The Ice Demon was locked in a cave, and the Drunken Sovereign was passed out on his mountain; the Golden Retriever was useless against political manipulation.

Lin Ji’an was entirely on her own.

’Well,’ Ji’an thought, her fingers slowly tightening around the handle of her Black Iron Spatula hidden beneath her robes. ’So much for a peaceful road trip.’

***

The journey from the towering, cloud-wreathed peaks of the Celestial Sword Sect to the sprawling, opulent capital of the Azure Empire should have taken exactly five days by royal carriage.

The Imperial Second Prince, Xiao Yichen, traveled with a retinue of highly trained, ruthlessly efficient shadow guards, a team of four majestic, six-legged Spirit-Stallions, and a carriage that was essentially a mobile palace suite crafted from enchanted mahogany and lined with crushed velvet.

It was designed for speed, luxury, and absolute, uninterrupted imperial authority.

Instead, the journey was currently on its twelfth day, and they had barely crossed the provincial border.

The delay was not caused by bandit ambushes, demonic beast attacks, or treacherous weather. The delay was caused entirely, unapologetically, by Lin Ji’an’s absolute inability to ignore a good ingredient.

"Halt the carriage!" Ji’an’s voice shrieked from the window for the seventh time that afternoon.

Before the driver could even pull back on the reins, the door burst open.

Ji’an, clad in her gray apron over her white Inner Sect robes, launched herself out of the moving vehicle, executed a flawless combat roll into a muddy ditch, and scrambled up the side of a steep, rocky embankment.

Inside the carriage, Xiao Yichen slowly lowered his teacup. He closed his eyes, taking a long, deep, highly measured breath to suppress the urge to commit a war crime.

"What is it this time?" Yichen asked, his voice a tight, melodic whisper of strained patience.

"It’s a patch of Iron-Threaded Saffron!" Ji’an yelled back enthusiastically, her boots slipping on the loose gravel as she attacked a clump of innocent-looking weeds with her Black Iron Spatula. "Do you know how rare this is in the wild?! The flavor profile is incredibly earthy, and it acts as a natural coagulant! It’s an absolute necessity for the seafood paella I’m planning!"

Yichen sighed, rubbing his temples with two elegant, pale fingers. He looked across the carriage to where Lin Xuan, the thirteen-year-old runaway heir to the General’s Estate, was sitting.

The boy had an ancient military strategy scroll open on his lap, completely unfazed by his older sibling’s feral foraging habits.

"Does your brother possess any concept of a schedule, little general?" Yichen asked smoothly.

Xuan looked up, his silver-flecked eyes blinking innocently. "Third Brother says that the Dao of the Iron Wok answers to no schedule, Your Highness. Only to freshness."

Yichen snapped his folding fan open, covering the lower half of his face to hide his irritated, yet deeply fascinated smirk.

He was an Imperial Prince. He was a sociopathic mastermind who viewed human beings as chess pieces to be manipulated, used, and discarded.

He had offered to escort Ji’an on this journey with the explicit, predatory intention of isolating the cook, probing his weaknesses, and figuring out exactly why the Ice Demon and the Golden Retriever were so hopelessly obsessed with a teenager who smelled like garlic and soy sauce.

Instead, Yichen had spent the last twelve days acting as a glorified chauffeur for a culinary goblin.

They had to set up camp every night because Ji’an refused to let "premium, freshly slaughtered beast meat" go to waste.

But, much to the absolute bewilderment of Yichen’s elite shadow guards, they weren’t complaining.

Because while Ji’an’s constant stops were maddening, the results were nothing short of miraculous.

Every evening, the royal campsite transformed into a Michelin-star pop-up restaurant.

Ji’an would commandeer the campfire, unpack her stolen Black Market cauldron, and work with a manic, terrifying energy.

She roasted wild Spirit-Boar glazed in wild honey and the very Saffron she had dove into ditches for.

She brewed thick, creamy mushroom soups that banished the night chill and actively smoothed out the cultivators’ meridians.

She made spicy, hand-pulled noodles that had Yichen’s hardened, emotionless assassins literally weeping tears of joy into their bowls.

But Xiao Yichen, ever the observant predator, saw right through the culinary spectacle.

He sat on his conjured velvet chair near the fire, sipping his wine, his dark eyes tracking Ji’an’s every frantic movement.

He watched her chop vegetables with aggressive, unnecessary force. He watched her stir pots until her knuckles turned white.

He watched her talk constantly to Xuan, to the guards, to the horses, filling the silence with an endless stream of cooking trivia and arrogant banter.

She wasn’t just cooking. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

She was hiding.

She was keeping herself so overwhelmingly, physically, and mentally busy that she wouldn’t have a single second of quiet to let her mind wander back to the Eternal Cloud Peak.

She was drowning out the deafening silence left by Xie Wangchen’s closed-door seclusion.

And that realization, that Ji’an was working herself to the bone just to avoid the pain of missing another guy, made a dark, ugly, and entirely irrational knot of resentment tighten in Xiao Yichen’s chest.

On the fourteenth day of their excruciatingly slow journey, a violent thunderstorm finally forced them to remain inside the carriage.

The rain hammered against the enchanted wooden roof in relentless, deafening sheets, turning the dirt roads to impassable mud.

Inside, the atmosphere was stifling.

The carriage interior was spacious, but when occupied by three people, especially when one of those people was radiating the subtle, suffocating pressure of a predatory sociopath, it felt incredibly claustrophobic.

The air smelled of the expensive, dark lotus incense burning in a brass censer, mixed with the faint scent of rain and the sharp tang of the herbs Ji’an was currently sorting into neat little piles on a wooden tray balanced on her lap.

Lin Xuan was curled up in the far corner of the plush, U-shaped velvet seating arrangement, completely dead to the world, snoring softly with a scroll covering his face.