Ten Months On

Chapter 19: Servitude

As the newly appointed "head maid" of the youngest Sect Master in Silver Wolf Sect history, Su Chen was surprisingly living a pretty carefree life.

She barely had to do much throughout the day except to cook, serve and cater to the Young Master's whims and fancy.

Which did not, she stresses, include bed service.

For such a perverted man, she was surprised to find out how chaste this man was in real life.

No women in his life, lovers at the side or trips to the brothel.

Men and women from the jianghu are famously known as a free-spirited lot. Their open-mindedness extended to their relationships with the opposite (and sometimes same) gender.

Men and women could have multiple lovers. Though in this era, the men were more possessive in nature and were cruel when found out that they were cheated on by their lovers. But the women were also to be reckoned with. Su Chen recalled hearing a story of how a woman from the jianghu who was cheated on by her scholar husband, had actually took the cleaver and chopped off his little thing. She then went on a spree to cook the thing and made his mistress eat it in front of her.

Su Chen felt bouts of shivers, recalling the memory.

Yet, Shen Yi rarely talked to other women. There were no other young women besides her and Yuan at the Silver Wolf base. The rest of the female servants were stocky labour women or kitchen staff, tough and strong, not the most ideal lover.

The other men occassionally had comfort women and prostitutes visit them in their tents during the times they were out and about, but Shen Yi steered clear of them immediately heading to his tent at the end of the day and ignoring the pitiful her who slept on the floor.

But in her servitude so far, she had to say that she was given quite a bit of freedom she would not have expected from the pervert.

Most of the meals she cooked were experimentation of ideas she had for Stork Pavillion's new menu.

Some of the successful ideas had made the Silver Wolf men worship her as a goddess while she never failed to also serve the failures to her dear Young Master, who stoically ate it all up, but whose frequent trips to the loo in the middle of the night had spoke truth of the viciousness of her failed cooking.

Su Chen had gotten better at cooking her own food over the few months and felt it therapeutic. A noble miss would rarely need to learn to cook. If anything, most of the food she had to learn included many steps and the arduous task of ensuring the dish look palatable and beautiful.

Now, Su Chen favoured quick straightforward cooking that brought out the natural flavour of food best without any frills. Of course, she had experimented with different steps that would take longer and more effort such as the succesful Gong Bak Pao (Braised Pork Belly in a steamed bao sandwich) which not only included boiling the pork, but deep frying, layering the pork in marinade (that she had painstakingly experimented with before she was pleased with it) for several hours, steaming the pork for another few hours and then serving the juicy black caramelised pork belly in piping hot buns stuffed with fresh green lettuce. Even she had to control herself from swallowing her tongue at every bite, licking the aromatic sauce that trickled from the sandwich down her wrists and hands. And when she bit into the soft white fluffy bao that had absorbed bits of the fragrant sauce and bit down on the juicy plump pork belly, the fats of which felt like collagenous jelly and the marinated soft tender meat so full of flavour with edges of charred caramel bliss, Su Chen felt like heaven on earth.

In days where she had to follow Shen Yi out and about, Su Chen experimented with pickled and preserved food.

Pickled sour fruits dipped in a honey glaze were her favourite. She usually would make a big batch of candied kumquats, that looked like bright orange jewels that glistened in the sun once they were done. So sweet and tacky, sticking to her teeth, yet sour so that it helped to stimulate her appetite, making the bumpy horse ride more bearable.