One spoon can shape mountains and seas; one flavor can lock away heaven and earth.
When Su Yu, a master chef’s descendant, inherited the family’s Seven-Star Wok Spatula, she learned that she had been born to be the final “flavor seal” keeping Taotie imprisoned. The masters of the eight great cuisines each wielded astonishing skills: Sichuan and Hunan’s ghost peppers took the shape of blazing skulls, Huaiyang’s delicate tofu shreds could sever souls and shatter illusions, and Lingnan’s sugar paintings concealed countless deadly threads. Yet this martial world was nothing more than a thousand-year feast for the ferocious beast Taotie.
Only after meeting a shepherd boy with the Book of Songs branded over his heart did she learn the truth:
The Zhou family’s heirloom Seven-Star Wok Spatula had once gouged out three of his protective scales.
The pepper-salt pastry her grandfather gave her on his deathbed held half a wisp of the soul of the vessel containing the beast.
And the secret cooking weapon capable of summoning heavenly fire was the key to unlocking the tragic love binding the two of them across three lifetimes.
The Feast of Mountains and Seas begins, and the ultimate flavor becomes a fateful trial.
The master of Hongyun Tower cooks strange beasts from the Classic of Mountains and Seas in nine sacred tripods. Steamed Gu Diao tongue can rewrite memories, while scallion-braised Ran Yi fish can reverse cause and effect. Su Yu makes her own body the stove, and the shepherd boy turns his bones into kindling. Together, they cook up a defiant gamble in a boiling martial world:
If love can be infused with flavor, can Taotie’s savage evil be transformed into the cooking smoke of the mortal world?
The forbidden love between the Cooking God’s daughter and Taotie’s vessel unfolds with the eight great cuisines as weapons and mythical beasts from the mountains and seas as food, simmering up a taste of the mortal world in a boiling martial realm.
