The Alchemy Wing of the Heaven's Third Level Academy smells, on a good day, like heated copper and chrysanthemum smoke.
On a bad day — which is most days — it smells like someone has been boiling corpses too long and forgotten to open a window.
The academy itself is a sprawling thing, built in the architectural language of heaven: white stone that catches light and holds it, pavilions connected by covered walkways draped in wisteria that blooms in colors too saturated to be entirely natural, and courtyards where the air sits still and ceremonious, as though even the wind has been instructed to behave itself. Everything is precise. Everything is intentional. The gardens are shaped perfectly , each rock placed to suggest virtue, each fountain angled to represent the flow of spiritual energy through a well-cultivated soul.
It is, objectively, very beautiful.
It is also, in my opinion, exhausting to look at. I feel tired just thinking how much work went into this place. Even the nature is not beautiful enough for the heavens apparently that it needs reshaping in their image.
What a shame. I miss the feel of overgrown grass. It is the best and softest place to take a long nap.
But the alchemy wing sits slightly apart from the main pavilions, tucked behind a corridor of silver-barked trees whose leaves catch the eternal afternoon light and scatter it in pieces across the stone path. It is quieter there. More practical. The stone counters are worn smooth from use, and the ventilation is good, designed to carry away alchemical fumes, which also happens to make it ideal for carrying away the smell of browning butter and caramelized onion.
I had discovered this years ago and considered it one of my finer observations.
"I'm sorry, but the young master has requested exclusive use of the alchemy wing for the evening."
This arrogant bastard…
The attendant delivering this news has the look of a man who is deeply aware he is standing between me and something I want, and who would very much prefer to be somewhere else. I cannot blame him. I probably look calm. I have been told I always look calm. What is happening behind my calm is a separate matter.
The gates close as my dreams of fresh buns are gone with it.
And the last thing I see before they shut completely — before the iron seals with a sound like a gavel coming down on a verdict — is his face.
Fan Yuan stands just beyond the threshold of the wing, already half-turned away as though the interaction is beneath his attention. He is exactly as insufferable in appearance as he is in practice: tall, with the lean, and still somehow muscular enough to look good. Sharp jaw. With that signature colour of the heavens… long black hair swept back and tied without a single strand out of place, the kind of hair that seems to have been poured rather than grown. His eyes are the deep, still black of a sky with no stars in it, like icy onyx beads. Makes me shudder even looking at them.
He is, by the Third Level's general consensus, extraordinary. A heavenly noble, born of cultivators, not made from the ascended dead like the rest of us. It shows in every line of him.
And just before the gates seal shut, I see it.
The smallest curl at the corner of his mouth.
A smirk. Barely there, swallowed almost immediately back into the blank, polished surface of his expression like a stone dropped into still water, creating fleeting ripples at the surface. If you weren't looking for it, you'd miss it entirely.
I was looking for it.
I am always looking for it, because I am apparently the only person who has ever noticed that Fan Yuan, prodigy of the heavens and walking portrait of cold indifference, makes that face.
It makes my blood simmer in a way that is deeply inconvenient for someone who considers themselves largely unbothered by most things.
***
I should clarify, in my defense, that I may have been somewhat loose with the term "kitchen" when I first began using the alchemy wing.
Technically, the space is designated for the refinement of spiritual compounds : elixirs, cultivation aids, the transmutation of raw spiritual material into something the soul can use. Technically.
But a fire is a fire. A stone counter is a stone counter. And the ventilation, as I said, is exceptional.
Does the label on a door determine the nature of the work done inside it? A knife in a cook's hands is a tool for feeding people. In a killer's hands it is a murder weapon. The tool does not change. The intention does. And my intention, every time I walked into that wing and set water to boil, was to make something worth eating.
This is how I justify it.
I have zero guilt about this. I had zero guilt about this for every year I spent quietly converting the alchemy wing into the only decent kitchen in all of the Third Level.
Until, apparently, now.
***
"That damned guy."
Xiao walks beside me with his arms crossed and his small face drawn into great offense. The gardens receive us back into their careful, sculpted beauty, the perfectly balanced rockeries, the fountains arcing in mathematically sound curves, the flowers that bloom in rotating shifts so that no corner of the grounds ever looks seasonally inappropriate.
"Just because he's a prodigy noble of the heavens he thinks he can walk in and take whatever he wants. I've never seen anyone reserve the entire wing before — not the whole thing! And he acts above everyone because he used to live in the upper levels—"
I exhale slowly through my nose, looking back in the direction of the sealed gates with grief. I had been planning those bread buns for three days. I had worked out the exact ratio of the dough.
Goodbye my dear buns…You will be missed.
Xiao is not wrong, though.
