The Spring and Autumn Snack Shop

Next book: When the Parasitic Flower Wants to Break Up. Visit my author page to find it.

Note: The setting is loosely based on the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. It is a fictional parallel world, and not historically researched.

* A slightly slow start. Everyday family life and food.

Blurb: When Man Weiying recovered her memories from before she was reborn in the womb, her father had fallen off a cliff and gone missing.

Her mother, Man Xun, was frail and pregnant.

Her grandparents and her uncle's family eyed them greedily, coveting Man Xun's dowry of houses and farmland and waiting to leave them destitute.

Man Weiying fled with her widowed mother from that nest of snakes, ants, and insects. After a rough journey, they returned to Man Xun's childhood home, Mount Yunmeng in the State of Jin.

The mother and daughter arrived, travel-worn, only to be stunned. Their once-imposing shop on the main street had inexplicably been smashed to pieces! Their fertile fields had been abandoned for ages!

Fortunately, they had Mount Yunmeng at their backs, and the prosperous city of Yunmeng at its foot.

With her cooking skills, Man Weiying set up a stall outside the ruined house. Starting with breakfast, she repaired the house and opened a restaurant, building a thriving life alongside her mother and younger sister!

*

Lately, everyone in Yunmeng City had been talking about one thing:

The fallen Man family's only daughter and granddaughter had both returned! Apparently, they'd been driven out by their husband's family! The granddaughter was an amazing cook, making all sorts of foods no one had ever seen before:

Youtiao, tea eggs, soup dumplings, pork floss bread, bobo chicken, fish with pickled cabbage, medicinal chicken soup, rice noodles served across the bridge... One novel dish after another!

Those in the know scoffed at the way people called her a granddaughter from outside the family. "Why call her an outsider? She has the Man surname too. She's set up a household of her own!"

*

To Wang Xu, Man Weiying was simply a chance act of kindness on his way home, and a coincidence that forced him to interact with her for the sake of his beloved dog.

Until her name began appearing more and more often on Mount Yunmeng. The disciples all started going down the mountain, one after another falling in love with the food at the Man family's little restaurant. They even turned up their noses at the cooking in Mount Yunmeng's own kitchen.

He, too, began thinking more and more often about the pork congee that had soothed his stomach when a cold left him unable to eat on the journey home from the State of Wei to Mount Yunmeng, and the warmth that had inexplicably spread through his heart at the time.

Gradually, he became the one who kept going down the mountain.

*

Later, when students returned from their travels hoping to ask their teacher, the Ghost Valley Master, for guidance in their studies, their junior brothers and sisters would simply point in the distance and tell them to go find him at that little restaurant.

*

1. Many details are made up. Nothing is historically researched; it's all in service of the story.

2. I don't accept writing advice.

Theme: While chaos never ends in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, life in the little city of Yunmeng remains peaceful