Dawn in the Pavilion felt different now. It wasn't just the soft light through leaves...it felt like the quiet before a storm. Na had spent a sleepless night staring at the ceiling of her tree room, Jin Long's final, echoing word—"Prepare"—rattling around in her skull like a stone in a tin can.
A grey suited attendant arrived precisely as the first moss lights brightened. "Mr. Jin awaits you in his private culinary atelier," he said, his tone implying she was being taken to an execution chamber, not a kitchen.
He led her not to the main arena, but to a secluded wing of the Pavilion built against a sheer cliff face. The door was a single slab of black stone, unadorned. It slid open silently.
The air that washed out was cool, dry, and smelled of nothing. Not herbs, not spices, not the ghost of past meals. It smelled sterile, like a laboratory.
Jin Long's private kitchen was a temple to precision. The walls, floor, and ceiling were seamless panels of polished steel the color of dull nickel, reflecting the cold, sourceless light in blurry duplicates. There were no windows. One wall was a series of locked, frosted glass vaults, behind which shapes and colors glowed faintly—his legendary hoard of magical ingredients. The central island was a vast expanse of black obsidian, utterly bare. A single, intimidatingly complex induction cooker was built into it. It was breathtaking, terrifying, and utterly soulless.
He stood at the island, his back to her, examining something on a holographic screen that hovered in the air. He wore simple dark pants and a grey tunic, his sleeves rolled to the elbows. He looked more like a surgeon than a chef.
"You are four minutes late," he said without turning.
"The attendant just—"
"Excuses are the first leak in a sinking ship. Time is the one ingredient you cannot forage, bargain for, or season. Lose enough of it, and you lose everything." He turned. His face was as expressionless as the steel walls. "Today, you learn control."
Na swallowed, her mouth dry. "What are we making?"
He gestured, and a pedestal rose from the floor beside the island. On it rested a bowl, a block of dough, and a small dish of cornstarch. Nothing else.
"Dragon's Beard Noodles," he stated. "A classic test of manual dexterity, dough hydration, and temperature awareness. You will make them from memory. You have one hour."
Na's heart sank. Dragon's Beard Noodles were legendary. The recipe involved pulling a lump of dough repeatedly into thousands of hair thin, perfectly even strands. It was a lifetime's skill. She had attempted it maybe twice with her grandmother, ending in a sticky, broken mess.
"But… I don't have a recipe… the hydration…"
"From. Memory." He tapped the air, and a large, glowing timer appeared on the wall. 60:00 began its inexorable countdown. "Begin."
Panic threatened to close her throat. She looked at the ingredients. This was a test designed for her to fail. To humiliate her. Anger, hot and familiar, began to burn away the fear. Fine. He wanted to see her fail? She'd fail her way.
She washed her hands at the icy steel sink, then approached the island. She touched the dough. It was cool, firm. She began to knead, trying to feel its life. Her grandmother's voice came back: "Talk to the dough, Na. It will tell you what it needs."
She worked in silence, the only sound the soft slap of dough on obsidian and the relentless, digital tick of the timer. She added water by feel, dusted with cornstarch by instinct. She wasn't thinking about perfect strands; she was thinking about the rhythm of her grandmother's hands, the pride she felt when she finally got a section to pull thin without breaking. She poured that memory, that feeling of connection, into her work.
When she began the pull, it was messy. Some strands were thicker, some snapped. She'd recombine and try again, her focus absolute. She wasn't making Dragon's Beard Noodles for her mentor. She was making them for the ghost of a warm kitchen and a woman's approving smile.
When the timer hit zero, she had a nest of noodles on her board. They were… okay. From a distance, they looked impressive—a cloud of fine threads. Up close, the inconsistencies were clear. But they were hers. She had made them with heart.
She placed the bowl before him, a simple sauce of black vinegar, soy, and a touch of sesame oil she'd improvised from basic condiments he had in a hidden compartment.
Jin Long had not moved. He looked at the bowl, then at her, then back at the bowl. He picked up a pair of polished black chopsticks. He lifted a single cluster of noodles.
He did not taste them.
He held them up to the light, turning them slowly. "Strand variation exceeds acceptable parameters by forty seven percent," he said, his voice flat. "Multiple break points indicate inconsistent gluten development. The hydration was clearly guessed, not calculated. The sauce is a sentimental attempt at balance, overpowering the delicate texture the noodles should have."
