Summary 4

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

Chapters 61 to 80 are where Interstellar Little Kitchen quietly stops pretending it is just about food, healing, or even survival. This is the arc where the story asks a much uglier question. What do you do when the system is working exactly as designed, and that design still crushes people?

The arc opens with instability spreading outward like a crack in glass. The Tide Sea is no longer calm. Beast tides are forming, not because of simple environmental collapse, but because Lin Changli’s power exists. His mental energy disturbs the deep sea just by being what it is. That detail matters. The strongest people in this world do not just solve problems. They also create them.

Sang Ye’s response is consistent with who she has become. She does not try to overpower the beast tide. She refuses the usual military solution of waiting, killing, and cleaning up later. Instead, she rewrites the environment. She plants underwater forests, spreads coral, and builds a buffer that absorbs mental energy before it can explode. This is Sang Ye at her most dangerous. She fixes problems permanently.

The cost comes immediately. During the operation, she vanishes.

This is the emotional core of the arc. Sang Ye being swept away by the sea is not heroic. It is sudden, undignified, and terrifying. The terminal is lost. Oxygen runs out. The world keeps moving without her. For the first time since her transmigration, Sang Ye is not in control of anything.

What saves her is not power, or luck, or plot armor. It is the mental mark she placed without fully understanding what it meant.

The revelation of the mental mark between Sang Ye and Lin Changli changes the story’s gravity. This is not a symbolic bond. It is structural. They are now bound in a way that cannot be undone without destroying both sides. Sang Ye did not choose it consciously. Lin Changli did not demand it. It happened because she planted a tree where there was space for one. That is very on theme.

When Sang Ye resurfaces, she does not return to safety. She runs straight into the underground world Black Tower pretends not to have.

The Loda Plains arc pulls the curtain back. Underground Guides exist because the official system cannot meet demand. Smuggling exists because planets are stripped and abandoned. The White Wolf Group exists because entire categories of people have no legal place in the Empire. Nobody here is shocked. They are tired.

Jiang Sili’s role finally becomes clear. He is not a traitor or a villain. He is an idealist who chose the ugliest possible compromise. He could not accept the military’s indifference toward hybrid children, and he could not openly rebel against the Empire either. So he walked into the gray zone and stayed there until it calcified around him.

The White Wolf Group is not romanticized, and that is important. They steal. They smuggle. They kidnap when cornered. But they are also the only reason hybrid children survive longer than a battlefield night. The arc refuses to make this clean. Saving people here always costs someone else.

The confrontation with Qiu Linghua is where Sang Ye’s past finally catches up to her. This is not a misunderstanding or a redemption scene. It is a reckoning. Sang Ye does not apologize. She does not soften her words. She tells the truth. The original owner of the body was destroyed by control disguised as kindness, and Sang Ye does not regret striking back.

What changes Qiu Linghua is not guilt or fear. It is proximity. Seeing the White Wolf nursery, holding children who were never meant to exist, breaks the hierarchy she grew up with. For the first time, she understands that no amount of status gives someone the right to decide another person’s life.

Her disappearance looks like a crime. It becomes a political bomb. It drags in the Court, the Princess, and the Empress herself. This is where the arc shows its teeth. The truth does not matter nearly as much as narrative control.

The long flashback into Jiang Sili and Asu Ment’s shared past is not indulgent. It explains the philosophy of the Empire in practice. The Empress does not deny the suffering of hybrids. She funds their survival quietly while maintaining a public stance of indifference. Asu Ment represents unwavering loyalty to the system. Jiang Sili represents the cost of refusing to look away.

No one here is fully right. No one is innocent. Everyone chooses a line they can live with.

By the end of the arc, Sang Ye makes her own choice.

She does not ask for protection. She does not ask for permission. She asks for a price.

Sang Ye wants to buy Black Tower after the mining ends. Not to rule it. To rebuild it. To turn a discarded planet into a refuge for people the mainstream will never accept. Exiles. Rioters. Hybrids. The unwanted.

This is the moment the story locks in its endgame.

Sang Ye is no longer reacting to the Empire. She is planning outside it. Food was never the point. Healing was never the point. The kitchen was a foothold.

Chapters 61 to 80 matter because they answer the question the story has been circling since the beginning. What kind of world does Sang Ye want to build now that she knows exactly how broken this one is?

The answer is not gentle. It is practical. And it will not ask anyone’s approval.