Aromatic Cooking Wins the Young Lord’s Heart

In a year of famine, Erya sells herself to the Prince’s Manor to save her sick younger brother. All she wants is a job as a kitchen maid and enough food to fill her stomach.

The eldest young master of the manor, Xiao Heng, is infamous in the capital as a madman: sinister and ruthless, afflicted with a leg injury, and shunned by everyone.

The first time Erya brings him ginger soup, she finds him curled up on the bed, clutching a bloodstained dagger like a dying wolf.

With trembling hands, she offers him the bowl. “Drink it while it’s hot. It’ll warm you up.”

From then on, her kitchen becomes the only medicine he needs.

With wild-vegetable cakes, millet porridge, and crackling pancakes, she gradually warms his frozen heart.

He uses ruthless methods to protect her from the plots and schemes of the household. “She’s mine. Who dares lay a hand on her?”

Then the conspiracy is exposed, his origins remain a mystery, and her identity is unmasked...

It turns out that the simple, homely comfort of that bowl of soup had already claimed the mad young lord’s whole life.

“Erya, I don’t ask for kingdoms and mountains as my bride price. I only ask that the smoke from your kitchen hearth keep rising for me for the rest of our lives.”