Year One of the Great Wilderness: The Chef Defies Fate to Save the World

In the first year of the Great Wilderness, torrential rain smashed through the last city wall.

As Su Liao crouched among the refugees, gnawing on tree bark and listening to the starving wails all around her, she suddenly recalled the year she was seven. Just before she was beaten unconscious for stealing food when she was starving, a scrap from Old Master’s Illustrated Guide to Wild Vegetables had fluttered from his arms into her bloodstained palm.

“Boil poisonous mushrooms three times to get rid of the bitterness!” “Dig up the roots of the man-eating vine, bury them in the ashes, and roast them for food!” When she made her first pot of wild vegetable soup in a broken clay pot, the thugs who had stolen her steamed bun came charging at her with knives. She wiped the soup from the corner of her mouth. “If you want to live, listen to me.”

The rain kept pounding down. She crouched in the mud, teaching refugees how to recognize wild vegetables, unaware that a man in a blue robe far away had tightened his grip on his compass. This lowly servant, trampled into the mud, could make withered vegetable seedlings sprout beneath her fingertips.

“The Spirit-Sealing Formation is about to collapse.” He chuckled. “But who could have guessed that the savior would be no immortal, but a cook who makes soup?”