The Regent Came to Scrounge a Meal Again Today

She was a modern three-Michelin-star chef and a top food psychologist. After transmigrating, she became the legitimate daughter of a duke's household, unloved by her father and bereft of her mother. Her stepmother and half-sister locked her in a woodshed, leaving her facing a desperate fate: disfigurement and marriage to bring someone good luck.

With a broken bowl, rotten vegetables, and moldy brown rice, she made a fragrant wild-greens soup from the most meager ingredients.

That bowl of soup drew in the regent, a man who had lost his sense of taste and could never sleep at night. From then on, she wielded food like a blade, carefully advancing through the inner household and the imperial court. A “Hundred Flowers Banquet” dazzled the capital, a bowl of “Cabbage in Clear Broth” won over three generations of court officials, and a “Last Supper” drove the empress dowager to publicly break down and confess her crimes.

But she said she hadn't come for revenge. She had come to heal: to heal those hurt by life, to heal the man who had shut himself away in a cold world, and to heal the once-wounded version of herself.

He offered her the empire as his betrothal gift and promised her a bridal procession stretching ten miles. She opened a private kitchen in the back courtyard of the prince's residence. Every evening, curling smoke rose from the kitchen, the warmest sight in the capital.

Ten years later, a little girl in tattered clothes stood at the gates of the prince's residence, holding a bowl of wild-greens soup. She was the daughter of the heroine's half-sister, here to seek refuge with her aunt.

Looking at the familiar soup, she remembered the girl she had once been. She took the child in and named her Shen Nian.

Remember the past, cherish the present.

Many years later, on a sunny afternoon, the elderly couple sat in wicker chairs, surrounded by children and grandchildren, with the fragrance of food filling the courtyard.

He still asked, “My dear, what's for dinner today?”

And she still smiled and answered, “Your favorite bowl of plain noodles, as always.”