He groaned, pushing the dead, surprisingly heavy deer off his legs. His entire body felt like it had been used as a clapper in a giant's bell.
[Divine Gourmet System Initialized!] [Welcome, Host Lin Fei!] [Objective: Become the One Above All through the power of culinary arts!] [Scanning local lifeform… 'One-Horned Azure Vale Fawn'… deceased.] [Analysis complete. Recipe Unlocked: 'Appetizer of Lingering Qi']
"What the hell is a 'Lingering Qi' appetizer?" he groaned, pushing himself up onto his elbows. His head throbbed in time with the pulsing blue text. "And could you be less loud? My head is killing me." The system, thankfully, dimmed its notifications to a soft, internal glow. It was the only courteous thing that had happened to him since he'd woken up in this lush, impossibly vibrant valley, moments before the panicked deer had ended its life and nearly his.
He was a chef, dammit, not a hunter. Back in his old life, his biggest concerns were a bad review on WeChat, dodging traffic cops, and making sure his signature mapo tofu had just the right numbing kick. Not being gored by mythical fauna. He took a shaky breath, the air so rich with oxygen it felt like drinking cold water on a hot day. The trees were too tall, the colors too vivid, the silence too profound. This was very, very far from Beijing.
A low, menacing growl from the forest edge ripped him from his thoughts. Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through him. A sleek, shadow-pelted wolf with eyes like smoldering coals emerged, its muzzle stained with fresh blood. It had clearly been chasing the deer. And now it had two meals. This was it. Reincarnated for all of five minutes. He'd be the punchline of the afterlife: Did you hear about the guy who got isekai'd twice in one day?
His eyes fell on the dead fawn. Then on the system's recipe, which hovered patiently in his mind's eye. It was insane. It was stupid. It was the only option he had. The wolf took another step, its muscles coiling, a low rumble vibrating in its chest.
"Screw it," he muttered, grabbing a sharp-edged rock. "Five-star dining or bust."
What followed was the most harrowing, messy, and profoundly unhygienic butchering job in culinary history. He worked with a frantic energy, the wolf's low, impatient snarls a metronome counting down his death. His hands, usually so precise with a julienne cut or a delicate sauce, were slick with blood and trembling. He found a few wild ginger-looking roots and some pungent, onion-like bulbs, mashing them into a paste with his rock. He used a large, flat stone as a griddle, heating it with a desperate focus he didn't know he possessed. He seared the thin strips of venison, tossed in the aromatic paste, and the moment the sizzle hit the air, something fundamental changed.
The air itself thickened. The rich, gamey scent of cooking meat was suddenly layered with something else—an ozone crackle, a fragrance that was less smell and more pure sensation. It was the aroma of a forest after rain, of deep earth and vibrant life, all concentrated into that one, glorious sear. The wolf stopped growling. It took a hesitant step forward, its head cocked, nostrils flaring. It didn't look hungry anymore. It looked… curious. Awestruck.
Lin Fei didn't wait. He shoved a steaming piece of meat into his own mouth.
Fire. Lightning. A river of pure, unadulterated energy exploded in his mouth and shot down his throat. It wasn't just delicious; it was alive. It was the taste of vitality itself. The complex, savory flavor of the venison was there, perfectly cooked, but it was a mere vehicle for the incredible power that came with it. The pain from his bruises vanished. The fatigue evaporated. His senses sharpened until he could count the individual hairs on the wolf's muzzle from twenty paces. He could hear the rustle of a leaf a hundred yards away, see the individual veins in the petals of a distant flower. A warmth, a power he had never known, pooled in his lower dantian, a tiny, spinning vortex of energy. Qi. He had Qi.
The system blazed again, this time with a cheerful chime. [Congratulations, Host! Successfully crafted and consumed 'Appetizer of Lingering Qi'!] [Cultivation Base: Mortal → Qi Refining Stage (Early)] [New Recipe Unlocked: 'Entrée of the Predator's Essence' – Ingredients: Flesh of a Shadow-Fang Wolf.]
Lin Fei looked from the notification to the wolf, which was now drooling, its eyes fixed on the sizzling stone with a terrifying, single-minded intensity. He had just leveled up by eating. And his next quest item was currently sizing him up as the main course. A hysterical laugh bubbled in his chest. He felt incredible, powerful, alive in a way he'd never felt before. He also felt like he was about to die.
"Well," Lin Fei said, picking up his bloody rock with a newfound, qi-infused strength. The fear was still there, cold in his gut, but it was now edged with a wild, giddy exhilaration. "This is a problematic feedback loop."
