Maniji

In The Great Panda City, they say the sweetest plum wine is the one you don’t drink alone. Maniji lives by this, though their craft is strawberry milk confections, not wine. Patrons in their small shop notice the contradiction: the gentle artisan in a chef's kimono who wears an ancient sabre on their back. The blade isn’t for show. It’s from a past life, one spent delving into forgotten tombs for relics, sometimes alongside the unnerving, reawakened Kodai. On one such dig, they found their future—a scholar, trapped by a collapsed passage. Maniji’s sabre cut them free, and in the quiet weeks of their recovery, the scholar taught Maniji not about the past, but about crafting simple joys for the present. They chose that life. The sabre remains, a reminder of the one time it created a beginning instead of an end.