038. PERVERT ALERT

“CEASE YOUR PERVERSIONS!”

Madam Zhang’s bellow was deafening. She stood in the doorway, furious, holding a jade tablet that flashed rapidly with crimson light.

Ming Shi, who was spread-eagle on the floor, basking butt-naked in sunshine and enlightenment, discovered that Qi Condensation did not grant immunity to mortification.

“AHHH—” He leapt to his feet and scrambled to cover himself with both hands, assuming the universal hunched-over, knock-kneed, genital-shielding position adopted by those discovered in compromising positions. “MADAM ZHANG SORRY—I’M SORRY—WAIT WHY AM I APOLOGIZING?”

What about knocking?! And what’s wrong with being naked, huh?

Indignant, Ming Shi hollered, “IF I WANT TO BE NAKED IN MY OWN ROOM I FEEL LIKE THAT’S ALLOWED!”

He and Madam Zhang glared at each other, both convinced of their own moral rectitude.

Had the outcome of this standoff been determined by garment weight, Madam Zhang would have come out on top.

She was decked out in battle-grade cookwear: a heavy-duty apron that sparkled with defensive arrays, thick chain-mail gloves, and a fierce, fighting scowl.

“I don’t care if you’re naked, boy!” she snapped. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen. Three sons and sixty years of renting to chefs—you think you’re special?”

She brandished the jade tablet. “You better stop whatever dark gastromancy you’re cooking with THIS INSTANT!”

The jade tablet strobed even more violently. Arrays crawled across its back like agitated ants, while it projected messages of hysterical calligraphy into the air.

DAO-PERVERT ALERT! DAO-PERVERT ALERT! SPIRITUAL CONTAMINATION DETECTED!

SUBSTANCE CLASSIFICATION: PERVERSELY INCOMPATIBLE WITH EXISTENCE

PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS: SOME PERVERT IS COOKING SOMETHING SO DISGUSTING THE DAO IS OFFENDED

RECOMMENDATION: EVACUATE. BURN EVERYTHING. SALT THE EARTH. IRREVERSIBLE PROPERTY DAMAGE! FATAL PERVERSION!

“But there’s no property damage?” Ming Shi protested, still trying to maintain modesty through strategic hand placement. He shuffled sideways, crablike, intending to grab the blanket off his bed for a makeshift wrap.

“No sudden movements!” said Madam Zhang. “In fact, no moving until I’ve cleared you!”

A shimmer of qi and a spirit-cleaver appeared in her hand. Ming Shi froze.

Fine. I’ll stay naked. Just don’t mince my new meridians!

Madam Zhang’s face scrunched as she scrutinized the distinctly undamaged room. The floor that should have been melting. The walls that should have been weeping mysterious fluids. The ceiling that, according to her tablet, should have developed consciousness just to scream.

She took a step into the room. Her foot came down with great caution, as if expecting the floorboards to reveal themselves as braised demon intestines. The jade tablet she held stopped flashing and lit up with a sustained red glow.

Madam Zhang peered at the tablet, eyes narrowed. “The safety formation report says something in here was so spiritually putrid that the emergency containment array activated to prevent it from eating through to the room below.”

“What?” said Ming Shi nervously. “No! How can that be?”

She ignored him and sniffed the air. “No sulfur. No rotting qi signatures. No screaming from the void between realms.” She glared at Ming Shi. “You better not be hiding some dark gastromancy dishes. I don’t care about scholastic debates—about demonic cultivation being relative on a sliding scale and nuanced by Intent and whatnot. My building, my rules. No cooking with resentful spirits, no fermentation of karmic debt, and absolutely no sous vide of suffering.”

She raised her spirit-cleaver and pointed it at him. “Come clean. What are you cooking?”

“I just broke through!” Ming Shi blurted. “That’s all! Mortal Cook to Qi Condensation! The qi fluctuations must have confused the formations! You know how breakthroughs are—so chaotic, Heaven being defied and all that, energies all over the place. It must have led to a misreading of my purged mortal impurities. Normal breakthrough process! Nothing unusual at all!”

As he babbled, he realized the impurities he purged from Luke Liu’s mortal life must have been so vile they’d literally set off alarms. It was actually not unreasonable for Madam Zhang to interpret the readings as evidence of dark gastromancy.

Madam Zhang snorted, unconvinced. “Several Mortal Cooks have broken through in this room. None of them set off the building formations.”

“But look how undamaged my room is!” Ming Shi spread his arms, sweeping them in a wide arc at his surroundings to make his point.

