Chapter 38: Secret Ingredients
Predictably, the moment the lock clicked, Wong Lei’s survival instincts overrode her coordination. She scrambled out of the cell, nearly tripping over her own feet in her haste. Kitty spoke first. Her cat ears were flat against her disheveled hair and her tail lashed in frustration.
“My apologies,” Kitty bit out. The words were sharp, though she directed them at Su Yao. “One moment, we were tracking the Yamato’s central energy signature. The next, the connection severed and the possession was forcibly undone.”
Su Yao’s eyebrow twitched. “Forcibly undone? By what?”
Kitty’s feline eyes narrowed to slits, glowing with pure, incandescent rage. “The Celestial Bureaucracy,” she spat, as if the words were poison. “Jinse’s divine authority as Goddess of Contracts was ‘required for a mandatory audit and quarterly planning session’. They yanked her essence back to the celestial plane.”
She clenched her fists. Tiny sparks of divine energy used for filing forms in triplicate fizzed around her knuckles. “In the middle of a hunt! The timing is, too convenient to be coincidence.”
Su Yao stared for a second, then let out a short, harsh bark of laughter that held no humor. “Of course,” she said. The sheer, typical absurdity of it fitted perfectly into the new, insane pattern of her life. “The one time we need a goddess to be unaccountably violent and reckless, she gets called into the office for a performance review.”
Mizukume, who had been observing the terrified cultivators as if they were a mildly interesting science experiment, murmured, “Even divinity isn’t exempt from the demands of middle management, a sobering universal constant.”
“So Jinse is where? In a heavenly conference room?” Zhang Wei asked. He had just caught up to them, looking equally baffled and weary.
“Precisely,” Kitty hissed. “Which is why I ended up stuck in a cell with these mewling mortals!” She gestured violently at the still-terrified Vanishing Moon cultivators.
“So the Yamato failed to capture her,” Su Yao summarized. The implications settled in. “But the Celestial Bureaucracy managed to. It’s effectively the same result for us. She’s out of the game.”
“Until the audit is complete,” Kitty confirmed. Her shoulders slumped in defeat. “And celestial audits can take eons.”
Su Yao looked from Kitty’s furious form, Wong Lei’s confused face, to the bureaucratic nightmare of the holding facility. The Yamato had vanished. Jinse was sidelined by heavenly paperwork. Their only lead was a factory they aren’t allowed to enter without an appointment.
“Fine,” Su Yao said. Her voice dropped into a low, determined register. “New plan. We can’t get to the factory yet and we can’t find the Yamato. So we’ll do the one thing we can do while we wait for that stupid form.”
She turned to the group. Her eyes blazed with a desperate need for combustion. “We're going to a bar. Yumi’s screaming wine is taking too long, and I need alcohol. Now.”
Wong Lei, still wiping tears from her face but perking up at the mention of a familiar topic, piped up. “Oh! I know a place! The ‘Floating Lantern Lounge’. It’s got a great ambiance, and the drinks are strong. The place is in the arts district.”
Su Yao refused to wait for further discussion. “Lead the way.”
The group marched out of the holding facility, leaving the Vanishing Moon cultivators to their terrified confusion.
They arrived at the Floating Lantern Lounge without incident. It was a dimly lit establishment with a vaguely mystical theme, featuring paper lanterns and low, ambient music. As they stepped inside, a voice called out from behind the bar.
“Welcome! I'll be with you in a,” The voice cut off as the bartender turned around. The bartender, a woman with tired eyes and a practiced smile, did a double-take. “Wong Lei? Thank the heavens. Your shift starts in ten. I thought you were going to flake again.”
She tossed a clean apron onto the bar, which landed with a soft thud directly in front of the stunned girl.
Wong Lei blinked. Her panic from the jail cell instantly replaced by a different kind of anxiety. “Oh! Right! I totally forgot with the whole jail thing.”
