Sauce Prophecies in a Year of Famine

A thousand miles of scorched earth. Two years of drought have cracked the fields, leaving not a blade of grass alive. Su Qingyuan's parents starve to death at home. To trade her for two dou of coarse rice, her clan elders even plan to sell her as a concubine to a wealthy landowner in town. At her darkest hour, she finds a small camphorwood box left by her late mother. Inside lies a worm-eaten, incomplete handwritten scroll: The Prophecy of Medicinal Sauces. This is no ordinary cookbook of seasonings. It is a life-saving secret recipe passed down from a chaotic age in a former dynasty. Wild beans, elm bark, bitter lichens, and other weeds and coarse ingredients found everywhere can be fermented and simmered into a paste using an ancient method. It fills the stomach and eases the swelling caused by famine, while helping ward off epidemics that spread easily in years of disaster. But many of the combinations in the old scroll are missing. At the end, a warning in bright cinnabar ink stands out: Mix even one medicinal ingredient incorrectly, and the sauce becomes deadly poison. The half-preserved recipes, capable of bringing either fortune or disaster, become the only way to survive the famine, and invite endless trouble. Her clanspeople and neighbors beg her desperately for help, then stab her in the back out of jealousy. Grain merchants corner the entire supply of beans, jack up prices, and exploit everyone without restraint. Local tyrants hear about the secret recipes and send men to her door to seize them by force. Everyone hopes she will share the recipes and save the whole village, but Su Qingyuan has already seen through the callousness famine brings out in people. She never dreamed of becoming a self-sacrificing savior. At first, all she wanted was to survive on her own. But when she sees the elderly in the village hovering near death and children crying without end, she cannot stand by and watch people starve. With the incomplete and unpredictable Prophecy of Sauces in her hands, the girl faces one thorny challenge after another, torn between self-preservation and compassion. With a jar of ancient fermented sauce, she wagers against the hearts of people in a chaotic age and carves out a path to survival for herself amid famine and scorched earth.