The blue-and-white porcelain bowl was heavy and hot against the twenty-five-year-old Gu Nian’s scarred palms.
For a long moment, he simply held it against his chest, letting the warmth seep through the thin, torn cloth of his frost-pine robe and into the frozen hollow. Meanwhile, his heart had been locked in abyssal ice for three thousand pages. His fingers, which had crushed the skulls of false immortals and strangled the throats of heavenly dragons, shook so badly that the bamboo chopsticks clicked against the chipped porcelain rim.
“Eat while it’s piping hot,” Gu Changsheng said, sitting across the warm wooden table on Floor Seven, resting his forearms comfortably on the checkered oilcloth as if they were back on the wooden porch of the Frost-Pine courtyard.
“I put two spoons of the caramelized pork gravy—the thick sauce from the bottom of the clay pot—right under the noodles. Stir it up from the bottom first so every strand gets coated.”
The twenty-five-year-old youth nodded dumbly.
With clumsy, trembling movements, he dipped the bamboo chopsticks into the bowl, lifted a tangle of thick, glossy wheat noodles glistening with amber pork gravy and bits of green scallion. Raised them to his pale lips.
He blew on them once—a childhood habit his mother had taught him before he turned seven, which came back to his lips without his even thinking about it—and took his first bite.