Su Yao stared. She opened her mouth, a scathing comment about the sheer number of part-time jobs this one spiritually-sensitive teenager seemed to hold on the brink of the apocalypse ready on her tongue.
She closed it. The energy required to express surprise, question the logic, or even acknowledge the absurdity was better spent on something more productive and less exhausting. It was a well she had drawn from too many times. She simply accepted it, the way one accepts that rain is wet or that bureaucracy is slow.
What’s next? she thought. The mental image formed with strange clarity. Running a multinational counterfeiting ring? Is she the one operating the mask factory?
The idea was no more or less plausible than anything else that had happened today.
Instead of commenting, Su Yao slid onto a barstool. “Give me your strongest liquor. Whatever will make me forget the concept of linear time the fastest.”
Mizukume took the stool beside her. Her schoolgirl form looked out of place. “I will observe the ritual of mortal intoxication. For anthropological purposes.”
Kitty simply leaped onto the bar. Her tail lashed. She fixed Wong Lei with a baleful stare. “Milk. In a saucer. Now. Or I will unscrew all the bottle tops when you're not looking.”
Wong Lei, looking flustered but falling into the familiar routine, quickly tied the apron over her clothes. “R-right! One forget-everything special coming up! And one saucer of milk,” She glanced at Kitty’s glowering face. “Extra cold.”
As Wong Lei hurried to prepare the drinks, Su Yao rested her head in her hands, watching the mundane chaos unfold. The hunt for gods and masks was on hold. For now, the most pressing mission was getting a traumatized weeb to make her a decent drink before her shift officially started.
Said weeb placed the glass before her, filled with a liquid that swirled with faint, almost imperceptible motes of light. Su Yao picked it up and took a long, deep swallow.
The taste exploded on her tongue. Her entire world tilted.
What the—
It tasted familiar, strong, and complex, like a ghost on her palate and a memory in her throat. Peach blossom honey from ancient trees, the sharp bite of spiritual frost, the smoky warmth of phoenix marrow. The drink felt like a pale imitation, but the blueprint was unmistakable.
This is the Jade Mountain Brew. The very same nectar that had flowed like water at her Eternal Banquet.
For a single, heart-stopping moment, she closed her eyes. The dim, themed bar around her dissolved. She could hear the faint, ethereal music of spirit zithers and feel the cool, smooth jade of her own throne beneath her.
The weight of her nine tails was a comfortable, powerful presence. Around her, the laughter of gods and immortals echoed. Li Xuan was there as the intriguing traveler instead of the betrayer. His calm eyes watched her from across the hall.
I am home. Everything else felt like a bad dream. Nothing in the mortal world mattered. One blink, and she would be back in her glory.
“Landlord? Your vitals are spiking. Is the ethanol concentration sufficient?” Mizukume’s flat, analytical voice sliced through the memory like a razor.
Su Yao’s eyes snapped open. She was back on a cheap barstool, in a knockoff mystical lounge, with a horror-game schoolgirl clone, a cat-eared divine messenger lapping milk from a saucer, and a part-time bartender who had just been in jail.
The taste of the divine brew was still on her tongue, a cruel mockery.
She slammed the glass down on the counter. The sound cracked through the ambient music. Wong Lei jumped.
“Where,” Su Yao demanded. Her voice was low and shaking with a mixture of rage and a grief she hadn't allowed herself to feel in centuries. “Did you get this recipe?”
Wong Lei blinked, wide-eyed. “R-recipe? It’s the house special! ‘Heavenly Nectar’. The owner got it from his grandma, I think? It’s just peach brandy, smoked honey syrup, a dash of bitters, and, uh, a secret ingredient he buys in bulk from Fresho?”
Fresho. The word was a final, devastating blow. Her sacred brew, the drink of gods, reduced to a ‘secret ingredient’ from a mortal wholesale warehouse.
