He awoke the next morning at daybreak out of habit, something his body had naturally adjusted to after months at the training camp. As he stepped out of his room and into the main corridor of the disciples’ sleeping quarters, the morning breeze brushed his hair over his shoulders, cool and crisp before the sun rose to warm up the air. Gyuvin pulled his hair back into a high ponytail to keep it out of the way for the day’s activities, heading for the Eclipse to eat breakfast before the people started coming. Hanbin was already there, standing by the serving line ladling out bowls of fragrant hot soup.
“Oh Gyuvin, you’re awake!” he said, greeting the younger boy cheerily. “The kitchen’s a little shortstaffed today because most of them are busy preparing the ingredients for the noodle-making. Wanna come and help?”
“Sure, what can I do?”
Gyuvin spent the next half hour in the serving line next to Hanbin, dishing out bowls of steamy rice topped with lightly pickled vegetables to the rest of the cultivators and disciples streaming into the dining hall. By the time the sun began to crest in the sky, the Eclipse had pretty much emptied out; most of them were already out in the Astral Courtyard setting up tables and chairs, putting out bowls of flour and salt and jars of water. The terrain of the mountain Meteor Court was built on meant some of the Court grounds were higher up; the corridors bordering the Eclipse overlooked the rest of the grounds, and Gyuvin could see merchants selling candies and trinkets wheeling their little pushcarts through the main gate to set up around the edges of the Courtyard to add to the festivity of it all.
“I think most everybody’s done eating,” Gyuvin said, putting the lid back onto the mostly-empty pot of rice. “I’m going to go and find Minwoo-sunbae and see if he needs help.”
“No, I’ll go and look for Minwoo,” Hanbin interjected. “You go look for Ricky and Zhanghao and the others. They’re probably a little lost, so it’d be good if you could get them settled in a bit since everyone else is too busy to entertain them properly.”
“Oh, right,” Gyuvin nodded. “I almost forgot. Okay, see you later!”
Gyuvin weaved through the bustling crowd of cultivators with his eyes peeled, pondering if he should just send one of them a communication array. He found them soon after; the seven of them were exploring one of the rock gardens near the Astral Courtyard, and he waved them over with some ruefulness. “I’m sorry I didn’t come and get you guys, I was helping out with something,” he said. “Do you guys want to come and join in the noodle-making activity? We’ve got hundreds of places set up, but they fill up fast so we’d better hurry.”
People were already streaming in as they re-emerged into the Courtyard, and Gyuvin could hear strains of festive music from outside the Court gates. They took off running to secure their own places and Hanbin caught a glimpse of them from afar, in the midst of carrying a big jar of water, laughing at the prospect of eight esteemed cultivators jostling for a spot to make noodles with the commoners on a holiday.
“Sunbae!” Gyuvin caught Minwoo passing by and stood up from his seat, running over immediately. “Is everything alright? Do you need my help?”
Minwoo glanced over the ingredients already set up on the table, running down a mental list. “No, you can stay with your friends. They might not know how to roll noodles properly, so make sure to show them how to do it.”
“Are you sure? I feel a little bad for slacking off when everyone else is helping…”
Minwoo smiled, ruffling his hair gently. “I’ll do twice the work today on your behalf, so you’d better go enjoy yourself.”
“Sunbae, you do twice the work on a regular basis.”
“Well…”
Gyuvin gave in and sat back down at the table. Everyone else around them was already beginning to mix their ingredients, only the seven of them who weren’t born in Sunshower City didn’t know how. The Summer Solstice Festival was a time-honored tradition; generations upon generations of people had once sat in these seats and made noodles together, and most everybody knew how to roll noodles as was the yearly tradition. Gyuvin scooped some flour and water from the big communal pot at the end of the table and got to kneading, trying his best to demonstrate the correct technique to the others, but the endeavour was so hopeless from the start Gyuvin almost wanted to laugh. The seven of them were really a living testament to the fact that cultivators were sometimes just entirely hopeless when it came to activities the commonfolk could do with ease.
“What’s all this?” Gyuvin asked despairingly. Ricky looked up at him, blinking owlishly, a pile of white liquid goop sitting in the bowl in front of him.
“I think I added too much water,” he observed, smiling calmly, in a voice so dignified one could almost forget he had viscous noodle-liquid dripping off his fingers.
“You think?”
Gyuvin handed Ricky a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his fingers off and sighed, reaching for the communal pot of flour to fix whatever noodle goop Ricky had made in his bowl. From the corner of his eye he could see Gunwook, sitting diagonal from him, rolling an extra large piece of dough into the shape of a mouse, and Jiwoong egging him on right next to him.
Gyuvin took a deep breath and sat back down, wondering if this was how Hanbin felt when he was the one in charge of making sure everyone else wasn’t doing nonsense.
“Haven’t you ever done anything like this before?” Gyuvin asked, mixing the extra flour into Ricky’s goop to fix the dough.
Ricky shook his head. “Cooking was always handled by the chefs at the Palace. The disciples aren’t even allowed into the kitchen,” he answered. “The Palace functions the way it does because everybody does their assigned jobs. Things get messy and complicated when people meddle.”
“Don’t you guys have traditions like these? I know Dewspring Estate does stuff like this all the time, the disciples wrap dumplings together during the New Year and stuff like that.”
Ricky looked a little wistful. “We don’t really do anything like that. The sect deems unnecessary celebrations a waste of time and resources.”
Gyuvin fixed him with a pitying look and sighed. “That is so sad. But then again, maybe that explains why Moonrise Palace is so rich and Meteor Court has no money.”
“Sad or not, to each their own,” Ricky answered, smiling. “But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To show me what a real festival is like?”