The wolf seemed to agree. It lunged. Time seemed to slow. Lin Fei's new qi-enhanced reflexes kicked in. He wasn't a fighter, but he'd spent years in hot, crowded kitchens, dodging swinging fridge doors and his head cook's flying ladle. He sidestepped, the wolf's claws tearing through the air where his throat had been. The movement was clumsy, fueled by panic and raw energy, but it worked. He brought the rock down on the wolf's flank as it passed. It was like hitting solid oak, but the beast yelped in surprise and pain, skidding to a halt and turning with a snarl.
This was impossible. He couldn't win a fight. He was a chef with a rock. His eyes darted to the remains of his cookfire, to a half-burned, smoldering branch. Without thinking, he grabbed it, ignoring the heat that seared his palm, and brandished it like a torch. The wolf recoiled, instinctual fear of fire overriding its hunger. It circled him, wary now, its growls lower, more uncertain.
Lin Fei held the burning brand aloft, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He and the wolf stood in a tense standoff, the sizzling stone of meat between them. He spent the next three days in a state of perpetual terror and culinary enlightenment. He'd managed to scare the wolf off that first time, but he knew it was still out there, watching. He'd eaten the rest of the fawn, each bite solidifying his nascent cultivation base, each meal a tiny step away from being one himself. He felt stronger, faster, his senses preternaturally sharp. He could hear the sap rising in the trees, see the individual threads of a spider's web fifty feet away. He'd even tried cooking some grass, just to see. The system had practically scoffed at him.
[Insufficient spiritual density. Recommend seeking higher-grade ingredients.]
"Oh, my apologies," he'd muttered to the empty air. "I'll just pop down to the celestial market for some divine pork belly. Do you take WePay?"
His chance for a better ingredient—and a way out of this terrifyingly beautiful valley—came on the fourth day. A commotion in the distance—the shrieks of spirit birds, the roar of a much larger beast, and a shockwave of power that made the very air hum and the leaves on the trees shiver. It was a sound of violence and power on a scale he couldn't comprehend. He crept toward the source, his new senses on high alert, moving with a caution that was now second nature.
He found the aftermath of a battle. It was a clearing torn asunder. Trees were splintered, the earth was scorched and scarred by deep gouges, and the air still crackled with residual energy that made the hair on his arms stand on end. In the center of the devastation lay a magnificent, nine-tailed fox the color of molten silver, its fur still flickering with fading arcs of lightning. It was dead. And standing over it, breathing raggedly, was a woman.
She was draped in robes of jade and white that were now torn and stained with blood. Her face was pale beneath a sheen of sweat, her breathing shallow and hitched. One arm was held at a terrible angle, clearly broken. But her eyes… her eyes were ancient, sharp, and filled with a power that made Lin Fei's new qi tremble in its core. She was beautiful and terrifying, like a glacier carved into the form of a woman, hiding a volcano beneath the ice. She hadn't seen him. She slumped against the only standing tree, its bark blackened from lightning, and pulled a pristine, glowing pill from a pouch at her waist. An alchemist's pill. The standard issue cultivation boost. She swallowed it, and a faint color returned to her cheeks, but the deep, core-level damage remained. She was still critically wounded. The pill was a bandage on a gushing wound.
Lin Fei saw the fox. The system went berserk.
[Warning! High-Density Spiritual Entity Detected! 'Storm-Tailed Celestial Vulpex' – Deceased.] [ANALYZING…] [Recipe Unlocked: 'Nine Revolutions Silver Broth of Heavenly Tribulation' – Grade: Earth (High)] [Effects: Major cultivation breakthrough, reforges damaged meridians, grants minor lightning affinity.] [WARNING: Cooking process requires precise spiritual control. Failure may attract… attention.]
This was it. This was his ticket out of the woods and into something resembling civilization. This woman was powerful, clearly from a sect. And she was hurt. He could help her. Or he could die trying to cook a mythical fox on a rock. The wolf had been one thing. This was something else entirely. This was a being whose very essence screamed power, and he was thinking about making soup out of it. The sheer blasphemy of the thought was almost amusing.
He took a deep breath, stepped out from the bushes, and put on his best, most disarming smile—the one he used to charm skeptical food critics and health inspectors. "Excuse me, esteemed cultivator? I couldn't help but notice you're looking a little peaky. I don't suppose you'd be interested in a… alternative form of treatment?"
Her head snapped up, her eyes flashing with lethal intent. A pressure descended on him, a weight that threatened to crush him into the dirt. It was like the air had turned to lead. "Who are you?" she hissed, her voice like the crackle of ice breaking on a frozen lake. "An assassin from the Violet Thunder Sect? Come to finish the job?"
"Lin Fei. And I'm a chef," he said, the words sounding utterly ridiculous in the face of her majestic fury. He gestured weakly to the magnificent dead fox. "And I believe I can make you something far more effective than that pill. A broth that will not just patch you up, but make you stronger than before."
