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Rule No. 75: Do not leave hot soup anywhere she can reach it.\nRule No. 160: Milk should only be made into pastries. If she drinks it as is, she will end up with an upset stomach.\nRule No. 310: No cucumbers. No scallions. Still, if no one tells her, or if she is fooled a little, she can sometimes be coaxed into eating them.\n\n...\n\nGrand Artisan Gull lets out a long sigh. He has already filled twelve notebooks with notes like these.\n\nMechanisms and fine food can both be worked out by following plans and recipes. Raising a child, though, comes with no ready-made blueprint for him to consult.\n\nIf a mechanism goes wrong, a few firm pats or a careful dismantling will usually fix it. If a dish goes wrong, at worst you get half-cooked rice or a burnt cake and a stomachache for two or three days. That passes soon enough.\n\nBut raising a child does not allow for carelessness. No one ever told him how tightly to hold a baby, how many years he ought to keep feeding her, how many words of comfort she needs each day, how many words of scolding, or how much pocket money to give her...\n\nWhat kind of troublesome mechanism is this? Grand Artisan Gull refuses to believe he cannot handle it. He has taught for years, can interpret Mohist texts from the highest principles down, can build all kinds of ingenious devices. How could he possibly lose to one picky little girl?\n\nSo, in a fit of determination, he gathers more than a dozen old recipe books. Remedies for crying at night, tonics to improve the appetite, anything the old texts mention, he learns to cook up for Xiaoxiao.\n\nBefore long, the room that used to be piled high with mechanism parts is filled instead with all manner of strange ingredients. And just like that, the great artisan of Mohist Hill finds himself on a one-way road into the study of ancient recipes.\n\nResearch, after all, is what he does best. Once he straightens out his notes, surely raising a child by the book cannot be that hard.\n\nBy then, he thinks to himself with no small satisfaction, no one in all Mohist City will understand child-rearing better than he does. And with that, he buries his head in the old recipes once more.\n\n...\n\nOnly, this child has not grown up the way the books said she would. Her tastes change, her temper changes too. She has even learned how to coax and outwit her father, borrowing one trick to set up another and slipping past him when he least expects it.\n\nAnd yet, when he sees Xiaoxiao lifting a rice paddle longer than her arm and deftly turning the fish in the pan, all the pride, relief, and quiet guilt this child has stirred in him rise at once into his heart. It is a taste no recipe in the world has ever recorded.\n\nGrand Artisan Gull decides to write all of it into his notes. This is a brand-new recipe, one no one has ever written before.\n\nPerhaps all it takes is some time, some companionship, and a little patience. Then those feelings that are so hard to name will simply grow, little by little, out of the child herself, and quietly spread through her father's heart.