The people of Yan call Baekjo 'the kitchen of all under heaven.' They say Jinlong himself gave it that name. In this city, every noodle shop, every palace banquet, has its own story to tell.

But the real name of the person who compiled this city's history and refined its script appears nowhere in any history book. Even though they did so much for the world.

This story begins with a retired official who walks into the Dali Temple of his own accord. The charge: arson. But something about this confession is off from the very start.

1. Who Is the Victorian Tourist Who Ordered Five Tofu Dishes?

All of Baekjo was buzzing with excitement ahead of the Mid-Autumn Baekjinyeon banquet. So was Weimigak, the little noodle shop across from the Dali Temple.

Two Dali Temple officials at the next table start chatting. About a mysterious fire that broke out at the Jeongpungnu kitchen. About a burglary at retired official Yeong's mansion where the thief left nothing missing but honey smeared on a painting of an immortal.

Then this rumor comes up: a few days ago, an old man in prison clothes ate twenty bowls of rice, then threw the empty bowls at the Dali Temple's gate, shouting, 'I'm the one who set fire to the archives!'

At the next table sits a Victorian tourist speaking fluent Yan. His name: Huang. Everyone assumes he can't understand the officials' conversation, but he's caught every word.

It turns out the five dishes Huang ordered are all tofu, one way or another. That he didn't even realize it himself only makes things more awkward for the shop's owner, Kang, and the young chef, Yu.

Sharing food with the customer next to him, he even helps himself to her dessert (candied tangerine peel) — only to learn she's Xingzhu, the food critic behind the Baekjo Culinary Records.

Provoked by Huang's taunt that maybe his own cooking skills just aren't up to snuff, an angry Yu makes a bet — if Huang finds better food elsewhere, Yu will owe him a free meal and the recipe. This customer's real name, revealed only later, turns out to be Rhodes Island operator Blaze.

2. The Confession About Setting a Wound Beast's Straw on Fire

Next door at the Dali Temple's court, something even stranger is happening. Retired vice magistrate Woojing has turned himself in claiming arson — except his alibi doesn't add up at all.

At the time of the fire, he was already in prison. Yet Woojing calmly rambles on — that he tied a burning bundle of straw to an injured wound beast and set it loose, that he struck the railing with his shackles 863 times (the exact number of years since the Dali Temple was founded!) to make a spark.

Lin Qingyan, his former student now attending as court clerk, grows more and more tense beside her colleague Haejin, who barely holds back a laugh.

Then, in a single sentence, Woojing lets his true feeling slip.

That document was nothing but pretty lies through and through. Reading it dirties the eyes and dirties the heart. So I burned it all away. How clean is that!

— Woojing

Going herself to check the burned-out archive, Lin Qingyan finds a scorched pine branch amid the ashes. It's from the very tree Woojing once said, 'When I die, make my coffin from this wood.'

Back at Weimigak, Blaze runs into her guardian at the mansion, Lin Qingyan. Getting scolded for sneaking out, she belatedly brings up her father.

Her father spent over a decade as a low-ranking official in the Ministry of Rites before he passed away. To Lin Qingyan's comforting remark that he 'must have been a good person,' Blaze answers bitterly. 'A good person...'

even good people die all the same.'

3. Two Granddaughters in the Yeong Mansion, Neither Gives a Clean Answer

Former Minister of Rites Yeongsul, nearing retirement, has two granddaughters at his mansion — his blood grandchild Yeong Sachu, and Yeong-in, whom he took in as a child.

By day, Yeong-in organizes historical records at the Hall of History; in secret, she writes food criticism under the pen name 'Wandering Xingzhu.' She's the very customer who bumped into Blaze at Weimigak.

There'd just been a break-in at the mansion, too. Nothing was stolen, but honey had been smeared on the mouth of an immortal in a painting — a burglary that mimicked the Kitchen God, a silencing kind of theft.

Lin Qingyan goes straight to Yeongsul and presses him about a case from ten years ago — the officially recorded death of Gojeon, a low-ranking Ministry of Rites official, who drowned in a river while accompanying a delegation to Victoria.

Yeongsul neither confirms nor denies it, just returning the same question. 'Magistrate Lin, what answer is it you're looking for?'

Meanwhile, Blaze causes her own kind of trouble, leaping out an 18th-floor window to make her escape. And when an invitation arrives at Weimigak for the final chef selection competition at Jeongpungnu for the Baekjinyeon, Blaze's next destination is set.

