Celestial Food Stall: I Set Up a Food Stall in Heaven

In the most remote corner of Nantianmen, my stall, with its tattered "Anti-Ancient Delicacies" banner, was listlessly emitting purple smoke.

It was called a stall, but it was really just a stove made of three white jade bricks that had been picked up from the ruins of some celestial palace, plus a long nanmu table that had been burned by heavenly fire and still had scorch marks on the edges.

Several rows of bottles and jars, their raw materials unrecognizable, were scattered on the table, containing various strangely colored ingredients for pickling.

Some were bubbling, some were glowing, and one jar emitted a low, muffled sound every few breaths, as if something was turning over inside.

I'm giving a massage to a deep-sea octopus with a rusty boning knife.

I caught this octopus when I went to the East Sea to collect a debt from the Turtle Prime Minister last time.

Its eight tentacles were tightly bound by the Immortal-Locking Rope, but its mouth was not sealed. It cursed all the way from the Dragon Palace to the Southern Heavenly Gate, and the richness of its vocabulary amazed me.

Its suction cups wriggled on the cutting board, making a "gurgling" sound. I kneaded the food while pondering the copper pot next to me.

There was still half a pot of soup left in the pot, and it smelled faintly of daylily.

That's Meng Po's soup.

The other day, Meng Po came to my place to drink osmanthus wine. She drank too much and forgot the soup on the stall before leaving.

I thought to myself that it would be quite delicious to use it to poach seafood.

Just as I was pondering this, a series of heavy footsteps came from afar, causing the soup in the copper pot to ripple.

Then, before the figure appeared, a scent arrived.

  

It was a piece of clothing that was speaking.

It says it has absorbed tens of thousands of years of sweat, been thoroughly soaked by the cool fragrance of laurel, and repeatedly kneaded by the rough action of felling trees.

It's neither fragrant nor foul; it's just domineering. You can tell who it is just by smelling it.

There wasn't another garment like it in the entire Heavenly Court. It belonged to Wu Gang.

Wu Gang's towering figure crashed into the stall, nearly shattering the nanmu wood table.

His coarse cloth undershirt was so worn that its original color was no longer discernible; it was now soaked through with sweat, clinging to his muscular frame in patches of dark and light.

Sweat streamed down his neck, staining his chest a purplish-brown.

The clothes were still emitting that smell, like a bottle of spilled liquor, which even made the bubbling pickled vegetables on my stall stop for a moment.

His breathing was heavy, like a bellows, and his arms remained motionless, protectively held in his chest.

A shivering white ball of fur poked out a paw from between his arms, then withdrew, then poked out again.

"Chang Baiwei! Help!"

Wu Gang's face was etched with anxiety and despair. Beads of sweat rolled down his forehead, dripping onto the cutting board and sizzling into white steam. "This time, only you can save the Moon Palace!"

The jade rabbit peeked out from his arms. Its red eyes were filled with tears, its long ears drooped on either side of its head, and its white fur was messy and covered with dust and fallen leaves.

"Boss Chang, that beast is going to tear down the Moon Palace! It eats more than Marshal Tianpeng and can cause more crashes than the Giant Spirit God. Even Sister Chang'e is furious. If you don't intervene, I'll have no choice but to turn into roasted rabbit meat to apologize to it!"

I slowly put down the boning knife. The blade pierced the cutting board with a "thud".

The octopus took the opportunity to spray ink all over my face.

I pulled out a cloth whose color I couldn't tell, first wiped my face, then wiped my fingers one by one, my movements unhurried and deliberate.

"Slow down. Is that axe that chopped down a thousand-year-old laurel tree just for show? Why did you hire someone like me, a wok tosser?"

"Bullshit!" Wu Gang cursed, and the smell of his undershirt wafted over again as he became agitated.

"It was all that idiot Tianpeng's doing!"

The Jade Rabbit continued, its voice trembling with tears, its tiny paws gripping Wu Gang's collar tightly.

