036. I JUST CALLED TO SAY I'M COOKING (DON'T STOP ME NOW)

Good news!

His qi found its paths!

A thousand meandering channels that looped and branched and reconnected!

… A thousand.

Meandering.

Channels.

That looped.

And branched.

And reconnected.

What is this shit?!

Once more, Ming Shi was faced with the profound existential question known as “Do I laugh or do I cry?”

Not that he had the capacity for either right now. He’d plunged his consciousness into his qi and been bowled over instantly, thrown in a loop with such violence that he felt motion-sick.

Earlier, when he sank into his qi, it was like lying back in a comfortable, albeit increasingly heated, hot spring.

Now he was being buffeted through a network of crazy whitewater rapids. His qi-sense was tossed and tumbled relentlessly as his spiritual energy rushed through dozens of channels, multiplying at every intersection, taking whatever directions it pleased, doubling back on itself because it could.

He caught glimpses of the scenery and was dumbstruck.

A channel racing down his arm—

Ah, nope, twelve channels, braided together, with lightning forking out?!

A node in his shoulder—

With twenty-seven connecting channels?!

A quintuple-helix spiral through his torso with pretzel-knot extensions—

Ankle? How did that take me to my ankle? Wait, is this my liver now?!

How was anyone supposed to navigate a roundabout with fifty exits? He couldn’t even chart a course around his big toe, which was especially ridiculous: it was packed with meridians so fine it looked like it had been stuffed with a sugar-spun cloud of glowing cotton candy.

How could he complete a cycle when his qi wanted to be everywhere at once, and everywhere was connected by a maze of interlocked mazes?

This was the crux of his final challenge to break through to Qi Condensation.

Ming Shi’s cosmic cooking had made meridians happen.

But he still had to do the thing where he guided his qi in one conscious cycle through those new meridians to achieve breakthrough.

And he really, really needed to break through.

Because as long as he was a Mortal Cook, he had no natural qi-defenses. And as long as he had no natural-qi defenses, there was nothing to trigger Eighty-Eight Hells to retreat as designed.

You see, a cultivator’s natural qi-defenses and their first breakthrough both relied on one key factor.

They both depended on that one conscious qi-cycle that was the prerequisite to start cultivation.

Taking your qi through one conscious cycle didn’t just declare your Intent to Heaven and give mortality the boot. It was also the crucial step that “enlightened” your own qi to comprehend the entirety of its course through your body.

From that point on, with this new bird’s-eye awareness, it would reflexively defend against any threats to the all-around sanctity of its movement.

This one conscious cycle was what woke up your spiritual immune system.

But to direct your qi, you yourself had to comprehend the totality of your spiritual anatomy as the greater sum of its parts. You had to gain full insight into every channel, every connection, every route and its permutations, and then show your qi the way through in one unbroken, coordinated flow.

As his qi-sense continued to be flung around on fast and furious currents, Ming Shi realized something else.

My meridian walls ... what's that shining fuzz around them ... ? Oh!

The walls of his new meridians were formed—or not formed—by the dust of his old meridians. They had been drawn to the new qi flows, coating them in layers of shimmering dust. In some spots, where the pressure between Eighty-Eight Hells and his own qi had hit a moment of just-right opposition, the dust had fused solid, resulting in a strong, reinforced meridian segment.

This made sense. After all, Eighty-Eight Hells was the vicious cousin of Madam Wan’s Daily Meridian Booster, which toned and strengthened your meridians through precisely this kind of resistance training. It stimulated the cultivator’s natural qi-defenses to push against the spirit-pepper’s pressure, tempering the meridian walls in between.

But the here-there-everywhereness of his qi flow was creating weak spots where the meridian dust hadn’t fully fused.

Case in point: an intersection where qi was frolicking away in seventeen different directions, creating a momentary vacuum.

Eighty-Eight Hells pounced. Ming Shi watched the meridian dust packed around that area loosen and crumble slightly.

Oh, come on. Really?

Well, more good news: yes, really!

Ming Shi could be really sure of what he was seeing. His qi-sense was operating with really crystal-clear perception. He could really trust what it showed him.

After all, he’d gone to great lengths to ensure its effectiveness. Three days of provoking Chang hadn’t just been about getting qi-boosts. It had been about getting them directly from the source.

Adaptive spirit-foods were sensitive. They calibrated to whomever they were served to, adjusting to match their qi-signature. If someone else had bought Chang’s congee for him, it would have shifted minutely from its neutral state to match that intermediary first.

The qi-boost would correct almost immediately to Ming Shi's qi once he ate it. But that initial miscalibration leaning toward the intermediary’s qi would have affected his qi-sense. Even though his qi itself was being accurately served, his perception of it would be slightly askew for a while.

It would have been like putting on the wrong pair of glasses then switching to the right prescription. Your brain needed time to catch up with the reality of the correct spectacles on your face. For a period of time, it would perceive distortions even though they didn’t actually exist.

Under normal circumstances, the distortion would have been so slight that it was negligible. Plenty of people sent couriers to pick up Chang’s congee in spirit-leak-proof containers.

But these weren’t normal circumstances.

One fuzzy section, just one area slightly out of focus, and he’d fail to grasp the whole of his meridian structure and flows. And without comprehending the whole, he couldn’t complete his first cycle.

So, good news: the piecemeal jump-cuts he could see, he could see really well, with complete accuracy!

I just need a view of it all so I can comprehend the whole thing, dammit!

