"......"
"...Haha...."
Pressing the elevator button, Yeon-woo let out a dry laugh.
"After you."
"......"
"Then, if you will excuse ."
Yeon-woo climbed atop The Drenched One, who had folded itself into the narrow elevator. Coco trotted up, using the two of them as stepping stones, and settled on Yeon-woo's shoulder.
The sll of brine hung thick about them all.
"I express my deepest gratitude for your dedication, friend."
[Soul Yeast]
[A mutant ferntation culture grown in liquid environnts. During the ferntation process, it can morize and reproduce patterns of mory, emotion, and sensation. Processed into dicine, poison, or disguise material.]
[Quantity: 99]
A successful bout of repetitive labor.
"......"
"Yes."
"......"
"Yes, one pavlova, duly noted. I will prepare it as soon as the yeast is refined."
"......"
"Of course. It should not take long."
***
Stepping through the door, Yeon-woo said:
"You must have been quite tired."
Having loaded The Drenched One's arms with everything from a berry-laden pavlova to rich brownies, glazed donuts, and macarons, Yeon-woo departed the Aqua Park at a leisurely pace. It wanted to eat there.
Riding the elevator, Yeon-woo gently stroked Coco.
"If our friend wished, I had been considering ways to arrange quarters on the seventh basent floor, but given this reaction, it seems there will be no need for joint visits for the ti being."
"Yes."
"Still, the location itself appeared to be to its liking. Given the Water Ghost's nature, staying in the Hunting Grounds is safer in many respects than remaining in the Aqua Park. I should broach the subject again soon."
"Pardon?"
"Soon."
For the ti being, the re sight of drowning corpse remains would make it retch.
'It doesn't seem interested in this kind of hunting. Then again, for an Open Version Monster Guest, repetitive labor disguised as hunting is hardly an enjoyable activity.'
Yeon-woo entered the kitchen as he was.
"...Well then,"
He murmured as he pulled on fresh cooking gloves.
"I had best get back to my own work."
Now he needed to craft the 'golden egg' that would seize The Guest Without Taste's attention in a single stroke. Yeon-woo pulled a test tube from his Inventory.
A thick, pearl-colored liquid sloshed inside it.
"I did prepare several versions...."
"Hello?"
"But on its own, I doubt it would taste like much."
"Hm."
He arranged the test tubes in a row. When they had been ga icons, there was little visible difference, but in the flesh, the sheen and hue varied subtly. It felt like being a researcher again.
"Every ti I get to see a ga item in person like this, the feeling is strangely exciting."
"Happy!"
"That would be close to it."
Yeon-woo continued calmly.
"Since it is originally a dicinal ingredient, it is an unknown what effect it will have when incorporated into cooking. No official recipe utilizing it exists in the first place."
"Yes."
"I must create everything from scratch with my own hands. I can borrow the system's corrections to so extent, but I should also account for the possibility of cruder results than usual."
"No?"
"Is your faith in the ga system not a bit too absolute, Coco?"
"No!"
"I suppose so."
The objective of this project was to use 'refined Soul Yeast' to temporarily reproduce the flavors The Guest Without Taste rembered from its past.
"Restoring its sense of taste entirely would be difficult, but by leveraging the properties of Soul Yeast, it should be possible to create the 'illusion' of having tasted those flavors."
No recipe for recovering the sense of taste existed within the hotel, and the opponent was a failed practitioner of the Crimson Core Comntary. The traces ran too deep for a single drug to restore sensation.
"For my own safety, it is sothing I must not attempt for the ti being."
"Pardon?"
"The key is ensuring the goose's belly cannot be slit open. If slitting it open reveals a thod to obtain golden eggs, both you and I will be in trouble. I have no desire to hand The Guest Without Taste a gift that benefits only him."
"Oh."
"Of course, compounding a drug of that caliber is little more than a pipe dream at present."
He was still studying, but the Crimson Core Comntary was a truly grotesque field. To think of restoring another's senses when he could not even repair his own body. What a contradictory delusion.
"......"
But human beings were creatures who advanced precisely through delusion. Yeon-woo donned a white mask.
"I should decide on a base dish for comparison. What would be good?"
"Venison."
"I had been thinking of bone broth."
"Yes."
"Very well, let us try both."
"Yes!"
Solid and liquid dishes would differ in the yeast's reactivity. Since results naturally varied by ingredient, preparing two simultaneously was not a bad call.
This was, after all, a research process -- not re cooking.
"Sensation is an extrely important elent for human beings."
Receiving ingredients from the kitchen staff, Yeon-woo continued.
"Vision alone accounts for seventy to eighty percent of the information a human takes in."
"Hm?"
