037. BREAKTHROUGH

Breakthrough.

Light erupted from Ming Shi as his meridians blazed, incandescent. His chest swelled and his back arched so forcefully he thought he might burst or snap.

Blindly, he felt the brush of something awesome, something transcendent, something just beyond—

Then his sense of self imploded and exploded out again. He was his qi, his qi-sense, his Intent, and what made it all one and the same. He was the rapids and the rider, the channels and the current, the whole maze, every way through it—and its center.

And his center was never still.

His center was his Dao-heart that moved and never stopped moving. It was within him and bigger than him and consumed him entirely as he commanded it.

He was the observer and the observed, the food he ate and the food he served.

He was the chef and the making of the chef.

A cultivator.

A chef with cultivation, because there was no such thing as a chef without.

And likewise, no such thing as a cultivator who was not a chef—not in this world.

His new cultivation base felt different from the inherited might of Liu Baozi and the borrowed strength of Chang’s qi-boosts. It was the breath in his body, the grip of his fingers, the rotation of his spine. It was innate and visceral, drawn from the breath of Heaven and Earth.

Iridescent rainbow light strobed through his meridians—red through the pretzel twist, green through the banana bunch, blue through his cotton-candy toe.

He looked like the love child of a Halloween ornament and Christmas decoration. Terrifying but joyfully so.

One last bright flare and the light dimmed and faded away.

Ming Shi toppled over, skull bouncing twice on the floor. Limply, he rolled onto his back, panting with exhaustion.

And then.

The purge began.

Every pore on his body decided to throw his mortal coil a farewell party.

It started with a black sludge weeping from his skin. Liu Baozi had never been mortal, but Luke Liu had twenty-six years of accumulated impurities, imported via the Transmigrated Reincarnator Express. It had the consistency of used motor oil mixed with rotten fish paste, and it smelled like someone had stewed durian juice in a public toilet.

And the purge had only just begun.

Gray paste oozed from his tear ducts, the phantom touch of every time he’d swallowed tears—whether borne  of frustration or just while chopping onions. His ears leaked the green congealed essence of every self-satisfied food review he’d endured. His fingernails wept a sticky rust substance that was born of each time he’d scraped a pan with a metal utensil.

“Why, oh, why,” Ming Shi groaned through teeth that were shedding yellow film, “is this—Hurk!—”

He rolled sideways just in time to vomit something that looked like tar. It splattered on the floor and ate into the wood.

The cleaning fee. I won’t survive it.

His stomach cramped violently. He had a vision of flambéed internal organs playing musical chairs. His insides were reorganizing, upgrading from mortal digestion to a chef’s gustatory spiritual processing.

“Why—” he gasped, “why is this so”—another wave of cramps—“so gross?”

His skin began to peel, flaking off in a blizzard of dandruff. It was sooty—even as he molted he was still sweating dark grime. Each flake of skin held a mortal taint: the hurts from burning his impatient tongue with hot soup on the regular, the accumulated trauma of touching wet food in the sink, the disappointment of unripe tomatoes, the frustration of dull knives …

And existential exhaustions, too many to mention.

The ones made of too many small, tired things that compounded—every nervous second of putting out a new menu, of wondering if anyone would like his food, of fearing that he was wasting their time, that perhaps he was wasting his own.

Every anxious, intrusive thought that he’d made the wrong bets, that he was disturbed to think his food should dare, that his food was too strange, too much, too weird to delight and nourish, that there was no place for it on any table in the world …

They all flaked away—the mortal taint of them, that is. Their distillations had been refined into the makeup of his spiritual constitution. They were part of him, after all. Part of the maze.

Underneath, new skin emerged, pink and tender as a newborn’s but already toughening with spiritual reinforcement. Soon the skin was firm and smooth, the complexion of an immortal whose body was now just built different. It tingled as it settled.

Like peppermint oil, he thought. Or gentle electrocution.

And beneath his skin, still more changes remade him. His muscles became denser without growing larger. His bones reinforced themselves. His senses sharpened, synergized, and even synthesized. He tasted colors in the air: mostly black and brown at the moment, unfortunately.

Meanwhile, his qi, having completed its cycle, was pinballing as it pleased. It zipped and zoomed through him in a thousand cavorting flows.

Nonetheless, the chaos was different than before. Now the chaos had insight. Each split, each reconnection, each detour happened with a comprehension of the whole. His spiritual immune system was up and running.

And it had an intruder to send packing.

Ming Shi’s qi flexed.

We’re a cultivator now, it announced in the language of spiritual pressure. Hello. Attention, please. This pushback is your trigger, so kindly behave as your maker Intended.

Eighty-Eight Hells, still pressing inward, was finally met with systemic resistance. It halted, duly triggered.

Oops, it replied with an awkward squeeze, as it calibrated to Ming Shi’s threshold. My bad. Qi Condensation, huh? Oh. Early Qi. Oops again. Erm, I probably should have left a while back. I might have gone overboard …

So check yourself, Ming Shi’s qi snapped, before you wreck yourself. With spiritual assault charges.

Yes, chef. Eighty-Eight Hells gave his meridians one last sheepish squish and departed.

