Cautiously, she sat down opposite the other woman. It was pointless to try avoiding a conversation - if Wu Lanhua went out of her way to find her, she wasn’t about to lose interest. Idly, she noted that this was the most private table in the entire room - sat in a corner, quite far away from the others, and even obscured somewhat by a column that reinforced the ceiling.
“How may this humble cultivator be of assistance to honorable merchant Wu?” She asked, lowering her voice so as to not be overheard, while the other woman poured both of them some tea. There were, of course, already two cups at the table.
“Dear Fakuang has told me that you are an immortal chef,” she responded, “I happen to have a party planned for this evening with my fellow colleagues in business. I have been wondering if we could taste some of your cooking?”
“At what price?”
“How could I put a price on culinary art? But perhaps three gold yuan could be considered a bonus.”
Three gold yuan were equal to thirty silver - in other words, a month’s salary for a normal chef. What was her angle in offering this particular price? To see if she could be swayed by money, or if she was motivated by something else? Or was this simply a standard price for private immortal chefs? She didn’t know enough to even begin guessing.
“You believe this to be an appropriate price for my immortal cooking?” Qian Shanyi raised her eyebrow, testing Wu Lanhua.
“I didn’t mean to cause offense,” she waved her off, “if I have, may you propose your own price?”
Was she really just trying to get her to work for her?
“Hm. How did you find me?” Qian Shanyi hummed, changing the topic, “I never told anyone where I live and work.”
“Couldn’t I have simply happened by your restaurant?” She even fluttered her eyelashes, just like she did back at the port. That had to have been intentional.
“No.”
“Fine,” Wu Lanhua sighed, “I told some of my men to keep an eye out for you - without telling them who you are, of course - and one of them happened to have followed you to the docks from a public bathhouse, where he lost sight of you.”
“Your man is quite lucky I was in a good mood. I considered breaking his legs for the insolence.”
“I very much wish you had,” Wu Lanhua waved her off, “my order was to simply observe, not harass you by playing some sort of spy. He did it of his own initiative, and it is only appropriate that he be punished for his stupidity. But from there, it was quite easy to find you - you draw more looks than you might think, and people have already noticed old Chen here had a beautiful new cook. I hope I didn’t cause offense? I only hoped to meet you to properly apologize for pulling my dear Fakuang away from helping you.”
So she was right. This woman had planned everything out. This only left a question of how she should react.
Qian Shanyi didn’t much care for her own face, so being tailed in the abstract did not disturb her. She only cared what the other woman might have intended to do with the information - but for now, she couldn’t make a solid guess.
For a moment, she considered playing up her reaction to get some sort of concession out of her, but this entire situation gave her pause. What else did she orchestrate? Was this fight between two men also her doing, meant to see how she would react - wherever she would intervene, and how would she behave around the common people? Qian Shanyi could name a dozen ways to make that happen. Regardless, Wu Lanhua would have already seen that she did not take offense easily, so it wouldn’t be a plausible lie to sell.
Furthermore, what could she demand? Wu Lanhua had already thrown her subordinate in front of the flying sword, and if pushed, could simply claim this offer of employment was the intended compensation. She couldn’t even rightly say it was a bad one, if so.
“But about my offer of employment?” Wu Lanhua brought her back to the table, seeing her sinking deeper into her thoughts.
“I will have to consider it,” Qian Shanyi replied noncommittally, shaking her head. She still didn’t know what the other woman’s angle was, and until she did, agreeing to anything specific felt dangerous. “It is now noon - by when will you need my answer?”
“I prefer to plan my evenings well in advance. Can I truly not make you decide right away? Would a larger monetary bonus sway you?”
“What is money in the face of immortality?”
Wu Lanhua leaned forwards excitedly.
“In that case, why are you wearing my stolen dress?”
Qian Shanyi clamped down on a spot of panic she felt, keeping her face and posture carefully even, and then kicked herself a fraction of a moment later - being neutral when accused of theft was the wrong mask to show entirely. She did her best to spin her momentary hesitation into a haughty, annoyed question - as if she was shocked someone dared to make the accusation at all. With anyone else, she would have been sure the transition was perfect and impossible to notice, but this woman was dangerous.
“What?”