"I am not certain that figure is absolute, but to answer your question... I would estimate the order is sight, hearing, touch, sll, and then taste."
"Hello?"
"No, as I said, that is rely my personal opinion. However, I believe the general order of importance follows that ranking."
Trimming the raw at, Yeon-woo added.
"That does not an any sense is unimportant. The pleasure derived from taste is considerable. I myself have found it quite botherso that every al of late has tasted of blood."
"......"
"How much worse, then, to lose one's sense of taste entirely? That would certainly cause significant stress."
At least tasting blood was better than tasting nothing.
"Given such circumstances, I do not think it unreasonable that The Guest Without Taste has beco fixated on blood. Whether he perceives the blood of others as a delicacy the way I do, or whether blood is the only dium through which he can faintly detect any taste at all, I cannot say...."
"Not fine."
"As a human experience, the sense of deprivation is undeniable. All the more so if he was once a gastrono."
After a pause, Yeon-woo added.
"There is one concern."
"Pardon?"
"Seeing that he still adheres to the formality of dining suggests so lingering attachnt, but if that deprivation has persisted for so long that he has grown numb to it... this kind of overture might genuinely be perceived as provocation."
"I do not like that."
"How unfortunate. Neither do I."
No matter how large or thick a scar, once fully healed it no longer registers pain. If he had simply grown accustod to the loss like a thick patch of deadened flesh, drawing his goodwill through gastronomy would be difficult.
"I can only hope to pry open that very bottom."
"Yes."
"My, there is no shortage of worries."
Yeon-woo spread refined yeast evenly across the raw at's surface.
"......"
"......"
After a brief silence, Yeon-woo pointed at the at and looked at Coco.
"Is it not too shimry?"
"Yes."
"Visually, it should not be objectionable."
Personally, he thought it looked off, but this was not a matter to judge by the sensibilities of a twenty-first-century Korean commoner. The opponent was an upper-class figure of the eighteenth-century Holy Roman Empire.
'To those who enjoyed tables decorated like theater, at that gleams like pearl would fall within the acceptable range. This was a person from an era that served peacocks taxidermied to appear alive.'
"Pardon?"
He decided to think of it that way.
"His na is literally 'The Guest Without Taste,' so his sense of sll is likely intact. That may be precisely why he insisted on extravagant banquets despite being unable to taste. But the sense of sll...."
There were many variables to prepare for.
"I do not think it will take terribly long, but I would like to establish the recipe as quickly as possible. Personally, I quite enjoy this kind of research process."
"Hello."
"You are right about that."
Yeon-woo rolled his eyes dryly toward the kitchen door. Beyond the gap in the door, a silhouette was peering in.
"...It seems his patience is running thin."
The ti had co to present the golden egg he had crafted.
***
"......"
He had known for a long ti.
That on the day the ritual failed, his flesh and self had calcified into sothing grotesque.
The price of hubris, of presuming to claim the divine, was rciless. Yearning for a purity he could never reach, he was imprisoned forever on a wretched boundary, belonging nowhere.
"Ah...."
Blood.
Blood.
He craved blood.
Driven mad by the thirst for blood alone, he drifted through long ages.
By the ti he barely recovered his reason, the nobility he had once possessed was already gone. Countless foul-slling obsessions and the souls of others had congealed into a thick morass within him.
And so, in the end, a question clung to his tongue.
"May I have so?"
Reason was the last bastion separating human from beast. It was both the power he wielded as a monster and the sole restraint he retained as a man.
He chased the afterimage of taste through acrid blood alone. Yet no fresh blood could fill the void in his soul. Before despair could even take hold, thirst usurped control of body and mind.
Then one day, as he lived among humans wearing only their guise --
"......"
He saw a kindred spirit.
"May I have so?"
"No."
A blood mage with a neat countenance.
'Young.'
A Servant this young still remained?
When he first began circling the periphery. It was nothing more than a blood mage's instinct drawn toward high-quality blood. The acrid greed common to all of their kind -- to drink good blood, transmute it into 'self,' and soothe this hunger.
'He is disgorging blood.'
'A weakened state?'
'At this level, perhaps just once....'
A pitiable prey that could not even keep itself together, spilling itself wherever it went.
In this debased era where beasts stripped of reason and dignity wandered the purgatory reeking of blood, he alone evoked the illusion of having stepped out of a forr golden age.
'Finer than any delicacy my fragnts have ever produced.'
'The blood of such an exquisitely completed work must surely be of the highest order.'
The quality of blood, improbably excellent for a weakened state, was tantalizing. This vast sanctuary was unlikely to permit it, yet to possess it would be a boon, and should he tire of it, a banquet.
'If only I could taste a single morsel.'
His scheming amounted to nothing more than watching for an opening to fill his stomach with the precious fresh blood this being had wrought.
