Summary 3

This page contains an original arc analysis written for readers of the English translation.

If the Snow Mountain arc was about surviving chaos, then chapters 41 to 60 are about what happens after survival stops being impressive and starts becoming dangerous. This is the stretch where Interstellar Little Kitchen fully commits to its real genre. It is no longer a story about a wrongly accused Guide cooking her way out of execution. It is a story about influence, inheritance, and what happens when the wrong people realize you are useful.

The arc opens quietly, almost politely, with paperwork. Sang Ye’s sentence reduction arrives, and the numbers are absurd in the best way. Thousands of years shaved off, millions credited and then instantly clawed back by the system, because of course they are. It is funny, but it also lands a truth. The Empire does not reward kindness. It rewards results. Sang Ye saved an Executive Officer, stabilized a region, and rewrote the Snow Mountain power structure. She is no longer a marginal criminal. She is an asset the court now tracks closely.

Emotionally, this is also where Sang Ye stops feeling like a guest on Black Tower. Wu Jianing runs into her arms. The West Building feels like home. Her pocket dimension grows forests, ponds, and the outline of an ocean without her asking permission. She is still officially exiled, but everything in her life contradicts that label. That tension sits under every chapter that follows.

The story then introduces its next problem in the most obnoxious way possible. Enter Sireno, the Mermaid Prince of the Tide Sea. He is beautiful, fragile, dramatic, and absolutely a walking disaster. His arrival detonates the calm of the base not through violence, but through vibes. He offends a Major General, destabilizes mental fields by accident, and somehow manages to get kicked out of a hospital while looking like the victim. This is not subtle writing. He is here to cause friction.

Sireno matters because he represents a new kind of threat. Not an enemy, not a criminal, not a rebel. He is a political obligation. The Tide Sea is critical to Black Tower’s mining and stability, and its people suffer from mental riots that scale into natural disasters. Sang Ye cannot refuse him. She cannot intimidate him. She has to deal with him.

What follows is one of the arc’s smartest moves. Instead of framing the conflict as Sang Ye versus Sireno, the story pivots to Sang Ye versus Lin Changli’s unresolved mess of feelings. Lin Changli becomes openly hostile to Sireno in a way that is neither rational nor professional. The Phoenix reacts first, violently and honestly, because spiritual forms are terrible liars. The hot spring incident strips away pretense. Sireno is not just pitiful. He is provocative, calculating, and very aware of what his charm does. Lin Changli is not calm. He is jealous, confused, and completely incapable of saying the obvious thing out loud.

This matters because Lin Changli’s arc quietly flips here. For dozens of chapters, he has been framed as a dangerous, unstable weapon that Sang Ye happens to calm. Now the story reveals the reverse angle. Sang Ye is the destabilizing force in his carefully controlled world. Her presence changes his behavior. Her absence sends him fleeing back to the Capital in a sulk, stealing rice balls like an emotionally constipated raccoon.

The Imperial Palace chapters are short but surgical. They show how deeply abnormal Lin Changli’s situation is. His mother sees the problem instantly. The Phoenix knows exactly what is wrong. Everyone understands except Lin Changli himself, because understanding would require him to speak first. Instead, he climbs onto the roof, eats sweet rice balls, and becomes tabloid news. It is funny. It is pathetic. It is also tragic in a very controlled way.

Meanwhile, Sang Ye keeps moving forward, because she always does. She negotiates manufacturing through Jiang Siwei. She shifts from hand-producing food to supplying raw materials and recipes. This is a massive power shift disguised as business talk. Sang Ye is no longer a cook. She is a supplier at industrial scale, and she is building redundancy so she is never cornered again.

The Tide Sea arc then opens fully, and the story’s visual palette changes completely. Clear water. Bioluminescence. Coral palaces. A functional society that is not rotting from radiation, but cracking under mental overload. Queen Isabella, or Lilibet, is introduced as the exact opposite of Brian from Snow Mountain. She is powerful, practical, and protective of both people and environment. The contrast is deliberate. Power does not have to rot.

Sang Ye’s solution here is elegant and very on brand. She does not just treat symptoms. She changes the ecosystem. Aquaculture launches under the sea, fed by mental energy instead of poisoned by it. Food replaces channeling queues. Instant noodles become emergency stabilizers. Her pocket dimension and the Tide Sea form a feedback loop that benefits both sides. This is not charity. This is infrastructure.

The arrival of Sayin, the Imperial Secretary General, locks the arc into place. Through her, the story draws a clean line between the Snow Mountain tragedy and the Tide Sea success. Sayin chose patience, influence, and long-term positioning. Wu Jinyue chose conquest and abandonment. Neither woman is framed as purely right or wrong, but the outcomes speak loudly.

By the end of chapter 60, Sang Ye is standing at the center of multiple converging power lines. The military relies on her. Civilians trust her. The Tide Sea welcomes her. The Secretary General is watching her. And the Prince who technically owns Black Tower is on his way back because she told him to come.

Why does this arc matter? Because it permanently changes the question the story is asking. It is no longer “Will Sang Ye survive exile?” The question now is “What kind of power will Sang Ye choose to build, and who will be allowed to stand beside her when she does?”

The kitchen is still there. The food is still warm. But the game has escalated, and everyone knows it.