“I didn’t recognize it back then - I have quite a few, you understand,” the merchant continued in a mild tone, “but it is unmistakably mine, even if you have had it tailored. Do you sew as well as cook?”
Qian Shanyi narrowed her eyes, letting the other woman talk.
“Oh, I don’t mean to threaten you,” Wu Lanhua chuckled softly, “It would be insanity to quarrel with a cultivator over a mere piece of clothing. Consider it my gift to you - but it is interesting, no? Even the poorest loose cultivators have enough money to buy their own clothes. Yet you choose to wear a stolen dress? My man told me you wore it the other day too - one begins to wonder if you have stolen it simply because you didn’t have any other clothes to wear. What would bring a cultivator so low?”
She didn’t mean to threaten her yet was a better way to say it. That she could always tell her fiance, a spirit hunter, about the theft was simply left unstated.
“There are many things that interest me about you,” Wu Lanhua continued, “How you had my fiance dancing to your tunes? From one woman to another, I must extend my admiration for your craft.”
She reached into a pocket of her clothes, taking out a card of hard paper with street directions written on it, and handed it to Qian Shanyi.
“You can find me at my estate - I believe that the preparations for the dinner would begin in about four hours. I hope to see you there, honorable immortal Lan - all I am asking for is to hear your story. I am very much looking forward to it,” Wu Lanhua purred like a satisfied cat that was done playing with a particularly fat mouse, got up, and left the restaurant, leaving her payment on the table.
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The first thing Qian Shanyi did when she was sure the merchant woman was gone was tell old Chen she was taking the rest of the day off. The restaurant would struggle without her - the number of customers had markedly increased since she came here, and Zhang Sheng couldn’t manage the evening workload alone - but she needed all the time she could spare.
The second thing she did was rush over to the imperial offices and ask if her seal was ready. As she had already expected, some “unexpected delay” - no doubt wearing an emerald dress - had happened, and the office said it would only be ready by tomorrow morning. She cursed Wu Lanhua in her heart, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.
That only left the question of wherever she should take the offer on the table or flee the town immediately.
She couldn’t deny that she was tempted. The payment alone would resolve a lot of her monetary troubles on the spot, and free her hands in her search for Wang Yonghao. Furthermore, she was sure that the merchant had a lot of other resources she could try to borrow - connections, allies, and so on.
On the other hand, rejecting the offer would force her to flee before Wu Lanhua could punish her - abandoning any hopes of getting her new imperial seal. Setting up the conditions that allowed her to easily get one made so quickly in another town would be extremely difficult - she might be forced to operate without one for weeks, if not many months.
But if she accepted it, she would be placing herself into a situation prepared by a rich, well-connected, manipulative woman with unclear intentions, who must have at least suspected Qian Shanyi was lying about her name, and knew she was a thief. If Wu Lanhua so chose, she could have Liu Fakuang on her tail in moments.
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To get more information, she swept through half a dozen taverns throughout town seeking rumors, talked to dock workers while asking for directions, and even pretended to look for a job with one of Wu Lanhua’s competitors.
She didn’t find all that much. Wu Lanhua was the only daughter to a pair of minor merchants, born somewhere downriver. She built her fortune on the back of an exclusive contract to deliver grain and vegetables to one of the many frontier towns, one very much like Xiaohongshan. Despite what one might have expected, she didn’t raise the prices of food into the sky, and instead kept them quite reasonable. It wasn’t an altruistic move by any means - she simply had the foresight to realize bleeding her first cow would not end well for her. Cheap food meant that more people moved towards the frontier, increasing the demand for her services, and the number of her contracts with local governments expanded as well.
At this point, her company operated just under half of the ships moving goods up and down the river.
Qian Shanyi had neither the time nor the resources needed to get access to more private information about Wu Lanhua, but she could read between the lines. She was married once, though her husband died a good five years back. In fact, she was well over forty, but looked almost two decades younger - a fairly clear sign she was using expensive alchemical treatments. She would have dismissed it as vanity if she hadn’t seen Wu Lanhua wearing sailor clothes like a second skin.