4. Three 'No Results Found' in a Row on the Academy Registry

Touring Baekjo's dessert shops with Xingzhu, Blaze suddenly confesses — the candied tangerine peel her father used to send her in Victoria as a child tastes different from the one she's eating now.

Her father was from Yan, she says, and died abroad while she was still growing up. Xingzhu starts to say, 'Blaze, your father must have...' — and quickly swallows the rest.

Around this time, Lin Qingyan sneaks into Baekjo Academy under a false identity and searches the registry for 'Gojeon.' The result comes back the same, three times running.

No results found.

— Baekjo Academy Registry Search

Then she finds a record under 'Gojeong,' a name off by one character — top of every class, but never finished his studies. The seal reason reads:

'In 1062, Gojeong and his wife and daughter went missing. This record is hereby sealed.'

In flashback, Lin Qingyan presses Blaze again on the year and place of her birth. Blaze can't answer. 'How would I even remember that...'

Meanwhile, in the Weimigak kitchen, longevity noodle training is in full swing. Blaze and Xingzhu, exhausted from staying up all night, resort to a 'sly trick' of secretly boiling store-bought dry noodles to make it through — but Yu catches on by smell alone and flies into a rage. Even so, he can't deny the taste holds up.

5. The Old Master Who Said Never Add Sugar to Candied Tangerine Peel — Then Suddenly, Fire

The first gate of the Jeongpungnu competition is identifying ingredients in tea; the second, explaining the origins of past Baekjinyeon dishes. Blaze draws 'The Realm's One Hundred' — the story of a humble braised radish dish some Taishi offered Jinlong fifty years ago.

When the story ends, the audience stirs. Jeongpungnu's head chef, Makbulbok, descends the stairs and asks, 'Even after all this time, someone still remembers that.'

At the final gate, tasting the longevity noodles Blaze presents, Makbulbok recognizes the broth's secret and flies into a rage. 'You've made a fool of me!' He suspects a connection to the Weimigak owner.

When she explains sincerely, Makbulbok slips out a hint. 'The one thing you must never do when making candied tangerine peel is add sugar. That's using sweetness to hide poor skill.' At that moment, the chandelier overhead catches fire.

As Blaze uses Arts to put out the flames amid the fire, an arsonist (wearing a mask) is found among the wreckage. Lin Qingyan gives chase but loses them, and Makbulbok, feeling he owes his life to Blaze, finally opens up.

Ten years ago, the cook who made the last meal for a death-row prisoner at the Ministry of Justice's prison was himself — 'Mak Soryuk.' That prisoner's name was Gojeon. And Woojing and Yeongsul, he says, had come to visit him.

For the first time, Blaze learns her father was a death-row prisoner. Even in shock, she doesn't let go of one point. 'Just because it's written in a history book doesn't make it true!

If history books were all true, then what exactly are you even investigating?'

6. Even a Stream Is a Page of History

As a girl, Yeong-in once met a low-ranking official who'd been caught sneaking paper and brushes from the mansion library. His name was Gojeon. He was always alone, and he never once forgot her birthday.

To Yeong-in, who called herself 'just an ordinary person,' Gojeon passed along something his own teacher once told him.

Most people never get their names into the history books, but that doesn't make them the blank spaces in that history. If anything, they are the very pages of the book itself.

— Gojeon

That winter, Yeong-in never saw Gojeon again. When she asked the mansion physician how he was, the answer was short. 'He passed away...

in an accident on the way to Victoria.'

Those words line up exactly with the 'official closing report' Lin Qingyan gave Blaze. And yet the physician himself tilts his head, puzzled. 'I never understood why, as sick as he was, he insisted on going all that way.'

Lin Qingyan announces she'll close the case, to keep Blaze from being pulled somewhere more dangerous. But a single line from her colleague Haejin changes her mind.

'If it's something that can't stay hidden, better to bring it into the light yourself.'

That night, Simcheol finds a single document on Lin Qingyan's desk, pinned down by her official robes and an inkstone. It was her letter of resignation.

7. The Night the Baekjinyeon Caught Fire — 'That Woman's Descendant'

Blaze, slipped in as a cook. Yeong-in, entering with a forged invitation. And Lin Qingyan, having removed her official robes to sneak in as well. Each stood in that banquet hall for her own reason.

As the emperor enters, Lin Qingyan cries out, 'I have something to report to Your Majesty!' A moment later, the entire hall bursts into flame.

Fleeing through the palace corridor amid the chaos, Blaze is seized by an unfamiliar 'Imperial Guard instructor.' Crossing blades with her, the words she throws out are like a bolt from the blue.