Gyuvin nodded, sprinkling flour over the pulled noodles to prevent them from sticking to each other. “That’s right. You might have so much fun you might not want to leave after, you know? Will your sect allow you to stay here forever?”
Ricky looked down, focusing on cleaning the flour mixture off his fingers, and said nothing more.
They managed to complete the noodle-rolling relatively unscathed, though Gyuvin made sure to nick the three noodle mice Gunwook somehow ended up successfully making before they ended up in the communal crate to be sent to the kitchen. He didn’t want to imagine the reaction of whichever poor commoner who received the noodles finding a mouse in his bowl, as funny as it would be on a regular day.
“They’re sending the noodles into the kitchen to be cooked in batches,” Junhyeon explained, finally having joined him after being relieved of water-refill duty. “They’ll start distributing them at around noon, so we can come back later.”
“Speaking of cooking,” Gyuvin interjected. “I’m going to go to the kitchen to see if they need any help. Can you take them out to explore the city or something, in the meantime?”
“Sure,” Junhyeon answered, grateful for the opportunity to take a break. “See you later!”
Gyuvin used his qinggong to scale the lower walls of the Court quickly, shortcutting the way to the kitchens on the higher levels. The kitchen was absolutely packed with people as expected, kitchen staff in aprons and cultivators in uniform alike, transporting crates and crates of freshly-rolled noodles into the supply line to get them into the boiling water. Gyuvin inserted himself easily into one of the cooking stations, stirring at the large pot of hot water in front of him like he saw everyone around him doing.
He watched the elderly lady next to him reach for a bottle of something glimmering faint green from under the stove and tip a good amount of it into the boiling water, stirring it in so the green dissipated into the steam and smoke.
“What’s that?” he asked, looking over.
The elderly lady graced him witbh a little smile, holding the bottle out to him. “It’s Soul-Cleansing Elixir. Put some in there too.”
“Soul-Cleansing Elixir?” Gyuvin took the bottle, tipping some into his pot. “Why? Aren’t these expensive?”
She shrugged, returning to her stirring. “Sect Leader Baek’s orders. We’ve been mixing Soul-Cleansing Elixir into the food for almost a decade now, who knows what for. Maybe that’s why Meteor Court has so little spirits lurking around.”
Soul-Cleansing Elixirs were elixirs refined by a higher-level cultivator, usually one specializing in medicinal healing and purification. They were useful for commoners if someone was suspected to be possessed by a demonic spirit; ironically, the elixirs were usually so expensive that most commoners would rather just hire a cultivator for an exorcism than buy the potion.
For cultivators who had a developed core, as most of them at the Court did, they weren’t susceptible to things like demonic possessions that easily, and elixirs of this type served minimal purpose. At most, it could be said to have a sort of spirit-calming effect, stabilizing one’s cultivation, but even then Gyuvin didn’t really see any significant value in mixing it into the entire sect’s food every day. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how much money the sect was spending on these elixirs every year. In fact, he didn’t even think there were any cultivators in their sect who made these elixirs. He wondered why Sect Leader Baek was going to all this trouble.
He shook his head, putting his focus back onto the cooking of noodles. The kitchen was stiflingly warm from the steam of a hundred pots boiling at once, and he threw a quick wind talisman to clear the air a little so his sweat wouldn’t drip into his eyes as he stirred. The cooked batches of noodles were strained and taken away to be cooled and mixed with a special sesame sauce, then they would be served cold topped with shredded cucumber and carrot in little enchanted paper cones that dissipated after the contents were emptied, to prevent waste.
By noon, as the sun crested in the sky, the noodles were all prepared, and Gyuvin was dismissed from the kitchen along with the rest of the cultivators to go and eat. He figured Junhyeon would have brought them out of the Court; as he left the grounds and entered the city, he kept his eyes peeled to look for any familiar faces in the sea of people out in the streets.
“Gyuvin-ah, we’re here!” Jiwoong called, waving wildly from the seats set up in front of a music hall where a beautifully dressed guzheng player was performing atop an ornately decorated stage. “Zhanghao, Yujin, Ricky and Matthew went off to look for snacks. I don’t know where Taerae went, but I presume he’s with Junhyeon.”
The ten of them ended up reuniting at some point during the course of the day, even Hanbin managed to get a break from helping with the Festival to come and join them to see a performance or two. As twilight began to descend upon the city, the sky melting into lavender and blue, they returned to Meteor Court for a quick dinner before the fireworks were supposed to begin. Dinner that day was simple, since the kitchen staff had been occupied for most of the day and didn’t have much time to make anything too special, but Gyuvin appreciated it regardless. The food at the Peak was good, but nothing under the sun could compare to the taste of home.
“The fireworks are going to start soon,” Hanbin said, looking out over the city. “People are already beginning to gather down there. We should go soon, before the crowd gets too big.”
Gyuvin shovelled the last bites of rice and stewed vegetables into his mouth. Ricky, seated in front of him, seemed to be making no move to leave.
“Don’t you want to go see the fireworks?”
Ricky bit into a piece of strawberry. “I don’t particularly like fireworks. You guys can go without me.”
“Oh, why?” Gyuvin asked, setting his chopsticks down. “Let me guess, because it’s noisy? Because you don’t like people? Because it’s noisy, and you don’t like people?”
Ricky smiled. “Something like that, so go without me. The rest of them left already, you’ll miss it.”
“You can’t miss the fireworks.”
“Yes I can.”
“I’m supposed to show you what a real festival is like, remember?” Gyuvin protested. “Fireworks are the best part of every big festival. Endure the noise for once and give it a chance, won’t you?”
Ricky sighed, like he already knew he was giving in, and stood up. “Okay, let’s go.”
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