Chapter 493 - Gourmet of Darkness
Despite his great effort, he failed to learn anything.
Sinehowze did not conceal her cooking skills from the others. Nevertheless, Angor didn’t quite understand the way she moved. He did, however, notice something about her mirage.
A mirage was an illusion of food that naturally occurred when a Gourmet chef cooked something. Angor once fell into a mirage on The Redbud when he almost mistook a lit oil lamp as a delicious drumstick.
While such mirages could be deadly to mortals, it basically had no effect on apprentices who had set up their spirit models. Rather, they could use such mirage to tell what kind of food they were expecting.
For example, they saw the illusion of the Lord of Tentacles; it was literally dancing in cooking smoke while swaying its arms here and there to grab different, strange-looking side-materials such as miniature cyclones, the melted egg of some unknown monster, and tree leaves they couldn’t recognize. Slowly, the Lord of Tentacles stuffed them into its opened maw before its body caught fire.
When the fire died down, a dish of glowing “Exploding Lava Egg Soup” was presented to them.
Usually, people used such mirages to see what was used to create the dish, but as an illusionist, Angor saw something more from it, such as how the mirage was not created by the cook but was brought by a strange power generated when the enchanted cooking flame and the flavor of food joined with each other.
There were no illusion nodes involved. The mirage was only a delusion subconsciously produced when a Gourmet wielded his or her supernatural cooking abilities.
Alan saw Angor’s former teacher before—an ill-bodied man named Jon. Using what he had learned until now, Alan suggested several menus that might help with Jon’s condition.
Angor thanked Alan, but he knew that none of the food would help Jon stay away from the world’s consciousness.
Alan said he never saw Aleen and Mara again after leaving for Candy House.
After talking about their past and future ambitions, Angor tried to ask Alan about his “instinct” earlier. Since Sinehowze was still nearby, he used Voice Transmission just in case.
“Did you think Sinehowze put something bad in her soup?”
Alan nodded and replied in Voice Transmission as well, “I think she’s a ‘Gourmet of Darkness’.”
Gourmet of Darkness?! Angor realized he never heard of such a thing before.
“They’re different from the ordinary Gourmet Wizards from Candy House. How do I put it… You can consider a dark Gourmet chef as someone who seeks benefit via cooking, but not for the sake of creating food. I don’t know if Sinehowze is a dark one, but her skills look like those used by a legendary wizard my teacher told me before: The ‘Culinarian of Spirits’, Shinsky.
“The books said that Shinsky was a Gourmet of Darkness from hundreds of centuries ago. She used dishes to attract the spirits from other worlds to fight for her, kinda like summoner spells. But summoner spells are restricted by their users’ levels, and summoning something stronger than yourself can be risky and costs a lot of resources. Shinsky’s food though… It was more like ‘exchanging’ rather than summoning. She used good food to pay the spirits. If a dish suited someone’s taste well, that spirit would still heed her call even if he was a really powerful spirit.”
“You can do that?!” Angor widened his eyes.
“Yeah. The spirits called by Shinsky were bound by a certain contract. Once they took her food, they had to fulfill the conditions asked by Shinsky.” Alan glanced at Sinehowze again. The woman had scattered petals here and there by floating above the boat. “When that old man gave the monster egg to her, he said something like ‘it’s payment for dinner’ and disappeared. That looks like one of the spirits summoned by a dark Gourmet chef.
“If Sinehowze really knows something like this, then you should absolutely NOT eat her food. Otherwise, you’ll get caught in a contract without even knowing it.”