Chapter 14: Pretty Good Bread

Lu came back the next morning with twice as much flour.

Lin Fan stood by the road, broom in one hand, storage key in the other.

One wagon rolled past.

Then a second.

A third.

A fourth.

Lin Fan looked at the wagons. Then at his storage room. Then at Lu.

"I said less."

Lu climbed down in the same gray apron from yesterday, trailing eight disciples, two full ovens, three tables, six clay bowls, a stone mill, enough firewood to survive a real winter, and roughly half a mountain of flour.

He calmly produced yesterday's note.

Lin Fan's own handwriting sat at the top: BRING LESS.

Underneath, in smaller, sneakier characters someone had clearly added afterward:

For the first trial.

Lin Fan raised his head very slowly.

Eight disciples found something urgent to study on the ground.

One particularly young disciple drifted behind a flour sack like it might hide him from consequences.

"You."

The disciple went white. "Senior?"

"Did you add that line?"

The disciple looked at Lu. Lu looked at the sky, as if checking the weather for the first time in his life.

Lin Fan's eyebrow twitched once and gave up. He'd learned this lesson the hard way already — arguing with cultivators about paperwork only ever ended with more paperwork.

"Fine."

Crimson walked over and lifted the stone mill one-handed, straight over his head, like it weighed nothing at all. Several disciples froze mid-breath — that mill needed six grown men just to shift it an inch.

"Crimson."

He stopped instantly.

"Both hands. You're still healing."

Dead silence.

Crimson slowly added his second hand to the mill. "Yes, Owner."

The disciples traded looks of pure horror. Lord Crimson. A red-eyed monster whose presence alone made grown men's knees buckle. Currently being scolded, gently, about proper lifting form for his injuries.

One whispered, "Just how badly was he hurt?"

Another clapped a hand over his own mouth before more could escape.

Lin Fan turned around. All eight disciples became instantly fascinated by flour sacks.

"Why is everyone acting strange today."

Nobody answered. He decided he didn't want to know badly enough to push it. "Fine. Let's bake."

Lu had clearly spent the whole night thinking. Possibly too much.

He set a bowl down. "I have reviewed yesterday's failures thoroughly."

"Good. First mistake?"

"The flame."

"Correct. Second?"

"Too much water."

"Third?"

Lu went quiet.

Lin Fan pointed straight up at the ceiling. "Nearly burning down my roof."

Lu lowered his head. "Understood."

Behind him, the alchemist had already slid a brush out of his sleeve, ready to record something.

"No secret manual," Lin Fan said, without even looking.

The brush vanished. Three other disciples' hands quietly stopped mid-reach for their own hidden brushes.

Lin Fan poured flour into the bowl. "Watch."

Eight bodies leaned in at once.

He added water — a trickle, then a pause, then another trickle. Lu's eyes narrowed like he was memorizing an ancient scripture. The alchemist's breathing turned audible.

Lin Fan stopped pouring. "That's it."

Silence.

"...That little?"

"Yes."

Lu glanced back at yesterday's now-empty water barrel, then at today's modest bowl, and something clicked visibly behind his eyes.

A disciple murmured, "Profound."

Lin Fan chose not to hear that.

Lu started kneading — stiff at first. Press. Fold. Turn. Press. Fold. Turn. The sticky mess slowly pulled itself into something smooth.

One disciple leaned in close enough to catch flour on his eyebrows, watching the dough like it might lunge.

It didn't move.

He let out a breath. "It didn't attack."

Lin Fan didn't even look up. "Dough doesn't attack people."

Crimson, meanwhile, was watching Lu's hands with terrifying focus. "Your strength is excessive."

Lu froze mid-fold. "By how much?"

"Approximately twelve percent."

Lin Fan stared at him. "How would you even know that."

Crimson pointed at the dough. "It stretched three fingers further than the last fold."

Lin Fan looked at the dough. At Crimson. At the dough again.

"You know, you could use that kind of attention span for something other than teacups."

Crimson went quiet, thinking hard about that.

