The Void-Whisker's Banquet

The funeral for culinary patriarch Kheng was supposed to be a somber, quiet affair at The Obsidian Cleaver, Ouros City’s most prestigious restaurant. Instead, it becomes a slaughterhouse. Kheng didn't die of natural causes; he choked on a mass of black fur after boiling the sacred Void-Whisker cat alive to supply the city's lucrative underground medicine trade. Now, the beast’s vengeful spirit has sealed the five-story restaurant. As the curse accelerates, the guilty family members and elite diners who profited from the panacea begin mutating into feral, razor-clawed abominations that mimic the cat’s dying yowls. Shy but stubbornly determined, Kheng's daughter Ouli must take up a meat cleaver to survive the night. Alternating between Ouli’s desperate fight and the perspective of Dassan, a lowly prep cook harboring a bittersweet, unspoken love for her, they are forced to team up with Ouli's bitterest culinary rival. Together, they must carve their way to the rooftop shrine to claim the mythical 'Nine-Fold Fortune' and end the lockdown. But what if the folklore's ultimate reward for breaking the curse is a trap designed to breed the next sacred beast?