Her romance with Liu Fakuang was the talk of the town a while back - apparently, shortly after he was assigned to this area, he needed to travel to neighboring settlements to coordinate with the imperial administration there, and she offered him a room on her ship that just happened to be heading in the same direction. Their cruise was attacked by demonic cultivators seeking to kidnap Wu Lanhua for ransom, and Liu Fakuang fought them off, sparking the first signs of love. It was truly just like a story from a theater play, but given how often the merchant traversed the river, Qian Shanyi couldn’t help but wonder what made demonic cultivators pick the one time her ship happened to be guarded by a spirit hunter to stage their attack.
Apparently, their wedding was set to happen two months from now - many people were involved in planning it, as it was going to be a very public affair.
In the end, she decided to take the offer. There was still a chance it was a trap, but on the whole, she didn’t think it was very likely - if Wu Lanhua wanted Qian Shanyi to come to harm, she could have simply tipped off her fiance, and left it at that. In fact, she was starting to suspect that her coming to the ramen shop in person was probably meant as a sign of respect to a fellow conwoman. Whatever plans she had in place, Shanyi would take the place of a tool, not of a sacrificial pawn.
Probably. It was a dangerous assumption to make, but such was the nature of dealing with people.
She gathered all her things, picked up her backpack of swords from its hiding place on a non-descript roof, and headed over to Wu Lanhua’s mansion. Just because she was accepting the offer didn’t mean she trusted the woman: if she had to run away halfway through the festivities, she wanted to have all of her things already on her.
As she walked, she felt herself growing excited. The days of agonizing waiting, wondering wherever she had unknowingly exposed herself, and trying to guess at threats she could neither see nor anticipate weighed heavily on her, but this? This was her element, a gamble of wills trying to take advantage of each other, and like a fish thrown back into water she felt her soul unfurl.
Now she simply needed to play well, and battle with the unexpected. She couldn’t help but think back on when she fell down from the sky, dragged down by the weight of a monster: back then, there was no time to worry, only to sink into the flow and move.
The house from which she stole her dress actually turned out to be merely the back of a much larger estate, meant for servants, kitchens, and the laundry. The front gates were a lot more opulent, leading out into expansive gardens. A young servant was already expecting her at the gates, and led her towards the main house.
She hummed a wistful tune as they walked, scanning the estate for anything notable. The gardens were quite impressive, at the very least by the standards of Xiaohongshan - she even saw an occasional talisman stapled to a post in the middle of a flower bed, controlling moisture or temperature for the plants that could not grow easily in the cool mountain air. There were a couple small pagodas around - nothing more than a roof and some benches, offering shade from the sun.
When they were almost at the main house she saw something that made her pause in her step. It was a small shrine, barely large enough to fit a single person, and clearly kept in good repair - the ground around it was clean of any leaves, and the wood was recently painted. There was a single large candle with small offerings around it, and above the entrance, a symbol that resembled a person, with the moon to their left and a sun to their right.
A karmist shrine, to the heavenly will.
She wasn’t sure how to take it. It was placed close to the house, in a spot of some provenance - but at the same time, Wu Lanhua really did not seem like the type. Perhaps it was used by a relative? With the time pressure she was under, she did not spend much time asking about the merchant’s other family, but she did know her aging father lived with her.
She asked the servant about it, but he did not know much, only having been hired a few months ago. She still didn’t decide how she should deal with this new revelation by the time she was ushered into the kitchens.
The kitchens were truly splendid: wide and gleaming, with every surface polished to a shine. She was greeted by the head chef: an elderly man with a strict gaze and calloused hands, who seemed to take her being there at all as an affront to his skills. She kept her manner polite and noncommittal: she didn’t know what Wu Lanhua’s plans for her were, or what she told her servants. The chef might have falsely believed she was there to replace him, but telling him as much would not strengthen her position in any way. It was equally plausible that this was meant as a test of her ability to work with others as it was that she was simply being used to put this man in his place: if need be, there would be time to mend relations later.
Once they started to cook he only grew even more disappointed by her skills, or lack thereof, and even started getting a bit snippy. She mostly ignored him: she wasn’t hired for her skill as a chef, but because of blatant nepotism, and she saw no need to worry that she wasn’t fulfilling a non-existent expectation. If he couldn’t get over himself and work with a less competent cook, then that was on him.
Instead, she studied the other workers: surprisingly, most of them didn’t even know she was a cultivator. That likely meant Wu Lanhua didn’t simply intend to hire her on as an immortal chef - so what brought her here?
