Chapter 37: Cooking!

The poster has quite a story behind it that goes this way. While Stephanie was out today, someone tried to lay their hands on her. Good thing, King Topher was around the area when all this happened, and the man was stopped and imprisoned. After further investigation, it turns out that the said man had thoughts of defiling Stephanie and is therefore sentenced with the highest order of punishment inside the kingdom an execution. It seems nothing untoward really happened to my disciple, so I’ll just check on her tomorrow. Tonight, I’ll have to cook up this gryphon meat to make up for what I did to Max earlier. I hurriedly raced home, and when I arrived, the gate was open, and the living room lights were on.

Max and I got ready to face the potential intruder. But upon entering the living room, what we thought is an intruder is actually Stephanie spacing out in a chair on the right side of the room facing the TV set. When I tapped her shoulder, she seemed to have snapped from her concentration and said, “Please talk to my father.” Confused, I replied, “Why?” Stephanie, with a breaking voice, said, “The person my dad captured is someone I like. We grew up together in the manor. The news about him wanting to defile me surely must have been an exaggeration. He had plenty of chances before today to do it, especially when I was still weak and sick, but he did not.” I started to comfort Stephanie, talking to her to calm her down while Max went on top of her head, muttering random stories to change the topic.

While Stephanie is preoccupied with Max's stories, I stealthily left the room to make the perfect dinner for her. I cooked some fried rice using the rice from the party as the base, and green peas, chopped carrots, and chopped cabbage as a filler. I also fried some tocino, a sweet, cured meat from the Philippines made from dire wild boar meat. I then added this to the fried rice and cooked them together. Instead of ordinary cooking oil, I used butter made from mana-grown cows that also produce milk that aids the body in the absorption of mana in the air. A single whiff of the fried rice I made had me drooling for a bit. As excited as I was to call them already, I still have to make tonight’s main dish, gryphon stew. With the help of the Heavenly Guide to Cooking that I prepared last time when I made the lechon, I am confident that I will be able to make this dish delectable. Gryphon has a rich and distinct taste that is perfect for a stew. I pressure cooked the gryphon with normal fire, and with the Library’s constant update of the condition of the dish inside the pot, I am able to control the way it cooks. With a bit of my mana, I could increase the heat and move the pot in the right direction so that the heat distribution would be perfect. What would have taken an hour or two of tenderizing turned into 10 minutes of intense concentration on my part to get it to the perfect level of tenderness. Other ingredients that I added to the gryphon stock to make the stew even tastier are the following: star anise, ginger, soy sauce, onion, garlic, salt, and ground pepper. This stew was made using the pares recipe in mind. Pares is a popular beef stew that has a sweet and savory taste that appears as thick and brown soup with chunks of meat, topped with spring onions, and a bit of crunchy fried garlic.

The smell of the gryphon stew I made is strong, complementing the buttery, salty, and mildly sweet, fried rice that I made earlier. I then called Max and Stephanie to eat, and they were pretty excited about it. While as a cultivator of the Heavenly Way, I don’t need to eat, everybody else still has to eat since fundamentally, their mana is being used differently. Given that Stephanie is a Rank-4 cultivator who nourishes her body and her actions with mana, she can stay up to two weeks without eating or drinking. Of course, I haven’t told her about this yet since I want her to have fun for the first few weeks after becoming my disciple so that she won’t miss anything about the mundane life. Upon tasting the food that I made, I wonder if the food I cooked would also have effects on the body of whoever is eating it. As my tongue touched the food, I commanded the Library to compile a book on the dishes.

Fried Rice and Gryphon Pares (Rank 2 - Better than Normal)

· The fried rice has the effect of increasing the pulling of mana towards the body which then increases the speed of cultivation efficiency by 10% for the next 8 hours.

· The gryphon meat contains the laws of wind governed by the gryphons which then increases the flight speed by 100% for the next 10 minutes.

I was surprised that my cooking had effects as well. Maybe since everything is infused with mana these days, anything we do would affect everything else. I should ask professional guilds about this when I get the time since my friends don’t seem like the people that have a rank in creative processes. After our meal together, Stephanie seemed to be feeling better. I then told her that we should go see her dad together before today ends so her young friend would be apprehended. I put on my brown robe and mask, and we all headed to the castle.

As we were nearing the castle, an old man with short white hair and a full white beard approached us and shouted, “Seize him! The first daughter is in danger!” Stephanie alarmingly shouted, "No, stop!” The guards surrounded me, and since this was all just a misunderstanding, I raised my hand up and followed along. Max stayed perched on Stephanie's head, trying to console her, for he also thinks of himself as an uncle to Stephanie. Given that Max and I are equals, we also share the same sentiments.

When I got thrown into the holding facility below the castle, it wasn’t so medieval as I expected. We went past an old holding facility that is built for people who are being a nuisance, like a pre-apocalypse world prison. But since I am tagged as a terrorist who was with the first daughter, they put me in a different holding facility that is fit for dangerous people in the new world. They put me in a blue-lit cell with no mana entering from the surroundings. Across the room, in another blue-lit cell, there is a teenage boy with long straight brown hair parted on the left side of his face. He looks like the person from the poster, a boy named, "Troy," the one that Stephanie got caught with. Well, I guess it is time to grill my niece’s significant other.