He let the noodles drop back into the bowl as if they were contaminated. "Sloppy. Inefficient. This is not cooking."
Each word was a needle, precisely aimed. Na's face burned. "They taste good! The texture is light, they—"
"Taste is subjective. Technique is not." He cut her off. "You cooked with feeling. Feeling is unreliable. It changes with your mood, your memory, the weather. What happens when your 'heart' is afraid? Or angry? Or sad? Does your dough know? Your food will be a chaotic reflection of your inner turmoil. In this arena, that is a fatal flaw."
He turned to the pedestal. With a wave of his hand, an identical set of ingredients appeared. "Observe."
He began to knead. His movements were not a dance; they were a metronome. Each fold, each push, was identical to the last, a perfect, repeating algorithm. He added water from a measured vial. He used a digital scale she hadn't even seen to portion cornstarch. There was no love in it. No connection. It was a chemical reaction he was conducting with his hands.
Then he pulled.
It was inhuman. His hands became a blur of motion, but a controlled, mathematical blur. The dough expanded, folded, expanded again, doubling each time. Sixteen strands. Thirty two. Sixty four. It was like watching silk being spun by a machine.
In minutes, a gossamer cloud of thousands of perfectly identical, hair fine threads lay before him. He gathered them, dipped them briefly in a clear, hot broth, and placed them in a clean bowl. He drizzled a precisely measured amount of a clear, citrus infused oil over them, then a single, exact grind of pink Himalayan salt.
He pushed the bowl toward her. "Taste."
Na, her hands trembling with a mixture of awe and revulsion, took the chopsticks. The noodles were a masterpiece of engineering. They melted on the tongue, their texture an impossible, uniform lightness. The flavors were clean, precise and subtle.
And also they were utterly, completely dead.
They tasted of nothing. Not of joy, or effort, or even of wheat. They tasted of perfect, sterile nullity. It was the best and worst thing she had ever eaten.
She looked up at him, her eyes wide with a kind of horror. "They're perfect," she whispered.
"Yes."
"And they have no soul."
Something flickered in his eyes. "Soul is not a quantifiable metric. Consistency is. Survival is. Your 'soul' will not save you when a Snow Demon is judging your broth and your hands are shaking with fear. Your sentiment will not stop a rival from sabotaging your stove. It is a weakness you carry like an open wound."
The metaphor was so violent, so personal, it took her breath away. This wasn't just about cooking. This was about his world, a world he was telling her was made of knives.
"My grandmother's food saved people every day," Na shot back, her voice low and fierce. "It saved tired people, lonely people. That's not weakness. That's strength you can't even understand because you're too busy counting strands! You have the palate of a stone, Jin Long! You can measure everything and taste nothing!"
He moved then with a slow, deliberate intensity that was somehow more threatening. He leaned across the obsidian island, closing the distance between them. The sterile light gleamed on his sharp cheekbones, deepened the pools of his eyes. She could smell not spices, but a clean, cold scent like ozone after a lightning strike.
"Sentiment," he said, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous register that vibrated in her bones, "is a luxury. A luxury that gets people killed in this world. It clouds judgment. It creates attachments. Attachments are targets." He held her gaze, and for the first time, she saw something raw beneath the ice—not anger, but a bitter, ancient conviction. "Your first lesson, Li Na, is not how to pull a noodle. It is to unlearn that heart of yours. Before it gets you, and anyone foolish enough to care about you, destroyed."
He straightened up, the moment broken. The cold, impenetrable mask was back. "We are done for today. Your task before our next session is to practice the Dragon's Beard pull one hundred times. With a timer. With measurements. You will document each failure and its cause. Dismissed."
He turned his back on her, calling up the holographic screen again, a wall of data and light.
Na stood there, the taste of his perfect, dead noodles still on her tongue, the echo of his warning—gets people killed—ringing in her ears. She looked from his rigid back to her own messy, imperfect, heartfelt nest of noodles.
He was wrong. He had to be wrong.
But as she walked out of the cold, silent temple of his kitchen, the warmth of her own conviction felt very, very small against the vast, calculating chill he lived in. The lesson had begun. And he wasn't teaching her how to cook. He was teaching her how to survive in a war she never knew she had enlisted in.