She stared at him as if he'd just declared he could fly to the moon on a noodle. The crushing pressure intensified. He felt his knees buckle, his new qi straining to keep him upright. "You propose to… cook my kill? The sacred beast I just spent three days and half my spiritual power to defeat? For a broth?" The disdain in her voice could have frozen hell.
"Yes!" he wheezed, the word forced out against the pressure on his chest. "Let me prove it. If it doesn't work, you can kill me. Fair trade." It was the worst sales pitch of his life. His life, which currently felt very, very short.
Something in his sheer, audacious desperation must have gotten through to her. The pressure lessened slightly, just enough for him to draw a ragged breath. A flicker of insane curiosity crossed her pained features, cutting through the anger and suspicion. "A chef," she repeated, the word utterly foreign on her tongue. She looked at his rough, blood-stained hands, his simple, torn clothes, the complete lack of a cultivator's aura beyond the faintest, most nascent whisper. Her eyes narrowed, calculating the risk, the sheer absurdity of the offer. Her gaze flicked to the pill pouch at her waist, then back to him. The pill had done little. She was running out of options. "You have one hour. If this is a trick, your death will be slower than you can imagine."
With her grudging, watchful eye upon him, Lin Fei worked. He used his rock to carefully skin the vulpex—a process that sent tiny, painful jolts of residual lightning up his arms. He built a proper fire and found a large, hollow stone to use as a pot. He foraged for wild herbs, the system guiding him to ones with stabilizing spiritual properties, his Spiritual Palate—though not yet named—already giving him an instinctual feel for their energies. He simmered the fox bones and the choicest meat, his own meager qi guiding the process, trying to weave the leaking lightning energy back into the broth as the instructions demanded. It was the most intense cooking of his life. Every second, he felt her gaze on him, judging, weighing. Every stir of the pot was a gamble.
The aroma that rose was not of this world. It was the smell of a thunderstorm captured in a bowl, of ozone and wild rain, of profound vitality and celestial power. The woman's skeptical glare slowly melted into one of stunned wonder. The forest around them fell silent, every creature drawn to the scent yet afraid to approach. The very air seemed to hold its breath.
After an hour, he presented it to her in a makeshift bowl of folded bark. The broth shimmered silver, with tiny motes of light dancing within it like captured stars. It steamed, but the steam felt cool and energizing.
She took it, her hand trembling slightly, whether from weakness or anticipation, he couldn't tell. She sniffed it, her eyes widening, the pupils dilating. Then, with a look of finality, as if accepting her fate one way or another, she drank.
The effect was instantaneous and violent. She gasped, her back arching violently. Silver light erupted from her pores, blindingly bright. Crackling arcs of lightning danced around her, sealing the cuts on her skin, snapping her broken arm back into place with an audible, crunching sound that made Lin Fei wince. The color returned to her face in a rush, and her aura, which had been flickering and weak, exploded outwards, thick and potent, pressing down on the entire clearing. The trees swayed under its weight. She let out a long, shuddering breath that sounded like the sigh of the wind after a storm, and when she opened her eyes, they glowed with a pure, jade-like light, faint sparks of silver lightning dancing in their depths.
She stood, her movements fluid and powerful, all trace of injury gone. She looked at her hands, flexing them as arcs of silver lightning danced between her fingers—a new affinity, born from the broth. She looked at Lin Fei, her expression utterly unreadable, a storm of thoughts passing behind her eyes.
He stood there, covered in grime and blood, holding his rock-spatula, his heart hammering against his ribs. Had it worked? Was she going to thank him? Reward him? Maybe even let him go?
She took a step forward, her newfound power making the air crackle. "That pill," she said, her voice now a low, thunderous hum that vibrated in his bones. "The one you called 'ineffective'. It was a peak-grade Heaven mending pill, crafted by the grand alchemist of my sect. It is worth ten thousand spirit stones. It can save a cultivator on the brink of core collapse."
Lin Fei's blood ran cold. Oh. Oh no.
"Your broth," she continued, taking another step, her gaze locking onto his, pinning him in place, "healed my foundational meridians. It broke a bottleneck I have been stuck at for thirty years. It gifted me an affinity I have sought for a lifetime." She was right in front of him now, a force of nature contained in human form. "What you have done is impossible. It is heresy to the alchemical arts. It is a power that should not exist."
She leaned in close, and her next words were a whisper that promised either salvation or annihilation, a secret shared between them that could never be unspoken.
"So, chef," she breathed, the scent of thunderstorms and divine broth on her breath. "You will come with me to the Jade Phoenix Sect. You will cook for me, and for me alone. And you will tell no one of this. Because if the wrong people discover what you can truly do…" She left the threat hanging, more potent for its incompleteness. The unspoken ending echoed in the suddenly still air: …neither of us will survive.