Royal Chef Transmigrated into the Real Daughter - CHAPTER 1

Chapter 1: Health-Nourishing Chicken Soup

Knock, knock, knock—

"Ning, wake up! I'm coming up."

Awakened by the sharp, insistent knocking, Tang Ning instinctively clutched the Capybara plushie in her arms tighter. Opening her eyes, it took her a moment to realize where she was: lying in the attic room of her homestay.

Just a month ago, Tang Ning was still the ‘Number One Female Imperial Chef of the Great Yin Empire,’ personally bestowed with the title by the Emperor himself.

During the grand Assembly of Ten Thousand Nations, she had single-handedly crafted a banquet of one hundred and eight exquisite dishes to showcase the overwhelming wealth and abundance of the Great Yin. Her culinary feats left foreign envoys willingly patting their stuffed bellies while chanting, "May Great Yin reign for ten thousand autumns! Long live the Emperor!"

The delighted Emperor gave a generous wave of his sleeve and granted her release from the palace to enjoy a life of peaceful retirement.

Who could have predicted that before her carriage even made it off the imperial road, a band of masked bandits would jump out from the bushes?

Their objective was unmistakably clear. The moment they yanked open the carriage curtain, they lunged straight for the jar of pickled vegetables she was holding in her arms.

Seeing the bandit's vicious eyes glaring daggers at the jar, Tang Ning immediately shoved her carefully cured dried radish right into his hands.

Nothing was more important than keeping her own life.

And yet, the bandit merely gave a wicked hehe laugh and stabbed her clean through the chest.

A sudden flare of agony shot through Tang Ning's heart. Before she could even spit out a mouthful of blood, she plunged helplessly into dark chaos.

When she woke up again, she found herself sitting inside the belly of a giant iron bird.

The instant she realized she was floating thirty thousand feet in the air, her mind went boom, and she fainted right back out.

Immediately after, a novel set a thousand years in the future unfolded in her mind.

In this book, the so-called vicious female supporting character shared her exact name and surname. She was the true heiress of the wealthy, high-society Tang family in Haicheng, who had been lost in the countryside as a child.

After her birth parents tracked her down and brought her home, the fake heiress suffered a massive crisis of insecurity. Terrified of losing her adoptive parents' love, her luxurious lifestyle, and her wealthy fiancé from Hong Kong, the fake heiress spun a story about "polishing the true heiress's resume" before taking over the family company, and bought her a one-way plane ticket across the ocean.

Her parents, realizing Tang Ning was unfamiliar with the place, the culture, and the language, arranged a local homestay to help her adapt quickly. Yet she still couldn't escape a relentless barrage of harsh realities: racial discrimination, campus bullying, and home invasions.

Over time, her entire mental state completely broke down.

At a party hosted with malicious intent, she was coaxed into consuming forbidden substances and tied to a wheel for some unspeakable, depraved group activity.

From then on, she fell into severe drug addiction, contracted AIDS, and lived a life that was neither human nor ghost.

Deeply consumed by hatred for her birth parents and the fake heiress, she returned to the country to execute a frenzy of revenge. But in the end, she was merely a naive country girl—penniless, powerless, backless, and stripped of her wits by narcotics.

Her ultimate fate was painfully predictable.

When she woke up for the second time, Tang Ning took a deep breath. She peered out the window at the dense layers of clouds, observed the oddly dressed modern people all around her, and then pinched her left arm brutally hard with her right hand.

Finally, under the strange, bewildered stares of the passengers sitting next to her, she rolled down her sleeve to cover the purple bruise, calmly accepting the fact that her soul had transmigrated two thousand years into the future.

So what if there was racial discrimination? Could it really be worse than the rigid class hierarchy of the Great Yin Dynasty, where people lost their heads at the slightest offense?

So what if there was campus bullying? As a female official who had survived the man-eating imperial palace, was she seriously going to be pushed around by a bunch of oversized brats?

And home invasions? She’d love to see whether their guns were faster than how fast she could hand over her cash!

As for that wild New Year's Eve party,knowing full well it was a trap, wouldn't everything be fine as long as she just didn't go?

Everything could still be turned around in time.

She would never allow herself to live out the miserable fate of the supporting character in that book.

Yet what she never, ever expected was that the very first crisis she would have to face... was figuring out how to survive in an agonizing environment of daily "white people food."

Every single day was either bone-dry bread, raw grass tossed in salad, or instant meals zapped in the microwave.

She heard that in an entire year, the only time anyone actually cooked was a dreadful turkey feast for Christmas—which was said to taste absolutely atrocious anyway.