A cool breeze to his nether regions reminded him that his hands had been serving a particular purpose in their previous position.

He was about to return his hands to protecting his modesty when he changed his mind.

Hang on. Why should I feel body shame? It’s my room! She barged in! I have nothing to hide! Nothing demonic, I mean.

He planted his hands on his hips, stood tall, and looked Madam Zhang in the eye. “My room’s totally undamaged. It’s definitely a formation error.”

“Or a concealment-recipe,” she shot back.

Once more, they stared at each other, one decked in protective cookwear, the other bare naked.

Madam Zhang eyed Ming Shi.

Ming Shi eyed her cleaver.

They were at an impasse.

Fortunately for Ming Shi, it was at this moment that an expert on spiritual hygiene waddled into the room.

Poff-poff, it went. Poff-poff, as it came through the doorway.

It was a happy, oversized, overstuffed drawstring pouch, as plump and full as a fluffed pillow.

About one foot tall, it was made of soft muslin cloth, cinched at the top with a thick cotton drawstring tied into a bow. Leafy herbs sprouted from the gathered-shut fabric like a fragrant, bouffant hairdo. A little below its verdant coif, a smiley face was woven into the fabric: two lively dot eyes and a curved, upturned mouth.

Poff-poff, it continued. Poff-poff.

The sound came from every tiny step it took with its stubby little legs, which were more like round cloth nubs at its base. They were so short its whole body waddled side-to-side as it moved.

Ming Shi recognized what it was right away.

A soup-based Kitchen Spirit!

Herb-stuffed drawstring pouches, like this Kitchen Spirit’s chosen form, were commonly used when making medicinal soups. Chefs would boil their herbs in a cloth pouch like a giant teabag.  It was a lot more efficient than straining or fishing out your roots and shoots individually.

The spirit released a wave of Intent that smelled like Sunberry zest and mint as it waddled directly to Ming Shi and latched onto his left leg with its whole body.

“… Is it Cleansing-Intent?” Ming Shi wondered out loud. It felt like a warm, cloth-covered water balloon was trying to melt into his leg.

“Mmmmmm!” the Kitchen Spirit hummed contentedly, nuzzling against his shin. “Nuan! Nuan!”

“Quite so. And it’s a she. She’ll have you know she’s a lady.” Madam Zhang wagged a finger at the Kitchen Spirit. “A’Nuan popped out of a pot of sweet persimmon and peachgum soup about twenty years ago. The Kitchen Spirit Tamer who checked her Intent explained it was the three-thousandth medicinal soup I’d made in this kitchen. Most of them were detoxifying recipes, and so A’Nuan was born from the accumulated Cleansing-Intent.”

A’Nuan made a sound like a soup’s simmer, her body vibrating like a purring cat’s. To her, Ming Shi must have smelled like fresh laundry, new soap, or that feeling of hugging an armful of warm clean sheets just out of the tumble dryer.

“She always shows up for fresh breakthroughs,” Madam Zhang explained. “Loves that just-purged spiritual cleanliness.”

“Nuan! Nuan!” A’Nuan made an affirmative squeak and hugged Ming Shi’s leg harder, her leafy herb-sprig hair bobbing enthusiastically.

“On the other hand, she cannot abide demonic energies. So it looks like you’re clean after all. She’ll be stuck to you for hours, probably.” Madam Zhang’s stance relaxed. Her spirit-cleaver glimmered and vanished, although she kept hold of her jade tablet. “Still, I’ve never seen the formation react like this to normal breakthrough impurities.” Madam Zhang tapped the tablet frowning.

Normal impurities. Normal. That’s the key word here.

Ming Shi had figured out the problem.

Normal breakthrough impurities were still part of this world’s ecosystem. Even the filthiest mortal sludge from someone born in the Low Vegetable Provinces was local trash—it belonged here and would eventually decompose and disperse back into the spiritual atmosphere. Like vegetable peelings on a compost heap.

But his mortal impurities from Earth must have been so incompatible with this world that their open presence could not be tolerated. It was barely permitted when these alien impurities were bottled up inside him, but once they were released and threatening to corrode this world, they had to go.

The Dao hadn’t erased them as a nice favor. It had done so because it was truly a Dao-pervert-alert situation.

“Maybe the formations just aren’t calibrated for, uh, really enthusiastic breakthroughs?” he suggested.

Madam Zhang swiped at the jade tablet, which had grudgingly downgraded its warnings from “APOCALYPSE, HOW?!” to “DEEPLY SUSPICIOUS.” Then she peered at Ming Shi once more.

