Wei Jia's diagram of "Deconstructed Dan Dan Noodles" was still displayed on her tablet, when without a word, she swiped it away, deleting the file.
"They want to play games?" She said with a low growl as she walked towards the main ingredient pantry, where Tianxia kept its perfectly sourced, expensive supplies. "Fine. We'll play."
She entered her access code and the heavy door opened revealing a treasure ingredients of global cuisine. She ignored the delicate, rare items. Her hands picked up the ingredients with the powerful, bold flavors.
She grabbed a container of huge tiger prawns. She took a whole basket of black garlic, its cloves dark and sticky with fermented sweetness. Then she grabbed a a jar of premium black bean paste (douchi), its salty, funky aroma so strong it could be smelled even through the sealed lid. Next she took a container of blistered, fire roasted padron peppers and a jar of pickled wild chilies.
As she came back to her workstation, Ming entered the lab.
"Are you ready…" He stopped midway when he saw her coming from the pantry with her arms full of new ingredients.
"What is all this? Aren't you done with your dish?" He asked in a worried tone.
Jia slammed all the ingredients on the table, and started working on them while explaining everything about the sabotage to him. She had no time to waste. Ming was shocked.
"I knew it won't be easy. But I don't expect they'd go to such lengths!"
"Its okay!! Let them do whatever they want to. I'll show them I'm not afraid of their petty tricks."
"What are you making?" He asked. "This isn't Dan Dan noodles."
"This is what my grandmother used to make on nights when we had nothing but a handful of dried shrimp, some chili flakes. She called it 'Typhoon Shelter Prawns.'"
She looked at Ming, a dangerous smile playing on her lips.
"They took my infused oil, so they left me with nothing but technique and rage. We'll see how they like the taste of that. I'm not giving them another chance anymore, Ming. I'm giving them a volcano."
The laboratory became a storm. Wei Jia set the induction burner to its maximum setting, a level usually reserved for experiments.
"Stand back." She commanded.
She began to move with a speed and ferocity Ming had never witnessed. The new knife was super fast in her hands, mincing garlic, ginger, and chilies into a fine, fragrant paste in seconds. The prawns were shelled and deveined with brutal efficiency. Then came the fire.
She slicked the wok with oil, and when it began to smoke, she threw in the aromatics. The sound was an explosive sizzle. A pungent aroma of garlic and chili bloomed in the air.
Next, the prawns hit the wok. Wei Jia tilted the pan, and the oil ignited. A column of fire leaped towards the ceiling, licking the sides of the wok and charring the prawns with wok hei.She added the black bean paste, the Shaoxing wine, the soy sauce.
Ming watched her. This wasn't that Wei Jia who he had seen cooking patiently. This was someone else. Her face was flushed, and covered with sweat, but she had never looked more powerful or more alive. He was mesmerized, and a little bit terrified.
In a final, furious series of movements, she tossed the prawns one last time, plated them on a white dish, and garnished them with freshly chopped cilantro and the blistered Padron peppers. The dish was beautiful, a chaotic pile of vibrant red prawns glistening in a dark, fragrant sauce. It was bold, aggressive, and irresistible. She set the plate down on the counter. She looked from the dish to Ming's awestruck face.
"Let them refine that."
Three floors above, in the silence of Tianxia's executive boardroom, Li Shiyan was in the middle of a sentence, dissecting Q2 profit margins with precision. The room was cold, and the air smelled of office supplies.
"...and if we analyze the supply chain inefficiencies in the Southeast Asian corridor, we can optimize..."
He stopped mid sentence. A scent had reached in his office. It was faint at first, an aroma that had somehow bypassed the building's billion dollar air filtration system. The members of the board looked at him, confused by his sudden silence.
"Mr. Li?" the CFO prompted. "The supply chain...?"
But Li Shiyan wasn't in the boardroom anymore.
He was now ten years old, small and lonely, hiding from his tutors in the one place they never thought to look for him: the back kitchen of his family's estate. The head chef, a stern man who ran the kitchen was gone for the evening. In his place was a visiting cook, a woman with laughing eyes and flour on her cheek, who had looked at the little boy in the corner and taken pity on him.
She had been stir frying something in a massive, seasoned wok, flames leaping around its edges.
"A little dragon's fire to make you strong." She had whispered, giving him a prawn directly from the wok. It was mouth wateringly delicious. It was spicy, garlicky, savory. He had never tasted anything like it before, and he had never been allowed to taste anything like it since. The cook had been dismissed the next day for inappropriate familiarity.
The memory buried for decades under layers of discipline and control, hit him with the force of a physical blow. A hunger unlike anything he had felt in years formed in his gut. It was more than a memory of taste; it was a memory of warmth, of a forbidden moment of genuine human connection in his scheduled childhood.
"Excuse me." He pushed back his chair and stood, ignoring the stunned looks of his executive team. "I have to attend to a critical quality control issue."
He walked out of the boardroom without another word, following the scent like a possessed man. He didn't take the elevator. He took the stairs. The aroma grew stronger as he neared the research and development wing. He didn't need to check the lab numbers. He knew exactly where it was coming from.
He arrived at the door to Wei Jia's lab just as she was putting the final touches on her dish. On a white plate, she had arranged a nest of crispy, golden brown fried noodles. At the top lay a pile of the prawns she had just created from the fire. They were magnificent, a vibrant, blazing red, glistening in a dark, fragrant sauce studded with garlic and chilies.
He pushed the door open and stopped, his breath catching in his throat. She looked up at the sound, her hand freezing mid air as she was about to add a final garnish of cilantro. Her face was flushed and full of sweat from the heat of the wok. Her eyes, when they met his, were not the eyes of the defeated woman he had seen in his office instead they were the eyes of a warrior.
In that moment, standing amidst the smoke and the aroma of her creation, surrounded by the white walls of the prison he had built for her, she was the most magnificent thing he had ever seen. She was not a consultant. She was not his employee. She was a phoenix, risen from the ashes of sabotage.
And Li Shiyan, the man who controlled everything, realized that he was very hungry but it had nothing to do with the food.
The air in the laboratory, thick with the scent of chili and garlic filled with a new energy. His legendary composure was gone, replaced by a raw intensity. He was breathing slightly heavily, his chest rising and falling under his perfect suit.
He entered inside the lab. He didn't speak to her. He didn't acknowledge Ming. He ignored her completely, he was completely focused on the dish she had just created.
He reached past her, his hand steady as he picked up a fork from her workstation. He took one of the largest prawns from the crispy noodles. He brought it to his mouth and took a bite. And then he froze.
His body went rigid. His eyes, which had been fixed on the plate lost focus. The fork, held in his fingers, fell from his grasp. It hit the floor. Wei Jia stared, her anger forgotten, replaced by shock. Ming flinched at the sound.
Slowly, Li Shiyan lowered his gaze and looked at her. When he spoke, his voice was not the commanding voice of a CEO. It was a strange, broken voice she had never heard before.
"Where did you learn to make that?"