Genshin Impact, I, a mere mortal, cannot accompany you to the very end.

Yae no Miko tilted her head.

“Ying is my travel companion,” Qing Nuoyan explained. “She also wants to try the famous fox udon.”

Oh, I see.

"No."

"Do it yourself." Miss Fox propped her cheek on her hand, her long, narrow, pale purple eyes reflecting Qing Nuoyan's face. She said lazily, "This Lady is very tired."

"I don't know how," Qing Nuoyan said with a pained expression.

"How will you know if you don't try?" Yae no Miko looked at the boy. "By the way, you ate a bowl of my fox udon and haven't paid the bill yet, little guy."

"Oh, oh, I can pay."

"No." The goddess lazily uttered her twisted logic: "You ate a bowl of my fox udon, so you should give me a bowl back. This lady-in-waiting is hungry."

That's utterly unreasonable!

"I really don't know how," the boy said pitifully, "...I'll just pay anyway."

“Little one.” Miss Fox rested her chin on her hand and looked at her with a smile: “You just introduced yourself as a ‘traveler’, right?”

"Ah, is that so?"

"Then, may I see your pass?" Yae asked.

...Qing Nuoyan was startled, and feeling guilty, he subconsciously looked away.

"Oh..." Miss Fox deliberately drew out her words, "Oh dear, surely you don't have one—are you an unregistered resident?"

They saw right through me.

"If unregistered residents are reported, they can be deported from Inazuma."

Yae no Miko gently curved her eyes, like a little fox who had snatched a dried fish. "Little one, you don't want your smuggling to be discovered by the Kansei Magistrate, do you?"

The power of being coerced.

This guy...!

He's definitely not a good person!

For the first time, Qing Nuoyan felt the peculiar temperament of the fox-like lady in front of him. To put it nicely, she was cunning and calculating; to put it bluntly, she was despicable and wicked, yet there was nothing he could do about her.

"What do you want?" Qing Nuoyan stared at her warily.

"Make me some fox udon," she said lazily.

"Why do you insist on eating what I cook?"

"..." Yae no Miko paused, and after a long while, she said, "It was just to verify something."

It was another language I couldn't understand.

Qingnuoyan dislikes riddle tellers.

"Okay, okay, I'll do it." He had no choice but to give in, nodding in agreement while emphasizing, "Don't blame me if it tastes bad."

"Give it a try."

...

This is a shop that has been around for hundreds of years.

Despite the villagers of Konta Village's best efforts to preserve it, it has inevitably shown signs of age.

The stove was old and covered with dark brown spots, and the furnace was also covered with the accumulated wood dust. Qing Nuoyan stood in front of the desk and subconsciously stroked the cutting board. The cool touch carried a strange sense of familiarity.

Familiar with.

Is it just my imagination...?

Although the kitchen was old, it was very clean. Every dish was wiped clean and neatly arranged in the cabinet, and the kitchen knife was sharpened. The cool moonlight slanted in through the mahogany window, and the cherry blossom shadows swayed gently around him.

He noticed... that Miss Fox was watching him from the side.

He lowered his head again, staring at the prepared ingredients—dough, cleaned green vegetables, a few pieces of tender white fish tofu, simmered bone broth, and various condiments.

Let's get started.

I had to rely on my gut feeling.

Qing Nuoyan recalled the steps taken by Yae no Miko before. First, he kneaded the dough, added water and slowly mixed it. He then used a kitchen knife to cut the thick dough into thin noodles. After inheriting Fushe's swordsmanship, his knife skills were quite good, and each noodle was exactly the same width.

Cook the noodles in boiling water and then pour over the broth.

At the same time, it's time to fry the tofu.

The heat shouldn't be too high, or the tofu will become tough, but if it's too low, the texture will be soft and weak—Qing Nuoyan had never made tofu before, so she didn't have a sense of proportion and relied entirely on intuition to determine the heat.

'intuition'

An intuition that I don't know where it came from.