She did, of course, observe as much of what the chef and his underlings did as she could, stealing minor tricks and techniques along the way. That was only common sense.
Cooking for a party of merchants was a completely different experience from cooking for herself and Wang Yonghao, or from the ramen shop. The main dish was a piece of river fish cut into the shape of a flower, gently seared, and placed into a careful arrangement of vegetables and rice, topped with a light delicate sauce. The cooking was less about the taste, or speed and consistency, and more about perfecting every individual element to turn every dish into a piece of art. Despite his attitude, the other chef was a real master of the craft, and she greedily sank her teeth into meeting this new challenge. It took her some time to switch her thinking away from worrying over the throughput of dishes: with only a dozen guests to serve, they all could take their time.
Once it was time to present the dishes, Wu Lanhua sent a message that Qian Shanyi was to bring them to the guests, presenting them as if they were her own. This made the older chef go red in the face, which meant Wu Lanhua once again didn’t warn him in advance, even though she surely planned to do this from the start. Was it another test? To see if she would let the more experienced man take the spotlight? Or to see if she could find a way to placate him later, to settle things so that they could work together? Or perhaps it was a nod of respect to her, meant to make her more amenable to what she would be asked for later.
She lacked too much information, and there was no time to deliberate things. She decided to err on the side of taking her chances with the presentation: if nothing else, she could better judge Wu Lanhua’s mood in person.
If Wu Lanhua wanted to flaunt having an immortal chef on staff, then she could easily oblige her.
One of the maids even brought her a set of cultivator robes: of much lower quality than the ones she wore in Wang Yonghao’s world fragment, but appropriate for any normal loose cultivator. The robes were a bit tight in her shoulders, but otherwise fit her figure - she wondered where Wu Lanhua got them, as it couldn’t have been from her fiance, who was a much larger man. She quickly stripped out of her skirts and donned the robes, ignoring the looks from the other kitchen workers and cries of protest from the head chef, and joined two other waiters in bringing the dishes into the dining hall.
The guests were sitting around a long table, with Wu Lanhua at the head and Liu Fakuang at her side. He was wearing the same set of spirit hunter robes he always wore, while the merchant woman wore yet another green dress - this one bright and sewn with golden thread, flowing in many layers, making her look like an exotic, yet deadly flower.
Qian Shanyi observed those present carefully, trying to puzzle out the significance of the karmist shrine. Besides the head couple, there were nine other people there, though she only had to service the pair closest to the head of the table. There were two civil servants from the port authority, six other merchants, and even the town’s governor. None of Wu Lanhua’s relatives ever appeared, and she saw no overt signs of karmism - in symbols or speech.
She told the guests about the dishes - partly from what the other head chef mentioned during the cooking, and partly by blatantly making up stories based on niche cultivation techniques - and they seemed suitably impressed. She thought Liu Fakuang was the only one there who suspected she was spinning tall tales, but he didn’t call her on it. A shame - she had prepared a good way to turn it into a joke.
Once the dinner was over, she got some time to relax, only marred by the head chef coming over and trying to challenge her to some sort of cooking duel to determine which one of them was more deserving of the job. When she immediately conceded defeat, not even bothering to open her eyes from her short meditation, he seemed to become even more incensed. Some people just couldn’t accept simply being given face.
She heard Wu Lanhua coming from a while away, but didn’t bother warning the head chef. He was ranting at her about respect, and she was responding lazily here and there, but largely staying quiet. Ordinarily, she would have applauded his bravery at being willing to openly fight with a cultivator, but the reason for his fight felt so pointless that his admirable commitment to his beliefs and defending his place in the world just felt vaguely annoying.
Perhaps she really was being disrespectful. She realized that with everything she was trying to keep in mind, she managed to forget his name, which was a rare misstep for her.
Asking him about his name did not help him relax in the slightest.
Wu Lanhua saved her from needing to clean blood off the walls - the chef’s face was getting so red she could swear his spiritual root dantian was on the verge of explosion, despite his total lack of cultivation - by walking into the room and giving her a convenient excuse to leave.
“So,” she said, picking up her backpack and approaching the merchant with a grin, schemes starting to spin up within her mind, “I think it’s time we had that talk.”