Chapter 33 - Chaos
In the Master Room, Peta-chan had been tirelessly cooking one dish after another, without taking a single break.
After the pork miso soup, I had her make fried rice, karaage, steamed pork buns, grilled fish, cookies—you name it.
I taught her the fundamental cooking techniques: boiling, stir-frying, deep-frying, steaming, baking, and even mixing ingredients by proper measurements, shaping them, and baking afterward.
As expected, Peta-chan had a sharp memory. Once she was properly taught and had the chance to try it hands-on, she stopped making those absurd beginner mistakes altogether and became capable of making food that was entirely edible—honestly, more than decent.
“Alright! If you’ve come this far, you should be able to figure out how to cook just by reading the recipes in this book! Let’s try recreating everything in here!”
With that, I conjured up a cookbook like the ones you'd find at any bookstore and handed it to her.
In other words, I totally passed the baton.
By the time I handed her the book, she seemed to have started genuinely enjoying cooking. She began flipping through the pages and trying things out.
Dishes like chilled eggplant, mille-feuille hot pot, yellowtail simmered with daikon—homey, down-to-earth meals straight out of a typical Japanese recipe book, rolled out one after another.
Each one had that humble, “I followed the recipe” kind of taste, but they were all solidly delicious.
“If you overcook it, it’s ruined—but if it doesn’t have any char at all, it just doesn’t feel right, you know? A little bit of browning makes it tastier.”
She said that while flipping something in the frying pan.
Whoa. That comment alone told me her skills had really leveled up.
She might’ve just caught up to my level—your typical bachelor’s half-assed home cooking tier. There’s really nothing left for me to teach her anymore. Fly free, my disciple.
Meanwhile, the monitor only showed the female knights trudging endlessly across a wide plain. Nothing interesting.
So I decided to just kick back and enjoy Peta-chan’s homemade meals for a while.
“...Star anise? What’s that? Hey, Master, can you pull out some star anise for me?”
“Huh? Oh... yeah, I can.”
I summoned a bit of star anise and handed it to her—though I was starting to feel a bit uneasy.
This was bad. She was starting to request spices that were right on the edge of my knowledge. If she went any deeper into obscure territory, I had a feeling names I didn’t recognize at all were going to start flying out.
Sure, if I knew what something was, I could pull it out—but if I had absolutely no knowledge of it, not even the dungeon’s miracles could make it appear.
Once, I tried to summon chinsuko, the Okinawan treat. I only knew the name—had no clue what it looked or tasted like. And sure enough, I couldn’t produce it. That confirmed it: I couldn’t summon what I didn’t know.
But come to think of it, if something’s completely outside my knowledge, it probably wouldn’t show up in the cookbook I summoned either.
Even though Peta-chan had been picking dishes at random, they all ended up being Japanese, Chinese, or Italian recipes I recognized. That probably wasn’t a coincidence.
If the cookbook had truly contained dishes and ingredients completely unknown to me, it wouldn’t be strange if Czech or Hungarian recipes started popping up—but not a single one had so far.
“Okay, this one—Tsureikozen Enkarve!”
“What the hell is that?!”
Just as I was thinking that, she blurted out a dish I had absolutely never heard of.
“Seems like it’s a dish from the Kingdom of Sepans. Looks like the recipe for something I found in the belongings of an adventurer I once absorbed ended up in this book.”
“Ah, so because the cooking is being created with your miasma, even knowledge that you absorbed ends up being incorporated into the recipe book, huh? Makes sense...”
The dish was a flavorful mix of salty stir-fried shrimp, vegetables, and fruit, all wrapped in a thin, crepe-like shell. Surprisingly, it was pretty good.
It reminded me of eating something okonomiyaki-esque at a foreign food stall.
The closest comparison I could think of was when I had bánh xèo at a Vietnamese restaurant—though the seasoning was completely different.
“Mmm~ I remember seeing something like this ages ago, but it was packed with too many random ingredients, and I figured there was no way I could recreate it. I gave up halfway through analyzing it and just converted it into points. So this is what it was supposed to be, huh~”
As we chatted, we enjoyed our meal in a relaxed, cheerful atmosphere.
“We’ve arrived, Captain Touji. This is the Deformity-Healing Spring on the ninth floor.”
Nestled alone in the vast, open grasslands was a rocky hot spring, roughly ten meters in diameter.
Honestly, asking someone to just walk around and find this would’ve been absurd.
Even the knights of the First Unit silently agreed with that assessment.
They undressed and slowly entered the spring.
The moment they slipped into the water, everything began to change—the swollen joints, the bones that had healed crooked after breaks, the misaligned muscles, the chronic back pain...
All the aches and pains they’d resigned themselves to living with for the rest of their lives vanished, as if melting away into the water.
“Oooohh...”
“This is... incredible...”
“Aahh~ this is a blessing, truly...”
“I can’t remember the last time my shoulder didn’t hurt...”
Relieved sighs rose from every member of the First Unit.
Their bodies had been through countless battles, far beyond what normal knights ever experienced. Chronic injuries were practically their default state.
And yet, even in this moment of bliss, Captain Touji was calmly and methodically moving her once-injured fingers, testing the motion of her shoulders and lower back, as if going through a checklist.
“…That’s our captain for you.”
“To stay that composed even in water like this...”
“Meanwhile, I feel like I could sprint across the plains right now…”
“UWOOOOOOOHHHHH!!!”
And just like that, the captain let out a feral roar.
Startled, every knight turned to look.
“I can twist my torso this way—no pain! That way—still nothing! And look, my right shoulder! It used to stop below my chin—now I can raise it all the way! This is full recovery! I’m healed! This is a full-blown miracle!
Man, I thought I’d either die or be forced into retirement on the next expedition, but now? I’m good! I can do this! Ten more years—no, thirty! I can fight for thirty more years!!”
...Wait, what? That’s how wrecked your body was, Captain?
Even with all that ridiculous strength?
We’d all just assumed she was in perfect shape, aside from her left pinky that wouldn’t bend. She’d been fighting all this time like a total powerhouse.
And... thirty years?
You’re seriously planning to keep dungeon-diving into your seventies, Captain?
“WHOOOOOOOOO!!!”
Completely naked, Captain Touji leapt out of the spring, brimming with energy.
“““C-Captain?!!”””
Then she sprinted across the plains—still totally naked—performed backflips and somersaults—naked—caught the attention of a nearby monster—charged at it naked at full speed—obliterated it—still naked—and stood triumphantly in the creature’s blood, laughing like a lunatic.
There she was: a naked, blood-drenched, middle-aged woman howling with laughter in the middle of a sunlit field. A living embodiment of chaos itself. That wild display thoroughly shattered the mental image the First Unit had held of their disciplined, unshakable captain.
“...It appears Captain Touji is, um, very pleased with the spring. So... that’s good news.”
Vihita tried to offer a comment to smooth things over as the knights stood frozen in shock. But no one was listening.
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