Copper Soul, Duck Spirit

Synopsis Lin Mo transmigrates onto the battlefield of the War of Resistance Against Japan and becomes a cook. He thinks he’s landed in a story about a military mess hall, unaware that five thousand years of Chinese civilization lie hidden in a pot of Yulin duck stew. In 1944, the Japanese invaders came knocking. Colonel Yamamoto Seimei used the dark art of “duck-blood divination” to summon the ancient fiend Xingtian. The iron hooves threatened to bring down the mighty Zhen’nan Pass and extinguish the flame of civilization. Li Zongren raised ducks in the Zhensheng Tower, while Bai Chongxi forged an iron defense at Kunlun Pass. No one knew that the young man simmering soup in the kitchen could turn the blood from his palm into “blood hexagrams” that foretold the battlefield, or that when the duck stew boiled, it resonated with an ancient bronze cauldron underground. “You think I’m cooking?” Lin Mo said to Su He. “I’m rebooting civilization.” The duck stew was a code. The soup was a program. Just when the enemy thought victory was within reach, Lin Mo lifted the lid. Jinghong in the cauldron and Yi Yu Song awakened back to back; the heroes of Kunlun Pass returned, bloodied, while a fungal network spread underground, becoming a river of memory for China. And he stood back to back with Su He, the girl who could read “moss memories,” before the final pot of “Civilization’s Kindling Soup.” “Promise me,” she said. “As long as the ducks are here, the formation holds.” “I promise,” he said, drinking down the scalding soup. “As long as the people endure, the soul of our nation will live forever.”