'The Imperial Guard has been tracking your whereabouts for over forty years now. You're that woman's descendant. Forty years ago, the one child who vanished without a trace from a family convicted of treason.'

Blaze protests that she never knew a thing about her own birth, but gets no answer. Lin Qingyan, arriving late, steps in between them. 'It's for the sake of the truth...

the very truth all of you are turning your backs on.'

The instructor warns that it would take three of them to stop her. Even so, Lin Qingyan doesn't yield. '...Go!' With that one word left behind, Blaze goes flying beyond the city walls.

8. A Tangerine Seed Becomes a Tangerine, No Matter Where It Lands

Blaze wakes at Weimigak after passing out, unable to answer when Yu asks what exactly she's trying to find when she doesn't even know who she is.

A tangerine seed rides the wind from south of the river to north of it. It's not the south, and it's not the north, that made that seed into a tangerine — it's decades of sunlight and rain. Surface and substance can differ. Only once you understand that can you move forward.

— Yu

Meanwhile, at the Dali Temple, the last conversation between Woojing and Yeongsul continues. Yeongsul finally admits it — that he had the Minister of Justice killed, because the entire Taishi affair was, from start to finish, a false charge.

It's also revealed that on the night Gojeon was caught trying to save a baby girl from the Taishi's mansion, it was Yeongsul who took the child in and raised her instead. That child was Yeong-in.

Yu, Weimigak's young chef, tells her something else — that every dawn, Gojeon used to stand in this very alley, gazing for a long time at the mansion where the child he couldn't protect with his own hands was living.

Only then does Blaze understand her father's other life. 'A man who spent his whole life lying to protect someone he'd never even met, a man who lost his own daughter and lost himself along with her — I've never met anyone like that... What a fool he was.'

It's here that Blaze reveals her real name for the first time: 'Go Chokhwang.' It means the light of a candle flame — faint, but still lighting up what's around it. Yeong-in quietly repeats the name, then holds out her hand.

'From today, you're not alone anymore.'

9. Offering Longevity Noodles to Jinlong

In the end, Blaze walks all the way into the Forbidden Palace and sets down a bowl of noodles before Jinlong — for the true birthday no one else bothers to remember.

Blaze asks how someone as remarkable as the Taishi ended up condemned for treason — whether it truly was a false charge. Jinlong's answer isn't what she expects.

'A false charge? That wasn't the truth — it was simply a solution...'

The Taishi truly had taken part in that rebellion. But it was meant to end a tyranny, and the script was already written beforehand for her alone to bear all the blame after the fact. Even the Jinlong of today was someone seated on the throne within that very script.

Blaze doesn't ask for an apology, or for her father's honor to be restored. Instead, she asks for just one thing.

Just make me one promise. Don't forget them.

— Blaze

After a long silence, Jinlong decides not to pursue Blaze's crimes, and orders that 70% of all of Baekjo's energy be mobilized to open Sui's tomb — a dangerous decision to grant clemency to a being sealed away for so long.

Epilogue. It Snowed Over Baekjo That Night

Weimigak's young chef Yu, the customer Wang who often dropped by, and even Nian, Dusk, Ji, and Ling — all of them, it turns out, were siblings split off from a single being called Sui.

To Wang, who means to enter the tomb alone out of guilt over their dead third sister, Yu insists on feeding him a bowl of soup first, then hands back his own share of the power. 'We were always just 'me,' from the very start.'

Facing his true self inside the tomb, Wang makes a resolve: whoever wins will live and whoever loses will vanish, but if this can make room for his siblings to live as people, then that's enough.

As Baekjo's energy shifts toward the tomb, it snows over the city for the first time in ages. Blaze and Lin Qingyan look up at it together.

I just wish this snow would keep falling a little longer.

— Blaze

Woojing accepts a ten-year sentence, and before boarding the transport carriage, asks for one last meal from Weimigak. Lin Qingyan decides to leave the Dali Temple and return to the Ministry of Personnel.

A few days later, Weimigak opens its doors again. Yu thinks everything that happened feels like a dream, but as he checks the broth's flavor one bowl at a time, he quietly breathes a sigh of relief. 'Thank goodness...

same taste as always. Just live looking at what's in front of you — leave tomorrow's worries for tomorrow.'

There were people whose names never made it into history — a father who lied for the sake of the truth, an old man who took in a child in another's place, a being who walked into the tomb on behalf of its siblings. And two daughters who chose never to forget them are, even today, checking the same taste of broth as they prepare the next meal.