Year fifty-six of the Firefolk Era, Frost's Descent.
Though the eternal night had retreated, the cold mist had not dispersed.
Across the Nine Provinces, gray-white mist often shrouded dawn and dusk, obscuring roads and cutting off messages. Starfire Hall used lamp arrays to signal warnings, but the mist was thick and the light faint, unable to reach far. The Nine Provinces gradually became isolated islands.
Yet on this very day, a wisp of fragrance drifted out of the mist in Ruin Abyss Alley—
It was the fragrance of rice porridge, mingled with the sharpness of sliced ginger and wild greens, and a hint of the toasted scent of firewood scorching a clay pot.
"It's Granny Li's hearth," the people in the alley said. "She's cooking Warm Winter Three-Ingredient Porridge again."
She cooked it slowly over a low flame, the lid gently dancing, its bubbling like a heartbeat. As she cooked, she murmured, "The rice must cook through, the fire must hold out, and people must wait."
She ladled out a bowl, but instead of eating it herself, poured it into a clay jug, wrapped it tightly in an old cloth, and handed it to the boy at the alley entrance. "Take this to the Chen family on West Street. Their elderly mother hasn't lit her hearth in three days."
The boy ventured into the mist.
The mist was dense and the road slippery. He fell, and though the jug did not break, the rice aroma seeped through the folds of the cloth—
That fragrance gathered in the mist without dispersing, winding onward in silken strands, like an invisible road.
Strangely, when the households along the way smelled it, they all lifted their pot lids without a word of agreement—
"It's the winter porridge from Ruin Abyss Alley!"
"That smell... my