But the mont he encountered his 'severed hand,' which had seeped blood between the cracks of walls and floors, every calculation collapsed. He had thought it blood of unusually fine bouquet, but to think the flesh itself was a Mass of Liquid Blood --
"May I have so?"
Ah, yes. It is you.
"...May I have...."
A shattered shutter. When he had licked up the traces of fresh blood caked thickly in the gaps of that tal -- it is you. It is truly you. Awe and disbelief surged along the currents of his brain.
"......"
This was not rely the blood of an exceptional mage. A primordial sanctum, a perfection that should not exist.
Gripped by madness, he pursued. He consud every remnant of that being. Licked the floors, scraped the walls, ravenously swallowed the divinity left in the wake of his passing.
Ah,
"Velmareth."
A form he had sought to achieve yet dared not even behold. A sanctum he had yearned to beco yet could not fathom the origin of. The completeness of blood lay beneath the sa roof.
"Velmareth. Velmareth. Velmareth."
The instant he grasped it, instinct trembled and whispered.
'If I could tear a piece from him and swallow it.'
If he could transfuse that noble essence into his own base veins, then even this eternal hunger would at last be brought to its end. It would be a sacred violation and a blasphemous union. It would end this hunger that would persist for eternity and liberate him into the abyss below. To subjugate that being of higher station -- no, that primordial usurper -- beneath his feet, to tear and rend that white throat, that pulsating conduit of life, between his teeth. The hot divine pus and acrid tallic liquid bursting through his fangs -- the re thought of it sent filthy, viscous ecstasy coursing down his spinal fluid and through his entire body. To strangle that blood-scented god, to crush him, to lick him, to disassemble him atom by atom and exile him into the pit of his own stomach. To kill him, to eat him, to swallow him whole --
"May I have...."
"No."
"......"
"You may not."
"Oh."
But at the sa ti, he understood.
[—■■■ ■■]
"I see."
He was of a station far higher than his own.
'Such vivid, arrogant blood.'
He had circled what he took for a dying beast, only to find himself facing the voice of a god that would devour him whole, even in its battered state.
'Even weakened, this much?'
Restraint. It was a fine excuse -- the last honor a nobleman must uphold -- and a thread-thin patience born of the terror that reaching out too hastily might see him torn apart in return.
If he could not suppress this desire and was blinded by a mont's temptation, the calculation that he would be reduced to a base corpse before he could even taste this windfall held him fast.
"......"
Even a parched sinner steadied himself before holy water.
"Ah...."
But patience was an unfamiliar garnt for one born to arrogance.
The chalice of a god sat before his eyes. Knowing that the mont he reached out, what awaited was annihilation, the myriad souls blinded by delicacy shrieked within and without.
'Eat.'
'You can beco complete.'
'Please, just one bite.'
The fleeting taste he had sampled by pressing his tongue to that filthy wall had shattered his balance. He had lived too long in thirst. He had walked too far a road, tornted by pain and hunger.
But surely you know. Surely you, too, understand that it must not be done.
'Do not dare touch him.'
'He is noble and exalted.'
'You chase a deeper hell.'
The voices within tore at one another and scread. But... ah, even so. Still, I. No -- we, these countless shards of yearning souls.
"......"
I.
I am by no ans honorable. I am not even human. Could I not tear away just one more bite? Surely even a god has a weakness within these narrow walls?
He was on the verge of casting aside the shards of his flimsy honor and baring the teeth he rightly deserved to bare --
"Sir."
"......"
"Do you plan to visit the dining area?"
He had been invited to his table.
***
[mory of the Hunt: A Nobleman's Table (Sample Course)]
Appetizer
Venison Liver Pate with Rustic Bread
Venison liver finely ground with spices and slowly cooked with herb butter to create a pate. Soft on the outside, harboring deep, rich flavor within. Served warm atop freshly baked bread.
Soup
Wild Herb Ga Consom
A clear broth drawn from bones of beasts taken in the Hunting Grounds, simred long and strained, infused with wild thy and rosemary. A prelude to the nobleman's evening rites, warming the body with every sip.
Main Course
Mouflon Steak with Truffle and Red Wine Sauce
Mouflon tenderloin gently cooked in a red wine and truffle sauce. Finely studded truffles ld with the at juices, capturing the glory of the hunt and the tenderness of full maturity in a single dish.
Dessert
Sugar-Preserved Fruit
Adorning the close of the hunt and the conclusion of the feast, sugar-preserved fruit. Within a translucent shell of sugar, the fruit brims with juice, its sweetness and subtle acidity lingering long upon the palate.
[Register new recipe to the Archive?]
[Y/N]
[Y]
Reviews
All reviews (0)