His qi-sense tumbled through another series of rapids, catching glimpses of more ridiculous architecture.

Behind his right knee, some meridians had shaped themselves into a bunch of bananas.

Get it together. Get a cycle going. Come on. Organize.

He tried the All is Tea and Tea is All meditation.

“Feel the spaces within you, encourage your meridians to become the currents ...”

His meridians were already currents. That was the problem.

Hold still. Just hold still for one breath so I can see! What do I have to do to get you to hold still—?

The nameless Intent nudged his qi-sense.

That feeling, it said, he said. Walking into a kitchen. Breathing deep and holding it, to make it last forever.

Ming Shi hesitated.

Is that what I need? That feeling isn’t about holding still at all. It’s wide, sprawling, reaching, hungry for …

Everything.

Correct.

A glimmer of insight.

He breathed in.

He breathed out.

He breathed in.

Hold—

There.

There was his father, singing Cantopop over his wok.

Laughter.

“Let me taste!”

“Here. Is it good?”

“Yes!”

“You see? This is why we repress Core Formation until our Heart Pearls form.”

“How long until I can cook like you?”

“Depends. Took me sixty years.”

“Delicious,” said Mrs. Wu. “Your parents would have been proud.”

Would they?

You were going to show them, remember? You were going to show them all. You said—

- It’s me—

- Hm? Son?

- Me at the airport again!

- Aha, always airport or kitchen. Where are you heading now?

- To dinner!

- Haiya, I said where, not what meal!

- But that’s why I called. I just called to say I’m cooking.

- Ya, always cooking. Me too! Ha! Ha! But where? Just say. Don’t make us wait for your hipster postcard.

- Hipster—ahaha—!

- Son, it’s not funny to make Mom and me worry.

- I know, I know. Look, Dad, are you coming to get me or should I call an Uber?

- … ?

- Cool. Uber it is. Don’t snack before dinner, okay? And hey, tell Uncle Henry to come over too—

- Oh! Oooh! Ooooooh! Wife! Dumpling is at the airport—

- Tell him he’ll like what I’m making, that it’s inspired by—

Me.

By coconuts cracking in Kerala, thundering juice in the sun; woks over flames in Singapore, clapping metal in raucous applause; spiced jerk pits in Jamaica, smoke spiraling up like prayers; tanūr ovens in Isfahan, the open mouths of dragons; mole simmering in Puebla, whispering history's secrets; by arranging paella in Valencia, tagine in Marrakesh; skewering suya in Lagos, yakitori in Kyoto; turning al pastor in Mexico City, kebabs in Adana … and Munich … !

Oh, he could go on forever.

A thousand kitchens, countless joys and sweat and burns and wisdoms—

Me.

Always meandering, always hungry for more, seeking a thousand flavors and a thousand, thousand more, looping back to the old and branching out to the new, putting them together to reconnect with—

Me.

And at last he perceived the whole of his crazy new meridians. It was exactly what the glimpses had teased: a roller-coaster ride of dense tangles spun through him.

You could call it avant-garde, and you wouldn't be wrong.

Lift it out and you could auction it off as a piece of modern art—a man-shaped arrangement of luminous spaghetti, where the spaghetti displayed impressionistic motifs from different angles.

It was also a shining example of a textbook awful meridian structure. “Hysterically inefficient” was a diplomatic description.

It was wildly opposed to consolidation, wilfully dedicated to taking the long ways around, parading a preference for small channels rather than large ones, channels that demanded hilarious efforts to traverse a distance that others could cover with a sneeze, channels giving him no rest without some flow doing something irregular somewhere.

So? So what? Do you remember what they said? They said—

- Son, do you know why our dumplings have nineteen pleats?

- Because that aligns with the Nineteenth Soup Constellation? The load-bearing point of power for most steaming arrays and formations?

- No.

- Then why?

- Because First Ancestor Liu decided he liked them that way. Now, are you ready to fold your first dumpling? Relax your hands and fingers. Relax. Don’t clutch, relax. There is no wrong way to fold a dumpling. Aha. See?

I see.

Yes.

Me.

The pretzel twist by his liver, the banana bunch behind his knee, his cotton-candy big toe, the node with twenty-seven connections that he now realized swirled like a whirlpool—and if you looked at it upside down, was the top of a xiaolongbao.

This was him, the thousand touches that brought one dish of his into being: the criss-cross-cradle of his culinary adventures, woven with hands that his parents had held and would be holding forever, in that moment they’d cupped around his own as he folded his first dumpling.

This was him, he who was Luke Liu, who was Liu Baozi. This was the whole, wonderful mess of what it was to be him.

It’s me, he thought, this is me—

Ming Shi.

Enlightened Food.

In that moment, his qi knew the fullness of its ways.

The myriad routes were one, and one route was myriad.

Delighted, it reveled in the insight of this One Route, this great way. Who’d have thought there was one path that could have it all, unbroken? Who knew there was this journey that comprised all its wanders—the adventure that was itself, that it had never before realized?

It would return to flowing willy-nilly later, as it pleased.

Right now it was pleased by the One Route that was it all. It wanted everything, always, and the One Route was just that.

Relishing, relaxing, enjoying itself greatly, Ming Shi’s qi indulged itself and flowed through its first cycle.

Well, shit, said the Heavens, sensing another one hit the Dao. Go on then. Can't stop you now.

The ceiling between Mortal Cook and Qi Condensation Chef shattered.

Ming Shi let go of the breath he had been holding, and—