Lin Fan immediately regretted opening his mouth. "Forget I said anything."

They split up the dough. Lu shaped a loaf. The disciples followed.

The first produced a brick. The second an egg. The third something Lin Fan quietly suspected could double as a blunt weapon in a pinch.

Crimson made a triangle again.

Lin Fan stared at it. Crimson stared back, unblinking.

"You tried the triangle yesterday."

"The shape carries advantages."

"No."

"It could allow—"

"No."

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Lin Fan took it from him, rolled it round with two motions, and set it down. Crimson watched the whole process like it contained a hidden truth.

"Round distributes heat evenly," Lin Fan explained, mostly to end the conversation.

Crimson nodded slowly, clearly assembling an entire theory in his head about thermal cultivation principles.

"Don't overthink it."

"Understood," Crimson said, with far too much seriousness for the sentence, which worried Lin Fan more than the triangle ever had.

The loaves went into the oven. Normal fire. Normal heat. No spiritual flames, no explosions, no defensive formations, nobody drawing a sword this time.

Lin Fan nearly teared up from sheer relief.

The smell rolled out through the open door and down the road, and within minutes it had done more advertising than every flyer combined. The old woodcutter and his grandson showed up first. Then yesterday's family. Then two traveling cultivators reined in their horses outside, sniffing the air.

"Bread? From that place?"

They'd heard the rumors — a strange mortal owner, bandits doing dishes, a terrifying red-eyed worker, a Sect Master learning to bake bread of all things. Surely exaggerated.

The older one walked in first. Elder Mo, eighty-some years deep into formation study, took one look around and felt his expectations collapse instantly. Old tables. Plain chairs. Simple cups. Nothing glowing. Nothing that looked remotely expensive.

So this is the mysterious teahouse everyone won't stop talking about?

He nearly laughed out loud.

Then he rested one hand on the nearest table, purely out of habit.

His smile evaporated.

For one breath, nothing. Then his whole awareness lurched sideways — the table gone, the room gone, replaced by endless intersecting lines of Heaven and Earth, Yin folding into Yang, chaos and order locking together in something terrifyingly perfect.

Dao Rhythm?!

No — deeper than anything he'd studied in eighty years of dedicated formation work.

He yanked his hand back like it had bitten him. The vision snapped shut. Just a table again, complete with a small tea stain near the edge where someone had set down a cup wrong.

His eyes crawled slowly to the chairs. The teapot. The cups. The lamp. Then a plain little landscape painting on the wall, hung there — as Lin Fan would have explained, had anyone asked — because the wall had looked a bit bare.

His spiritual sense brushed it for half a second. The painted mountain seemed to stretch on forever.

His knees actually wobbled.

If a treasure holding even a fraction of this showed up in the outside world, sects would go to war over it. Old monsters would crawl out of hiding just to fight for a corner of it.

And this place is using it to hold up teacups.

That was when Lin Fan walked past, needing to get by. "Excuse me."

Elder Mo jumped a full inch off the ground.

Lin Fan grabbed the chair beside him and dragged it half a step sideways, out of the walkway.

Elder Mo watched, breath held, as an unimaginable web of cosmic balance shifted — and then simply resettled, perfect as ever, like nothing at all had happened.

He stared at Lin Fan. Lin Fan stared back, waiting.

"Ordering something?"

"...Tea."

"Which kind?"

Elder Mo glanced down at the teacup in front of him and had a sudden, cold thought: if the painting is that dangerous, what is the cup?

He decided he did not, in fact, dare pick it up.

"...Anything."

Lin Fan frowned. "That's not a kind of tea."

The oven opened, and Elder Mo's crisis was immediately forgotten by everyone in the room.

Warm air rolled out. Inside sat golden loaves — no smoke, no char, no reason for anyone to grab a bucket.

Lu stared, hands trembling.

One disciple's eyes went glassy and wet.

The woodcutter's grandson pointed. "That uncle's crying again."

The disciple wiped his face fast. "I'm not crying."

"Then why's there water?"