Mizukume leaned over and sniffed the glass. “A crude facsimile. The spiritual harmonics are simplistic, but the foundational notes are indeed reminiscent of a high-tier celestial vintage. How depressingly accessible.”
Su Yao stared into the depths of the glass. The ghost of her past laughed at her from the bottom. She had come here to forget, and instead, she’d been handed a key to a memory she could never unlock again. The home she remembered was gone. This cheap imitation was all that was left.
She downed the rest of the glass in one go. The burn this time felt less like nostalgia and more like a punishment.
Mizukume, who had been observing the ritual of mortal intoxication with academic detachment, turned her hollow gaze to Wong Lei. “I will also partake. Provide a libation you deem appropriate for my composition.”
Wong Lei, now fully in her bartender role despite the apron over her prisoner clothes, nodded with sudden professional seriousness.
“I think I have something,” the part-time bartender murmured and set to work with a surprising, practiced grace.
Wong Lei pulled out a small, unlabeled vial of clear liquid, a bottle of plum wine, and a sprig of fresh rosemary. She muddled the rosemary with a sugar cube, added a measure of the clear liquor, a float of the plum wine, and finished it with a single, perfect drop of something that shimmered like a tear.
Then she placed the delicate coupe glass was placed in front of Mizukume. The drink was pale, almost the color of a winter moon. Atop it, the rosemary sprig rested like a skeletal tree.
“It’s called a ‘Fading Echo',” Wong Lei said softly.
Mizukume picked up the glass with slender fingers. Her doll-like eyes were fixed on the pale liquid. A tremor, faint but undeniable, went through her hand.
She brought the glass to her lips and took a small, precise sip. Her entire body went rigid. The glass trembled violently in her grasp.
A single, black tear traced a path down her porcelain cheek. Then another.
Her shoulders shook with silent, seismic sobs. The elegant facade cracked, revealing an abyss of pure, unadulterated grief.
“The first snowfall in the inner palace gardens,” she said quietly. Her voice faltered, losing its practiced flatness, worn down by an old, unhealed grief. “A poem I wrote and never sent. A hairpin given by someone I knew would betray me. I believed those moments mattered. Now they mean nothing.”
She was reliving the quiet moments before everything changed inside a world of fragile beauty and certain loss, where every perfect instant carried the seed of its ruin.
Wong Lei watched. Her eyes were wide with a mix of fear and awe. “I just used some infused sake and a little bit of captured will-o'-wisp essence, I didn't know it would.”
Su Yao watched the formidable echo of a calamity crumble into a weeping schoolgirl over a cocktail. She took a slow sip of her own inferior Jade Mountain Brew. The familiar burn grounded her.
“Pathetic,” Su Yao muttered, but the word lacked its usual venom. She recognized the shape of that grief. It was the same one she tasted every time she remembered her own banquet hall.
Mizukume drew in a shuddering breath. The silence around her deepened, swallowing the last of her sobs. She placed the half-finished glass back on the bar with terrifying precision.
“The memory was vivid,” she stated. Her voice slowly reassembled itself into its flat, analytical tone, though a brittle fragility remained beneath the surface. “You have a gift for distilling sorrow, mortal.”
She looked at the glass as if it were a weapon that had been used against her. “I don’t believe I will require a second round.”
Quiet settled over the lounge, the air thick with the ghosts of two ancient beings reminded, in the most mundane of settings, of everything they had lost.
The soul-wrenching grief radiating from Mizukume was a stark contrast to the tacky paper lanterns and ambient synth music. Su Yao’s eyes narrowed. Her own nostalgic pain hardened into sharp suspicion.
“This can’t be right,” she stated. Her voice cut through the heavy atmosphere. She pushed her own glass away. “No ‘secret ingredient from Fresho’ can do that.”
She gestured at the silently weeping clone, who was now meticulously drying her face with a bar napkin as if erasing a tactical error. “I want to see the owner. Now.”
