At 14 years of age, Bai Zou joined the army to be a butcher after his father had passed. He had two younger siblings and a sick mother who had been injured in one of the many beast tides that hit the area.
At such a young age, he quickly grew in repute because of how meticulous he was in processing the spirit beast's body, and not only that he had shown to have an almost genius level aptitude for cultivation.
At 16 years he had already broken through to the foundation establishment realm and had blue grade pillars to boot.
The royal family quickly used its scant resources to help nurture him and even offered to move him and his family to the capital and have his post changed from a butcher.
While Bai Zou did agree to have his family move, he wanted to remain as a butcher. It was during that period that he started his cooking. He'd clean damaged carcasses and parts that were unwanted and make a few meat dishes from them.
The royal family acquiesced, though begrudgingly. Little Bai Zou's reputation slowly grew as the butcher of the field, who carved spirit beasts in one hand and cooked them with the other.
With his talent showing, spirit beasts in the core formation realm which usually had the same level of intellect as their human counterparts, even more so considering their long lives, started targeting him.
In their long years of fighting, those spirit beasts always showed a coordination that was human-like along with their cunningness. Over the years they were known to especially target any outstanding geniuses that showed up on the battlefield, even at the expense of sacrificing hundreds of their ranks for the one.
It even went to extreme cases where they'd mark those geniuses using scent-related racial abilities of some of them, and then attack them when their guards were lowered.
There was once a young general about 37 years of age and in the late stages of the core formation realm who had sword qi already developed at that age and was showing promise of becoming a palace realm expert.
His brilliance shone to all, including the spirit beasts who upon realizing the danger he posed to them, had him marked with the dust of a grey ash moth during one of the clashes.
The spirit beasts used the scent of that ash, to continuously track him as they waited for an opportune moment, and when it did, over a dozen late-stage core formation spirit beasts skilled in stealth and poison attacked him with no care for their lives.
He managed to slaughter about half of them, but he got poisoned in the end, and gotten eaten by the remaining two surviving spirit beasts at the end.
The royal family and other powers became even more cautious after this incident, however despite knowing that their geniuses could be targetted, they could not afford to hide them. They barely had any breathing room or the luxury of hiding them from the constant and brutal attacks of the spirit beasts especially during the tides, where every man, woman, and child would have to be used, to protect whatever little territory they had control over.
The best they could do was train them to the best of their abilities and offer as much protection as they could by assigning them, protectors. The protectors were usually aged war veterans in the late stages of the core formation realm, who had one foot in the grave. They only had one duty, to protect the genius even at the expense of their lives, which was why every protector was taught a destructive taboo art that would unleash a fearsome attack at the expense of their life.
The taboo art was something the royal family had been working on for thousands of years and its might when executed by a late-stage core formation expert, was sufficient to heavily injure a quasi palace realm expert.
With such firepower in their hands, the old veterans could ensure the safety of their protectees, even against a sudden beast tide or ambush like the young general had suffered.
Bai Zou with the talent he had shown was assigned one. He ended up forming a friendship with the old veteran, a friendship built on cooking. The old veteran wasn't exactly a skilled chef, but he had an obsession with duck recipes which he taught Bai Zou.
His restaurant's main dish, the golden flame roast duck was rumored to have originated from said veteran, and a few of the other duck recipes on the menu of the Golden Duck Platter restaurant.
Regardless of whether there was any truth to that statement, what was true was his deep friendship with that old veteran, which was why Bai Zou was hit hard when the veteran sacrificed himself to save Bai Zou when he was in the late stage of the core formation realm.
At the time his reputation among the populace of the Cinnabar Kingdom and the spirit beast was at an all-time high, especially the latter whom he had butchered a few of the top figures over the years.
This was why they sent a mini beast tide after him that was composed of about 300 spirit beasts, all at the core formation stage, and in the midst, there were about 4 of them that were already at the peak of the core formation stage.
The area Bai Zou had been stationed at the time became a blood bath at the onslaught of that attack with over half a million cultivators dying. Bai Zou managed to escape alive because of the veteran who executed the taboo art which opened a space for him to escape.
Over the next decade in a mad frenzy, he charged to the frontlines of anywhere with a rumored beast tide and slaughtered his way through their ranks.
He managed to increase his cultivation base within that short time to the peak of the core formation stage and develop slaughter qi and later slaughter intent which helped push his cultivation base to a quasi-palace realm expert and become the topmost figure of the kingdom.
As a quasi-palace realm cultivator, the Cinnabar kingdom behind him began its counter-attack and were finally the ones raiding their territories of those spirit beasts and bringing it under their control little by little, and within thirty years they had taken half of the territories and made it their own.
Within those thirty years, Bai Zou managed to break through to the palace realm, and along the way, he gained the moniker 'the smooth wind butcher'.
It didn't matter whether the spirit beast was skilled in defense or not, they were all the equal beneath his butcher blade. Whenever he swung his blade, there was no ostentatious display of power that came with most techniques that resulted in the destruction of the surroundings. Whenever Bai Zou swung his butcher's knife, the attack was silent and never went beyond the target and even the target never realized they'd been sliced until it was too late and their body were splitting ever so gently apart.
He had honed his slicing skills to the tip, where every movement of the blade, energy used, and containment were done with utmost precision and with one goal in mind which was to perfectly slice the spirit beast with minimal wastage of both his qi and the spirit beast materials.
Countless spirit beasts fell beneath that butcher knife and got harvested. Even as a palace realm expert he never forgot his roots.
Finally, they charged the main territory where the most powerful and ferocious of spirit beasts lay, the Aurora wild forest.
If it wasn't for the fearsome roars, the threat of brutal death, and being eaten, it was one of the most beautiful places in the whole kingdom with aurora lights shining at night and it was also the spiritual qi in the area was the densest in the whole kingdom.
The royal family had long day dreamed of making that area their own, ever since they spotted but they could never set foot there, but with a palace realm expert who had honed his skills in butchering spirit beasts, maybe they could finally do it and finally have full control over every inch of land within their kingdom.
But sadly things didn't go as planned, they barely made it halfway into the forest before they were routed back, and with serious injuries at that, with Bai Zou's injuries being the heaviest.
The forest housed a spirit beast in the palace realm, that was in hibernation and got woken by the commotion and retaliated. Its cultivation realm remains unknown but in its half asleep state, it managed to wound Bai Zou and slaughter a third of the parties who had charged in.
A ceasefire ensued in the kingdom, with the spirit beasts restraining themselves within their remaining territories while the kingdom abandoned all thoughts of getting close to the Aurora wild forest.
It was after that fight that Bai Zou settled and opened the Golden Duck Platter Restaurant.
To Li Shu, while she admired the cooking of his restaurant and thought it was divine. When she entertained the thought of filing a suit against him, all she felt was dread.
She was taking someone who was known to cleave hard-skinned core formation spirit beasts as easy as putting a knife through butter and had a knack for it, and she was filing a complaint against him, and when she felt his spiritual pressure that had the brutality of slaughter in it, she would have run away had her legs not given out immediately.
...
"Ahem."
This 𝓬ontent is taken from fre𝒆webnove(l).𝐜𝐨𝗺