Fan Yuan's origin is no secret. Heavenly nobles are a different category of being altogether — souls who were never mortal, born directly into cultivation, shaped by the spiritual atmosphere of the upper levels from their very first breath. You can see it without being told. It is that perfectly beautiful face that is obviously far superior than us mortal souls, and that jew black hair a signature of the heavens. Not to mention his insane powers.
The man was born with power and charisma.
The rumor, passed in low voices around the academy, is that Fan Yuan was demoted. That he had done something to displease the heavenly gods, defied them in some way significant enough to have him sent down to the Third Level to re-earn his ascension. Through the hard way with the rest of us peasants.
I find this very difficult to picture.
Fan Yuan is the single most controlled person I have ever encountered in any life (and my death). He is a perfectionist and cold as ice.
That someone like that had once, apparently, stepped out of line—
"I wonder…"
"Huh?" Xiao looks up. "Did you say something, Ye Fen?"
"No. Nothing."
I turn it over for a moment, then let it drift. There is no use chasing that thread.
But something about that smirk sits wrong in me. That brief, swallowed flicker of mischief, it had looked almost like recognition. Like anticipation.
Like he had known I would come tonight. Like he had come precisely because of it.
I press the thought down.
My head hurts when I push at things like this. There is something in me that resists — a part of my memory that blurs and goes quiet when I lean on it too hard, like pressing on a bruise that has no clear source. I have learned, over the years here, to leave those places alone. There is enough world in the present without excavating whatever is or isn't buried in the past.
Fan Yuan is here to study for his ascension trials. That is all. He wanted the space and he has the rank to take it.
Right.
It is that simple. No need to overthink it.
I turn back toward the garden path and walk.
***
"Ye Fen! You're giving up that easily?"
"What would you have me do, Xiao? Knock on the gates and demand he share? Besides in a few turns of the season he will ascend and we will have the wing to ourselves again. Sometimes doing nothing is the best solution. And he can technically kick oth of our asses."
"
He opens his mouth.
"Don't answer that."
He closes it.
I shrug and keep walking, and after a moment I hear his footsteps catch up, short and quick. Three years younger than me, Xiao, which in mortal terms had been no great gap, but here, in a place where time moves differently and people come to understand themselves slowly or not at all, it sometimes feels like more. He has been here longer than me and carries that particular kind of tiredness of being stuck in the same level for too long.
Still, he might have been dead longer than me, but he was still young when it happened.
The academy's instructors do not seem to factor this in.
I glance at him.
He is quiet, which for Xiao is unusual and therefore informative.
I stop. Abruptly enough that he almost walks into me.
"What is it."
He doesn't answer.
I reach out and press two fingers to the center of his forehead.
"Ow — what was that for?"
"Bottling things up makes you restless. Ruins the sleep." I grunt.
You will not grow taller than this if you don't get enough sleep, I almost say…strange…I know he won't ever grow . He is a spiritual soul in heavens and not a living being. Still I feel like I have said those words before. Not in my death…but before…
Ugh, now I am annoyed. Too bothersome.
"Spit it out."
He rubs his forehead and looks sideways at a fountain.
Then, quietly: "...I really wanted to try your buns. It's been a while since I had — since someone actually made something. Since my mom used to—"
He stops himself.
I look at him.
His face is too earnest for how hard he is trying to seem annoyed. And that is the thing about Xiao that the academy does not seem interested in accounting for: however much cultivation he has learned, however many hours of meditation and spiritual refinement, he is still — underneath all of it — a person who lost things when he died. Things that don't have names in the heavenly curriculum. Things that taste like home-cooked food and warm kitchens and someone making something specifically for you.
He was still young. He still is, in many ways.
I look away from him and scan the garden.
Behind the main grounds, past the formal rockeries and the tiered pavilions, there is a path that most of the academy's students overlook because it leads nowhere academically useful. It winds down a small slope, through a stand of trees with broad silver leaves that overlap like roof tiles, and opens at the edge of the sacred grounds, a quieter stretch of the Third Level, older-feeling than the academy's groomed perfection, where a waterfall comes down from somewhere above and pools at the base of moss-covered stone.
Tucked behind that waterfall is a small cave.
The official purpose of the space is meditation. Communing with the natural flow of spiritual energy. One of the foundational pillars of cultivation — the idea that before you can shape or direct spiritual force, you must first learn to listen to it where it already exists, in the unaltered natural world.
I know about the cave because it is one of my best napping spots. The sound of the water is very good for sleeping. And no one ever comes to bother me.
But there are flat stones in there. Broad ones. And a natural chimney in the rock where the smoke from the waterfall's mist already creates a draft.
And if I used just a small, focused application of fire cultivation — basic level, barely above ambient — and found stones of the right weight and density to act as—
Oh.
"I know!"
Xiao startles. "Huh? Wh — where are you going?"
"Follow me."
"Ye Fen! Follow you where?!"
I am already walking.