"Marshal Tianpeng sent over a Tibetan pig. When it first arrived, it was only the size of a palm, and it was still very hairy. I even shared half a carrot with it. Who knew this pig was a bottomless pit? It ate like a glutton reincarnated, and in just a few days it grew into a two-hundred-pound behemoth!"

"It raids the kitchen in the morning, the storage room at noon, and tries to steal my jade pestle at night. Just now, it kicked over the Cleansing Dew that Sister Chang'e had refined for three hundred years—three whole hundred years, not a single drop left!"

I understand. The Heavenly Pig sends a pig, and the pig gains favor.

Now the pig is causing trouble, and Chang'e is scolding Wu Gang for not being able to control it.

When Wu Gang faced a fat pig that could roll around, howl, and eat Chang'e's baby, it wasn't that he couldn't beat it, but that he couldn't hit it or scold it.

This pig was a gift from Tianpeng, and it also won Chang'e's favor for the first few days.

He was a rough man who couldn't judge the situation properly. He was afraid of hurting the pigs if he hit them too hard, and he was also afraid of not being able to control them if he hit them too lightly. He ended up turning from a master pig handler into a pig nanny.

"You're a dignified immortal, capable of chopping down even the spiritual root of the laurel tree with your axe. Why would a mere mortal pig drive you to this state?"

Wu Gang's face stiffened. His eyes darted away, his mouth opened and closed again, and finally he forced out half a sentence: "I was afraid of hurting the fairy's flowers and plants."

He pulled his T-shirt down a little, as if trying to cover something.

But the sweat-soaked clothes clung tightly to his body, covering nothing at all.

It was still speaking, using that scent mixed with sweat and osmanthus to announce to the entire South Heavenly Gate something Wu Gang didn't want anyone to know.

The Jade Rabbit rolled her eyes: "Why weren't you afraid when that pig was gnawing on the laurel tree? You're just afraid that if you hit Tianpeng's pig, the fairy will be unhappy."

Wu Gang's face flushed red, his knuckles cracking as he gripped the axe handle, but he couldn't utter a single word.

He dared not look at the Jade Rabbit, nor at me; he could only stare down at the axe in his hand, as if waiting for the axe to speak for him.

An axe can't talk, of course; an axe only chops things.

I chuckled to myself.

This isn't asking for help; it's clearly someone trying to get jealous.

Tianpeng sent a pig, and the pig became a favorite. Now the pig is causing trouble, and Chang'e scolds him for not being able to control it.

In this entire chain of logic, what bothered him most was probably not the pig itself, but the phrase "given by Tianpeng".

That pig kept rooting around under his nose every day, and each time it rooted around, it reminded him: Tianpeng came, Tianpeng gave, and Tianpeng's gift was accepted.

He spent tens of thousands of years cutting down trees in the Moon Palace, yet he couldn't even send a single word to them.

"Alright, I'll take the job."

I stood up and my gaze fell on that T-shirt.

The coarse cloth texture was inlaid with golden laurel shavings, and the cuffs were adorned with amber-colored resin.

It still smells like that.

Rough, domineering, and brooking no refusal, it's as if Wu Gang himself is condensed into a bottle of strong liquor, one sip and you're intoxicated.

I already have a dish in my mind. A dish that uses this dress as a starting point and that fat pig as the medium.

"Wu Gang, I guarantee I'll clean this pig spotlessly. I'll make sure even Marshal Tianpeng wouldn't recognize his precious spirit pig."

I tossed the rag onto the table. "But there's a condition. I can borrow this shirt."

Wu Gang looked down at his dirty undershirt and didn't ask any further questions.

People who have stayed in the Moon Palace for a long time are like this; they are used to not asking many questions.

He simply raised his hand to scratch the back of his head and said in a muffled voice, "Fine, as long as you can deal with that pig, I'll give you ten, not just one."