For the rest of the year, the local diet prioritized only three things: fast, convenient, and barely keeping you from starving to death.

Even during the famine years back in the Great Yin Dynasty, Tang Ning had never suffered this much.

To make matters worse, the homestay had strict rules, and the landlady explicitly forbade Tang Ning from using the kitchen.

She possessed a supreme body of culinary skills, yet had nowhere to display them.

Every morning meant ice-cold milk and cold bread.

Things weren't much better at school either,just a few extra pieces of fried chicken that were neither crispy on the outside nor tender on the inside, alongside various flavors of bread.

Before long, her stomach rebelled. Plagued by severe vomiting and diarrhea, she suffered an intense reaction to the foreign climate and diet. Eventually, her low blood sugar caused her to collapse right on the street while on her way downtown to get Chinese food.

Thankfully, a kind passerby called an ambulance and rushed her to the hospital.

Only after a round of medical treatment did she clear the danger zone and return to her bedroom in the homestay attic.

She slept all the way until almost noon the next day.

Having missed two meals straight since last night, Tang Ning rubbed her completely empty stomach. Digging through the meager handful of English words in her head, she called out weakly toward the trapdoor in the floor: "Come up."

The floor hatch opened, and a long-legged girl with wavy brown hair climbed up holding a bowl. It was Susan, the landlady's granddaughter.

Standing at a full 172 centimeters (5 '8), Susan’s head nearly touched the ceiling the moment she stepped into the cramped attic.

She walked over to the bedside and handed the bowl to Tang Ning without a trace of expression on her face.

Tang Ning reached out to take it. Looking down into the bowl, she immediately found herself staring eye-to-eye with a dead chicken head floating in murky broth—its eyes wide open in unpeaceful death.

Tang Ning’s hand trembled. It took every ounce of strength in her body to suppress the urge to throw the bowl across the room.

"What... is this?"

She forced a smile, speaking in simple, clunky English.

Seeing Tang Ning put on her "fake smile" again, Susan looked thoroughly impatient. She blurted out a rapid-fire string of English words, heavy on slang and dropped syllables. Noticing that Tang Ning was still staring at her with a completely blank expression, Susan rolled her eyes dramatically.

She grabbed the electronic translator off the nightstand, repeated her words briefly into it, and then threw both the translator and a slip of paper onto Tang Ning’s bed before turning on her heel and leaving.

Clearly, Susan deeply disliked Tang Ning.

Tang Ning was a rich girl whose family threw money around to send her abroad to study in America. To Susan, that meant she was robbing a deserving student from a poor family of a university spot. On top of that, Tang Ning couldn’t even utter a proper sentence, let alone understand specialized university lectures. It was a complete waste of educational resources.

Because of this, Susan couldn't stand her. Even though they attended the same school, Susan would pretend not to know her whenever they bumped into each other.

Tang Ning was helpless about it, but she didn't really care either.

Once Susan was gone, she carefully set the bowl aside and picked up the paper slip to take a look.

$6,000 USD?!

What on earth could be this ridiculously expensive?!

Taking a closer look... oh, it was the bill for saving her own life.

Never mind then.

Although medical care in this country was pricier than consulting the grand imperial physicians in the palace, snatching her life back from the grave made it worth the cost.

Besides, the Tang family was a prominent, wealthy household; a sum like this wouldn't even dent their pockets.

After settling the hospital bill, Tang Ning had only ten dollars left to her name. Thus, she dialed an overseas call back home.

No one picked up for now.

Given the time difference, they were probably all asleep.

Hanging up, she left a message on WeChat for her cheap excuse of a father, then picked up the translator Susan had thrown down and hit play.

A metallic, robotic voice droned out from the little silver box: "The doctor said you have a Chinese stomach and aren't used to our food. Grandma specifically made a bowl of health-nourishing chicken soup for you to drink. Please finish it and return the bowl to the kitchen."

After listening to the translation, Tang Ning silently turned her head and took another look at the contents of the bowl.

No offense...

Are you sure this is chicken soup, and not chicken corpse water?

How do these foreigners cook chicken soup without even skimming off the blood foam?!

Looking at the bowl of soup, Tang Ning truly couldn't bring herself to swallow a single drop. After hesitating for a long moment, she decided to negotiate with the landlady about borrowing the kitchen.

Holding the bowl in one hand and the translator in the other, she went downstairs.

Just as she reached the kitchen doorway, she witnessed a scene that she would find difficult to forget for a very long time...

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