Wong Lei flinched, wringing her hands on her apron. “The owner? He’s really busy running a bunch of other businesses and is always traveling. No one really knows where he is half the time.”
“I don’t care if he’s negotiating with the King of Hell. I need to talk to him. Give me his contact.”
“Okay!” Wong Lei fumbled for her phone, scrolling through her contacts. “Here. It’s Mr. Li.” She showed Su Yao the screen.
The name on the display was a simple, infuriating Mr. Li.
Su Yao stared at it. The sheer, cosmic predictability of it felt like a slap in the face.
Of course it’s another Li, she thought. The words screamed in her mind. What is it with that family? Are they the universal constants of conspiracy? The secret landlords of reality itself? First the curse, then the factory, now a bar that serves spiritual warfare in a glass?
“Naturally,” Su Yao said aloud. Her voice was dripping with a venomous calm. She took out her own phone and inputted the number. “Let’s see which Li this is.”
Mizukume, having fully recomposed herself into a statue of eerie calm, observed, “The Li family appears to be the central knot in this era’s tangled web. To pull one thread is to find it connected to their name. It’s statistically improbable. Therefore, it’s intentional.”
Su Yao was already hitting the call button. She pressed the phone to her ear. The hunt for the Yamato, the mystery of the mask forger, and Jinse’s location, all of it was suddenly secondary. Right now, she needed to know why a member of the Li family was brewing drinks that could make a primordial echo weep for a lost golden age.
The phone rang twice before it was picked up.
A man’s voice, calm and slightly weary, answered. “Yes?”
Su Yao focused on the background noise, a woman’s low, rhythmic moaning that was unmistakable and theatrical.
Her eyebrow twitched. “Am I interrupting something?” she asked. Her tone was flat and utterly unimpressed.
There was a sigh from the other end of the line. “Stop it,” the man said. His voice shifted away from the receiver, clearly addressing the source of the noise. “The joke stopped being funny a long time ago.”
The moaning ceased instantly, replaced by a faint, feminine giggle that was quickly muffled.
His attention returned to the phone. “My apologies. What can I do for you?” His voice was polished, patient, and gave nothing away.
Su Yao frowned. “I’m at your bar, the Floating Lantern. I just had a drink that triggered a memory I haven’t been able to access in a thousand years. My associate here just had one that made her cry like she’d lost her entire dynasty. I want to know what you put in them.”
A pause crackled over the line. When Mr. Li spoke again, his voice had softened. “The ‘Heavenly Nectar’ and the ‘Fading Echo’. They are house specialties. I’m glad they were impactful.”
“Impactful is one word for it,” Su Yao snapped. “I want answers. Your corporate PR can wait.”
“I assure you, the ingredients are all perfectly sourced,” Mr. Li replied. His voice was smooth as silk. “The reactions only reflects the drink’s quality and the consumer’s suggestibility.”
From her stool, Mizukume spoke loud enough for the phone to pick up. Her voice had regained its chilling monotone. “He is lying. The concoction is a key. He knows what locks it opens.”
Su Yao’s eyes narrowed. “You heard her. We’re not leaving until I get a real answer.”
He let out another sigh, this one tinged with what sounded like genuine resignation. “Very well. I can be there in twenty minutes. Please try not to terrify the rest of my staff.”
The line went dead.
Su Yao lowered the phone, staring at it. The background moaning was dismissed as a joke, but the evasion was staged.
“He was trying to throw me off,” she murmured to Mizukume. “To make me think I’d caught him in something embarrassing and mundane.”
Mizukume gave a slow blink. “A classic misdirection, the lewd pantomime to disguise the spiritual one. He was engaged in something he didn’t wish you to hear. The moaning was a curtain.”
“Twenty minutes,” Su Yao said, settling back onto her stool and signaling Wong Lei for another drink, this time something ordinary. “Then we see what kind of Li we’re dealing with. And what his real business is.”
The web, she was sure, was about to get a lot more tangled.