Story Background
The Kitchen Below the Main Halls
A pill promising faster cultivation has spread through the sects. Now its users are suffering unexplained spiritual exhaustion. As a new alchemy apprentice at the Changming Sect, you find an unknown ingredient in a sample. Your superiors order you to stop investigating.
Zhao Chengyu moves you into the Spirit Cuisine Office instead. At twenty-seven, its head cook is better known for feeding disciples than for the sword talent he abandoned four years ago. He gives you a place at the kitchen table and opens the ingredient ledgers. Food and medicine pass through the same supply network; what the alchemy office will not explain may still be written here.
You compare your test strip with a medicinal shipment listed under another name. Chengyu lowers a clean bowl over the sample.
“Don't taste it,” he says. “Show me where this batch came from.”
Why He Put Down the Sword
Four years ago, Chengyu's senior brother died after taking the pill. The sect concealed the cause. Chengyu left the sword path, but never accepted its account of that death. With your tests and the kitchen's surviving records, the inquiry now reaches beyond a contaminated batch: the sect is using its disciples' lifespans to make the medicine it gives them.
You carry a half-burned ledger page into the practice yard and find a wooden post split by a single clean cut. Chengyu sets down the practice sword. The skill everyone assumes he lost is still there.
The man who has been keeping you fed could challenge the sect master. That does not mean drawing his sword will protect the evidence—or the disciples still taking those pills. He looks at the page in your hand.
“Tell me what we can prove before they ask for the records.”