The Top-Ranked Chef: With One Bowl of Noodles, She Decides the Fate of Empires

Everyone in the capital knows the cook Shen in Rouge Lane.

When the bride at a duke’s family wedding feast suddenly dies, one of Shen’s dishes identifies the killer. When longevity soup at the Princess’s residence brings harm, one of her banquets lets the noblewomen see their own death faces. When tribute candidates go mad at the Luming Banquet, one bowl of her soup exposes the chief examiner on the spot.

Someone asks her, “You’re only a cook. Why do you meddle in everything?”

Shen Zhiwei weighs her ladle in her hand and smiles. “I don’t meddle. I only deal with food. If there’s something in a dish, I’ll say what it is.”

No one knows she is the daughter of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau official whose entire family was executed ten years ago. One bowl of soup can determine life and death; one bite of food can reveal the worth of a person’s fate.

Even fewer know she can taste everyone else’s fate, but not her own.

Twelve pages of a heavenly book, twelve banquet tables, twelve fates. The secret her father protected with his life, the banquet the Imperial Preceptor plans to hold at the cost of three hundred lives: it all rests in her ladle.

Until the Embroidered Uniform Guard named Pei Yan blocks her doorway. “Shen Zhiwei, I’ll help you investigate your father’s case.”

She tastes the dish he made and frowns. “Way too salty. Fine. Starting tomorrow, you can chop vegetables for me.”