Unbothered, A’Nuan was trying to half-float, half-climb up his leg to get closer to his dantian. She wanted more of that delightful fresh-breakthrough flavor. The floating was not very effective. It kept turning into climbing. Every few inches, she’d stop to latch on like a greedy koala bear. “Fine,” said the landlady at last. “But I’ll be calling a formations chef for maintenance. And if I find out you’ve been doing anything involving fermented nightmares or flash-fried fate threads—”

“I would never!” Ming Shi said, still naked, still standing tall, still being cuddled by an anthropomorphic soup sachet. “I don’t even know what those are!”

“Good. Keep it that way.” She cleared her throat. “A’Nuan, go get him the manual. Go on. You can stay with him later, while he studies.”

A’Nuan released his leg with obvious reluctance and waddled toward the door, looking back every few steps to make sure Ming Shi hadn’t suddenly become less delightfully clean-smelling as she departed.

“Put some clothes on, young man,” said Madam Zhang. “Nobody wants to see your enlightenment.”

“My enlightenment is selective about its audience, anyway,” said Ming Shi with dignity.

He dressed himself in his only other set of spare robes, which Boss Wu had thrown in along with his other cooking equipment. Ming Shi had thought that two changes of clothes would be enough; after all, both of them were embedded with stain-repellent and self-cleaning arrays that just needed recharging once a month.

He made a note to return for some backup garments.

Just in case I run into another existential mess that transcends stain repellant.

Soon A’Nuan waddled back through the doorway with a slim tome floating on top of her head as she bobbed up and down with each poff-poff step. Her stubby cloth-nub arms were raised up as if to steady it, but they were adorably useless, being far too short to reach.

She poff-poffed to Ming Shi and the book flew up to his chest height before he could bend down to retrieve it.

“Thank you,” he said, reaching out to take it.

The book was heavier than it looked. Various stains and scorch marks adorned the front and back covers, and the corners were crusted with sugar crystals that had fused on.

“Every aspiring chef who moves in gets access to this book,” said Madam Zhang. “Call it a welcome gift, or maybe a guide to not wrecking my building.”

Ming Shi ran his fingers over the cover. He could sense traces of other chefs’ qi and Intents lingering in the margins—excitement, frustration, and triumph flavoring the tome like the seasoning on a well-used wok.

Even the title had been seasoned:

FUNDAMENTALS OF CULINARY CULTIVATION

A Practical Guide for the Aspiring Chef

[Now with 50 Percent More Sarcastic Margin Notes!]

The sub-subtitle was just one of the many student contributions that decorated the cover along with doodles of vegetables breathing fire, stick figures fending off lightning bolts with woks, and various Kitchen Spirits.

Ming Shi laughed. “This book has been through a lot, huh?”

“It’s tradition,” Madam Zhang chuckled. “Every tenant who started their chef’s journey here has added their notes. They move on, up to bigger Kitchens and brighter futures, but they leave their wisdom and sass behind.” She snorted. “Especially their sass.”

A loose sheet slipped out, covered in bold handwriting. The characters on it were written with such vigor they almost seemed to leap off the page. There was also a notable refusal to entertain conventional approaches to writing said characters, and a disdain for any punctuation besides exclamation marks:

[Did you just braek through! Good jobb Fellow Doaist! I broak through in this room just liek you! Now I run a candy shopp in the Middle District! Dreams come true! Fellow Daoist! You just haev to believe!

- Sweet Lin!
(Former Resident, Current Honey Phoenixx Maiden, Candy Cultivaetor!)]

Once more, Ming Shi found himself laughing out loud.

“Leave the book on my office desk downstairs before you head to market tomorrow.” Madam Zhang said, heading for the door. “You can sign it out whenever you want, but it should always stay in the building so other tenants can have access. Now get to reading. A’Nuan’s Cleansing-Intent has a positive effect on mental clarity. Make good use of her presence and get some studying in.”

“Nuan! Nuan!” agreed A’Nuan. She had scaled his robes and was plastered against his side making happy simmering, bubbling sounds.

“All right, all right,” Ming Shi laughed. There was a low chair by his window, and he settled into it, making himself comfortable. “If we must.”

A’Nuan nestled into his lap, her warm body like a rumbling hot water bottle against his stomach. She released a contented sigh that smelled of cinnamon and red dates.

“Comfy?” asked Ming Shi, patting her gently.

“Nuan!” she confirmed, patting him back with one stubby arm.

“Good,” Ming Shi said, opening to the first page while his new study buddy purred. “Let’s see what wisdom the generations have to share.”