A certain intuition guided his actions: when to add the ingredients, when to take the food off the heat, how much oil to use, how to prepare the seasonings... everything relied on that intuition. At first, his movements were clumsy, but he gradually became more skilled.

“Little guy, do you know Kiyono Fuin?” Yae no Miko suddenly asked.

She already had a vague guess in her mind.

The wind whispers through the clear fields...

I've vaguely heard of this name.

Perhaps Ying knows.

But he didn't know, or rather, he wasn't very clear, that he had completely forgotten everything that had happened before.

“I might know him,” he replied, adding the tofu to the soup.

He could naturally reach for any seasoning, and he could also easily reach for any cleaver, as if he knew where it was. He became more and more adept at it. The layout of this kitchen had never changed, not even for hundreds of years, and it remained exactly as it was before that person left.

"Is that so..."

The fox spirit stared intently at Qingnuoyan's retreating figure.

The boy was very young, completely different from that old man.

Their hair color is different, their eye color is different, their appearance is completely different... They are clearly two different people.

But for some reason, I found myself watching his back as he cooked.

Just for no reason...

I felt sadness.

She remembered that clear morning after the first snowfall, the misty clouds scattering golden sunlight, the stove, the kitchen, and her waiting by the kotatsu, the old man cooking in the same way—making his last bowl of fried tofu.

Also like this.

They slowly overlapped.

That was 218 days ago, and four days later, the old man died, turning into thunder in the sky.

She didn't know why... she suddenly remembered such a distant memory.

Is this another hallucination... or a visual illusion?

It's just what people call longing.

She suddenly remembered the letter Gan Yu had written to her—did she, like Gan Yu, believe that all of this was an illusion?

Or perhaps, something else entirely?

Miss Fox's furry ears twitched.

Taste doesn't lie. If what the eyes see is an illusion, then the taste on the taste buds won't change. This is the lesson she learned from running this small shop.

Even though a hundred years have passed, every elderly person... every very old customer, when tasting her fox udon, will softly exclaim, "So delicious, so nostalgic."

They are old now. Like this old shop, they are dust in the sands of time. Their sense of smell and taste have faded, but they can still taste that familiar flavor and shed tears for it. This is a beautiful and amazing thing.

The taste is memorable, the taste is worth remembering. Even a hundred years later, it can still bring tears to the eyes of customers who miss it. So, 214 days later, it can still amaze someone's time. In 214 good mornings and good nights, both the taste and the days are worth waiting for.

I'll never forget the taste.

It's finally done.

As the moon rose above the branches, its light cast the swaying shadows of cherry blossoms everywhere, enveloping the flowers in their shadows. Miss Fox gazed at the steaming bowl of Fox Udon, added a piece of fish tofu, and slowly put it into her mouth.

Boom—

Thunder rumbled outside the window, and cherry blossoms fluttered down in the evening.

"How is it?" Qing Nuoyan asked tentatively.

"Really delicious."

Yae no Miko ate another piece, then picked up another. She paused, lowered her eyes, and chewed slowly. After a while, she whispered, "So delicious."

His shoulders trembled slightly.

"Wow... don't be like this, is it because you're really just average?" Qing Nuoyan panicked a little when she saw Miss Fox's expression. "Don't force yourself..."

“No.” Yae no Miko gently shook her head. She looked at Qing Nuoyan and repeated, “It’s delicious.”

"I miss it."

...

P.S.: Whew, an update is here!

Chapter 118 "Kill him, and bring his heart back."

Snow-covered landscapes, pear blossoms in the wind, frost-covered railings—winter has arrived.

In the Land of Winter, it is always snowing heavily like this.

Even though summer has passed, the biting wind still howls, carrying bits of ice. Layers of frost have formed on the old, damp castle walls, and dead plant debris clings to them, slowly melting away with the snow.

In the era before the Fool was born, the Queen of Winter Kingdom possessed a sword.

That sword had served her faithfully.

Many people say that the sword is a traitor because it betrayed its homeland and came to a distant foreign land.