He turned sharply away without answering.

Lin Fan patted the air near him sympathetically. "His bread survived. Let him have this."

The disciple's shoulders shook harder.

Lu lifted a single loaf with both hands, carrying it over like it was made of glass. "Please."

The whole room went silent. Even Elder Mo forgot, briefly, about the possibly-cursed teacup in front of him.

Lin Fan tore off a piece. Steam curled up. He bit in.

Soft. Warm. Clean flavor. A touch dense in the middle, crust could use another minute — but it was, unmistakably, bread. Real bread, not the charred weapon-brick from the day before.

He nodded. "Pretty good."

Lu froze completely.

The loaf slipped from his hands and landed square on his own foot.

He didn't move an inch.

Eight disciples stared at their Sect Master. Then—

Thud. One dropped to his knees.

Thud. A second.

Within seconds all eight were kneeling in the flour-dusted dirt. The guard by the door lowered his head too. Even the reformed bandits, standing off to one side, straightened up like something solemn had just happened.

Elder Mo's own heart skipped. Pretty good. Two words. He looked at the impossible table, the world-ending painting, the teacup he'd been too afraid to touch — and then at a Sect Master kneeling in front of an ordinary-looking young man over a comment on bread.

What kind of praise carries that much weight?

"Why is everyone kneeling again?" Lin Fan asked the room in general.

Nobody answered. Lu's eyes had gone red. "I have waited many years to hear those words said about anything I made."

Lin Fan opened his mouth to say something and then just... didn't.

For once, he actually understood. This wasn't about the bread at all. Lu had spent his whole life on a path of power and politics and sect obligation he'd never actually chosen, and today someone had finally, casually, told him the thing he genuinely wanted to do wasn't a waste of his time.

Lin Fan let the silence sit. One breath. Two. Three.

Then he pointed down.

"Lu. You're standing on the bread."

Lu's expression cracked. He yanked his foot back so fast the woodcutter's grandson burst out laughing, and the whole heavy moment shattered on the spot.

Three disciples dove for the fallen loaf. One inspected the crust like a battlefield medic. "Still intact!"

Another exhaled hard. "A close call."

Lin Fan rubbed his forehead. "It's bread. Not your Sect Ancestor's remains."

They went quiet. One of them wrapped it carefully in cloth anyway, just in case.

Lin Fan took a second bite. "Next time, less dense in the middle."

Lu already had a wooden board out. "And a longer bake for the crust."

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

"Also—"

Lin Fan stopped talking.

Carved across the top of the board, already finished, in four enormous characters:

OWNER LIN: PRETTY GOOD

"...When did you write that?"

Lu hugged the board to his chest. "Just now."

"Hand it over."

Lu stepped back. "This is important."

"It's a food review."

"It is guidance."

"It's two words, Lu!"

Lin Fan reached for it. Lu moved faster than a man his age had any business moving, and eight disciples instantly closed ranks around their Sect Master like a human wall.

Lin Fan looked at eight full-grown cultivators defending a plank of wood that said Pretty Good with their lives.

"...Fine."

He pointed at the whole group. "But if I ever see that hanging inside your sect hall, I'm burning it."

Everyone went pale.

"...Figuratively."

The disciples relaxed. Elder Mo did not. He can threaten to burn down the entire Mountain River Sect's morale with two words?

Crimson noticed Elder Mo's face and shot him a long, quiet look of pity.

His second of the day.

By noon the smell of bread had pulled in a proper crowd. Seven cups of tea sold. Fourteen Spirit Stones, real ones, counted twice just to enjoy it. No monster cores, no cursed pills, nobody trying to barter with a suspicious jade fragment.

[Legitimate customer service recorded.][Revenue recognized: 14 Low-grade Spirit Stones.][Hospitality Points: 143 → 157.][Bread-related customer interest detected.][Green Heart Tea condition advanced.]

Still locked. But closer. At least something in his life was proceeding like a normal business should.