That last squish was just what Ming Shi needed. Between that and the resistance of his qi, the meridian dust that coated his spiritual channels tempered and fused, finally solidifying all the way through him.

One final surge of wrongness erupted from his core. This was the deepest impurity, the fundamental dross of dread mortality from Luke’s Earth, from a Realm utterly devoid of spiritual energy. It emerged as a pearl of absolute black that forced its way up his throat and out his mouth, splattering on the floor in a puddle of dark slime.

The pearl hissed, steamed, and dissolved into the floor, taking with it the last traces of Ming Shi’s mortal limitations.

All in, it took a good twenty minutes for the Fountain of Filth to stop running.

Then, as if Heaven itself couldn’t abide the mess, it all began to fade.

The black sludge turned translucent, then transparent, then simply wasn’t. The tar-vomit that had been eating through the floorboards reversed its damage as it evaporated, wood un-corroding and reforming, as if time ran backwards through it. The scabs of filth, the shed skin, the unmentionable substances—all of it grew lighter and lighter, more and more ghostly, until even the smell was gone.

It was all being erased from reality. The Dao had decided that some aberrations were too gross to exist and filed them under “never happened.”

Within minutes Ming Shi lay spread-eagle on a perfectly clean floor in a perfectly clean room, sunlight falling warm across his face through the window. The air smelled fresher than ever, flavored with the faint sweetness of the previous tenant’s caramel.

He felt incredible. Lighter, cleaner, and fundamentally more.

I feel more. I am more.

There was a surreality to it—or rather, a hyper-reality, as if he’d finally shaken off the dust of his previous incarnation to make real contact with this world.

Each breath drew in air that felt so thick, so full, so crisp, and enriched with flows of qi that his tongue could now distinguish as a cascade of flavors. Colors, sounds, scents—all had gained new depth, as if someone had wiped clean a window he hadn’t known was dirty, handed him a tissue to blow his nose, and rinsed out his ears to boot.

Light had texture now. When he held his hand up, the sunbeam brushed his palm with a soundless swish, like fine, invisible silk. It was the motion of yang qi. The swish melted into a caramel-scented qi flow from the cooking alcove. The energy of browning butter and molten sugar had been cultivated and spilled so often it would take weeks to dissipate.

In the shadows, there was cool yin qi that tasted like licorice. It sank down, down into the floor, mingling with the flavor of pine—the Wood-qi the boards held. Faintly, Ming Shi could taste it blending with the medicinal soup Madam Zhang was stirring.

It was a sweet soup this time, cleansing, good for the lungs: Snowbound pear and osmanthus. She was stirring with a technique that made the pear’s qi expand. In that distant motion Ming Shi could feel the hint of a fresh winter gale, even now, in the end days of summer.

He heard the weight of her footsteps—among others—as she moved, taking it off the stove. She favored her left side, he noted. The flame beneath the pot leapt up, and he sensed a Fire-qi spark, bold and cheerful, catching a ride on a billow of steam. It drifted out onto the street, where it tangled with a thousand more streams of qi, all of them born of the city and forming it in turn.

The Fire-qi spark flew up, launched by the sizzle of oil from someone frying donuts. A breeze blew it in through his bedroom window. It landed in Ming Shi’s mouth as he greedily sucked in air.

Almond paste, he smiled. The donuts have almond-paste filling. How wonderful is that?

 He thought he’d been sensing qi before, but now he knew he’d only been observing its impact on the material world while Liu Baozi’s memories filled in the blanks, like an optical illusion.

Ah. That’s what it is.

This was why he felt like he’d finally made contact with this world. It was because this was how he’d experienced it, as Liu Baozi.

Well, kind of.

Really, this was a mere fraction of what Liu Baozi had felt at Foundation Establishment. But it was enough for Ming Shi to feel as if he had emerged from a dream and reentered the waking world.

Ming Shi had felt a slight dissociation the past few days and written it off as congee jitters. Now he knew it was actually a kind of spiritual cognitive dissonance.

Put it this way: his memories of this world tasted of infinite flavors, but he’d woken up in a body that could taste only salt and sugar. It was so alien that his mind had hallucinated tastes based on what cues it could spot. If he ate an apple, he remembered the taste of one and imagined it to be so. But in truth, all he’d been tasting was sugar—none of the fruit’s unique perfumes, none of its malic acids, nothing of the flavor profile that made an apple taste like an apple.

Thus, unable to accept that their vessel had fallen to Mortal Cook, his qi-sense and consciousness had conspired to operate via translation and heuristics, to try to present him with the world as they remembered it to be true.

Now, with his qi-sense liberated from mortal limitations, Ming Shi was present at last. He could actually taste flavors again, so to speak. He knew they were not as bold or manifold as the flavors he’d tasted as Liu Baozi—that the world had spiritual heights he was aware of but could not access. But at least his senses had been restored.

At least he was now, truly, in the Thousand Flavor Realm.

He was no longer blind and could see Mount Tai, even if he could not yet climb it.

He was also, he realized, completely naked. His clothes had dissolved in the disgusting deluge and vanished alongside the whole mess.

Because of course the Dao saw fit to preserve the floors, but not his dignity.

“Well,” he said to the universe at large, “at least no one can see—”

The door burst open.