In times of good weather, Yi Yi lived alone in the crude grass hut he’d built himself by the riverside, tilling the land and amusing himself. A normal human wouldn’t have been allowed, but as Yi Yi’s feedlot lectures on ancient literature had edifying properties, imparting a unique flavor to the flesh of his students, the dinosaur breeder didn’t stop him.

It was dusk, two months after Yi Yi had first met Li Bai, the sun just tipping over the perfectly straight horizon line of the Devouring Empire. The two rivers reflected the sunset, meeting at the edge of the sky. In the riverside hut, a breeze carried faint, distant sounds of song and celebration over the prairie. Yi Yi was alone, playing weiqi with himself.

He looked up and saw Li Bai and Bigtooth walking along the riverbank toward him. Li Bai was much changed from before: his hair was unkempt, his beard even longer, his face sun-browned. He had a rough cloth pack slung over his left shoulder and a large bottle-gourd in his right hand. His robes had been reduced to rags; his woven-straw shoes were mangled with wear. But Yi Yi thought that he now seemed more like a human being.

Li Bai walked over to the weiqi table. Like the last few times, he slammed the gourd down without looking at Yi Yi and said, “Bowl!” When Yi Yi had brought over the two wooden bowls, Li Bai uncorked the gourd and filled them with wine, then took a paper package from his pack. Yi Yi opened it to discover cooked meat, already sliced, its aroma greeting his nose enthusiastically. He couldn’t help but grab a piece and start chewing.

Bigtooth only stood, a few meters away, watching them silently. He knew from before that the two of them were going to discuss poetry again, a topic in which he had no interest and no ability.

“Delicious,” Yi Yi said, nodding approvingly. “Is the beef made directly from energy too?”

“No, I’ve gone natural for a long while now. You might not know, but there’s a pasture a long distance away from here where they raise Earth cows. I cooked the beef myself in the Shanxi Pingyao style. There’s a trick to it. When you stew the meat, you have to add …” Li Bai whispered mysteriously into Yi Yi’s ear, “Urea.”

Yi Yi looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“Oh, that’s what you get when you take human urine, let it evaporate, and extract the white stuff. It makes the cooked meat red and juicy with a tender texture, while keeping the fatty parts from being cloying and the lean parts from being leathery.”

“The urea … it’s made from pure energy, right?” Yi Yi asked, horrified.

“I told you, I’ve gone natural! It took me a lot of work to collect the urea from several human feedlots. This is a very traditional folk cuisine technique, faded from use long before the destruction of Earth.”