Behind him, Elder Mo had finally worked up the nerve to actually pick up his teacup. The second his fingers closed around it, his face changed all over again — the tea inside sat completely, unnaturally still, not one drop of steam escaping, like time itself had stopped moving inside the cup out of respect.

He nearly dropped it on the spot.

Crimson's voice arrived at his shoulder. "Careful."

Elder Mo's blood went cold.

Crimson eyed the cup. "If you break it, Owner deducts the cost."

"...How much would that even be?"

Crimson thought about how Lin Fan handled broken dishware in general, and his expression turned grave. "I don't know."

Elder Mo's hand started shaking. Crimson nodded, satisfied — as far as he was concerned, that was exactly the correct amount of fear to have.

As the crowd thinned, Lu prepared to head back — construction on his side project needed overseeing.

Lin Fan handed him a cloth. "Take this. Somehow the only thing in this shop that hasn't been touched by flour yet."

Lu accepted it with both hands.

Elder Mo's pupils shrank the instant Lu wiped his own sleeve with it — the flour didn't brush off, didn't blow away. It simply stopped existing.

He held his breath. ANOTHER one?!

Lu folded the cloth carefully away.

Lin Fan pointed down the road. "Bakery goes over there."

"Beside the teahouse?"

"Near it. Not blocking it."

Lu nodded and produced yet another wooden sign, freshly painted with a cloud drifting across it.

HEAVENLY CLOUD BAKERY

Lin Fan had to admit, grudgingly, that it looked genuinely good. "Fine. Just don't cover mine."

Lu bowed. The loading began — ovens, flour, firewood, the stone mill, the surviving bread.

Lin Fan caught the bandit leader mid-attempt to smuggle a loaf inside his own robes.

"What are you doing."

"...Preserving it."

"For what."

"Training purposes."

Lin Fan held his hand out flat. The bandit surrendered the loaf with visible reluctance.

"You are not starting a Bread Dao."

"Yes, Owner."

Crimson, standing nearby, had gone visibly thoughtful.

"Not you either."

Crimson silently let go of whatever plan had just started forming.

By the time the road went quiet again, Lin Fan swept flour into a growing pile while Crimson dragged the tables back into place and the five bandits mopped up with buckets like a very committed cleaning brigade.

Lin Fan eyed his storage room. "We need more space."

The bandit leader instantly started pacing out measurements on the ground.

"No circles," Lin Fan warned, before anyone could get creative with a formation array for a storage shed.

The rope quietly disappeared back into a sleeve.

For a few peaceful minutes, everything was calm.

Then he spotted it.

A brand-new sign, right at the roadside. Large. Gold-lettered. Expensive-looking in a way that made his own hand-carved board look like a mistake.

GOLDEN JADE TEAHOUSEFINE TEA — ONE LOW-GRADE SPIRIT STONE

Lin Fan stopped sweeping mid-stroke.

His own tea cost two.

He looked at the sign. At his own shop. Back at the sign.

Crimson drifted over. "Owner?"

Lin Fan's grip tightened around the broom handle.

Crimson's eyes narrowed at that grip specifically. He personally knew exactly what that broom was capable of. "...Those bastards."

His own killing intent stirred right along with it. "Shall I—"

"No."

Crimson stopped, disappointed.

Lin Fan stared at the words ONE LOW-GRADE SPIRIT STONE like they'd personally insulted his mother.

Crimson had watched this man face down armed bandits without flinching. Watched him stay perfectly calm while a Sect Master sobbed over bread. Watched him casually handle treasures Crimson himself couldn't fully comprehend.

A one-stone price cut had done what none of that could.

So this, Crimson thought, deeply solemn, is what Owner truly fears.

Lin Fan looked down at the flour still coating half his own floor. He hadn't even finished cleaning up from today, and someone had already opened a price war on him.

"Crimson."

"Yes, Owner."

"Staff meeting. Tomorrow."

Crimson straightened his back like he'd just been handed a sword.

"Understood."

He glanced once more at the golden sign glinting down the road, expression gone cold and flat.

The enemy, clearly, had no idea what it had just started.