Hana Seo woke up choking on the smell of rotting onions.
Her first coherent thought wasn't where am I or what happened, it was who the hell stores alliums near raw meat?
The second thought came slower, dragged through the sludge of a splitting headache: I'm not dead.
She should be. The last thing she remembered was standing in her apartment, staring at the email that destroyed her career
MICHELIN STAR REVOKED: INVESTIGATION INTO PLAGIARISM AND FRAUD
and then... nothing. No tunnel of light. No flashback montage.
“Get up, you lazy wretch!”
Hana's eyes snapped open.
A woman loomed over her; fifties, built like a brick oven, face cratered with old acne scars. She wore a grease-stained apron and the kind of scowl that suggested she enjoyed hurting people.
“I said up!”The boot connected again, harder this time.
Hana rolled sideways, instinct overriding confusion.
The room swam into focus.
Stone walls… Low ceiling…..A massive hearth belching smoke. Dozens of people in similar rags chopping, stirring, hauling.
The noise was deafening metal on metal, shouting, something sizzling in a pan that smelled like burning hair.
A kitchen.
Not just any kitchen. A nightmare.
Hana's chef-brain catalogued the horrors in rapid succession: cross-contamination everywhere, no temperature control, raw poultry next to vegetables, a rat casually strolling across a prep station while everyone ignored it, and Jesus Christ was that mold being scraped off bread and served anyway?
“Are you deaf and stupid?” The brick-oven woman Head Cook, judging by the way everyone gave her space, grabbed Hana by the hair and yanked her forward.
“You've got thirty seconds to haul water, or I'm throwing you to the guards for laziness. They'll find better uses for you than I can.”
The threat was clear.
Hana's survival instinct kicked in. “Yes, ma'am.”
Her voice came out wrong; raspy, accented differently than she expected. But the woman released her with a shove, and Hana stumbled toward a line of wooden buckets, mind racing.
Okay. Okay. Process this.
She wasn't in her apartment. She wasn't in Los Angeles. She was in some kind of... medieval castle? Palace? The architecture screamed pre-industrial Europe, but the fashion was more fantasy than historical. And everyone spoke English, except it wasn't quite English, except somehow she understood it perfectly and they understood her and…
“Move it, Kitchen Girl!”
Right. Existential crisis later. Survive now.
Hana grabbed a bucket. God, it was heavy, actual wood, no plastic, no handles and followed a girl about sixteen toward a stone well in the corner.
The girl moved with the mechanical efficiency of someone who'd done this a thousand times.
“You're new,”the girl muttered without looking at her.
“Or stupid. Maybe both.”
“New,” Hana managed.
“I... don't remember how I got here.”
“Nobody does. You get sold, traded, or born into it. Doesn't matter which.” The girl hauled up a bucket of water that should've required two people.
“I'm Mira. Don't bother telling me your name. Marta doesn't use them. You're Kitchen Girl until you prove useful or die.”
Fantastic.
Mira glanced at her sideways. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”
“Something like that.”
“Well, ghosts don't haul water. Get moving, or Marta will make you regret waking up.”
Hana filled her bucket;arms shaking, back screaming and followed Mira back into the chaos.
The kitchen was worse up close. The “prep stations” were just rough tables covered in God-knows-what. Knives were dull, chipped, filthy. A cook was wiping his nose with his hand and then kneading dough. Another sneezed directly into a pot of soup.
Hana's eyes twitched.
I've seen Michelin kitchens shut down for less than this.
“Kitchen Girl!” Marta's bellow cut through the noise.
“Stop gawking and start scrubbing! Those pots won't clean themselves!”
Hana turned toward a mountain of scorched cookware that looked like it hadn't been properly cleaned since the Bronze Age.
This is my life now, she thought grimly.
Dishwasher to the medieval damned.
She rolled up her sleeves of rough, filthy fabric that made her skin crawl and got to work.
Hours blurred together.
Scrub. Rinse. Repeat. Her hands cracked and bled. Her back felt like it might snap. Around her, the kitchen churned out meal after meal for what Mira explained was “the upper palace” nobles, guards, advisors. The servants ate scraps. If they were lucky.
Hana wasn't lucky.
By the time the midday rush ended, she was light-headed from hunger and exhaustion. She slumped against the wall, hands shaking, and watched Marta bark orders at a group of cooks preparing the evening's banquet.
A banquet.
Hana's professional curiosity dragged her upright despite herself. She edged closer, trying to see what they were making.
It was... bad.Not just bad. Offensively, criminally bad.
They were boiling meat into gray oblivion. Vegetables were being hacked into uneven chunks and thrown into water with zero seasoning. The bread was stale. The “sauce” was flour and water. That was it. No stock. No aromatics. No flavor.
Hana's soul hurt.
“What are you staring at?”One of the cooks, a man with a face like a bulldog, glared at her.
“Get back to scrubbing, Kitchen Girl, before I box your ears.”
“That's not going to taste like anything,” Hana said before she could stop herself.
The kitchen went silent.
Marta turned slowly, eyes narrowing. “What did you say?”
Hana's survival instinct screamed SHUT UP. Her chef's pride said DOUBLE DOWN.
“I said it's not going to taste like anything. You're boiling the meat to death. No sear, no browning, no fond. And you're not seasoning the water. That's... that's just sad.”
Marta stalked toward her, and Hana realized she'd made a terrible mistake.
“You think you can do better, Kitchen Girl?”
“I….”
“Answer me!”
Every eye in the kitchen was on her. Mira looked horrified.
Hana swallowed hard. “...Yes.”
Marta's smile was slow and cruel.
“Then prove it. You've got until the evening bell to make something worth eating. If it's good, maybe I won't have you whipped. If it's not…”
She didn't finish. She didn't have to.
Hana stared at the pathetic ingredients in front of her gray meat, limp vegetables, stale bread and felt the weight of impossible expectations settle on her shoulders.
Just like old times, she thought bitterly.
Except this time, failure didn't mean a bad review.
It meant blood.
