106. The Power to Turn Bread into Coal
106. The Power to Turn Bread into Coal
In the heart of the Empire's capital, Ben's Bakery was filled with fragrant, mouthwatering breads and dazzling, sweet desserts.
The massive building, occupying some of the most expensive prime real estate in the capital, displayed bread on the first floor and desserts on the second.
Gazing at the artistically arranged desserts and breads, members of the Noble Gourmet Society gave the following assessment:
"This shop is like an oasis of sweetness in the middle of a barren desert. Stepping inside makes you feel like you've entered a completely different world from outside.
And the sophisticated interior design that matches the caliber of the desserts on display... The head's meticulous nature truly shines through."
Ben, the head of "Ben's Bakery," thought the oasis comparison was rather apt.
Right next to the elegantly designed building of Ben's Bakery, inside a rough-hewn structure attached to it, dozens of pastry chefs were pouring all their energy into making the breads and pastries that would be displayed in the shop.
That was because the bread factory attached to the refined and elegant bakery was a desert-like place filled with scorching heat, sweat, and pain.
The bread factory was a dreadful place.
Muscular men frantically pounded dough, and behind them, others shoved the finished prepared dough into the blazing hot ovens.
Shoving it in wasn't the end of it.
They had to constantly check if the bread was baking properly inside the oven and shift its position accordingly.
Until every last loaf was finished, the pastry chefs couldn't budge a single step away from the ovens that belched scorching heat; their bodies were drenched in sweat and their faces flushed red from the heat.
The physical labor was grueling, and the heat radiating from the ovens made the environment no different from a sauna.
Among the inventions of magical engineering, there were devices that continuously cast temperature-lowering magic, but they could not be used because it was discovered that their performance was so good that it negatively affected the ovens.
There was no other way to cope except to go into a room where such a device was installed, rest, and come back out if someone felt like they were truly about to collapse.
One pastry chef, who had been vigorously kneading dough for a long while, asked Ben, who had come to check on the situation.
"Head... is that really okay?"
"What's that, you punk?"
A man shouted, his mustache boasting stylishly upturned ends as if a crescent moon had been tacked onto his face.
His powerful, trained physique was nearly bursting out of his pristine white chef's uniform, and his stubborn-looking eyes were intense.
Ben, the head of "Ben's Bakery," shot back a reply at the pastry chef who had asked him.
"I'm talking about handing over the prepared dough to the Woodvilles. That's something not even the Imperial Household does."
What concerned him was the "preservation dough" sent to the Academy just this morning.
It was an innovative method: dough in its final stage before baking, enchanted with preservation magic, that only needed to be popped into an oven to yield a product of identical quality to the items displayed in the shop.
Using this method could give people far away the feeling of having visited the shop, but Ben's Bakery had only ever tested the preservation dough and had never once sent it out externally.
That was because the motto of Ben's Bakery was to offer a taste that could only be experienced at this shop.
"I've done business with that family for a long time, so I can do them a favor like this. They also lent me money when I was setting up this shop."
Though he would never normally do such a thing, if it was a request from the Woodvilles, Ben had no choice but to comply.
Ben was born a commoner.
He may do business catering to nobles, but at his roots, he was just a farmer from the countryside who was fairly good at baking bread and had just arrived in the capital.
When he came to the capital and tried to set up a bakery bearing his own name, not a single person helped Ben, but the Woodville Trading Company trusted him wholeheartedly and gave him the support to open the shop.
And to this day, it was the Woodville Trading Company that supplied Ben's Bakery with all manner of ingredients.
How could he possibly refuse a request from the daughter of such Woodvilles?
"Selling it during the Academy festival... the biggest reason nobles line up at our bakery is because this taste can only be savored here...!
Unlike dough, even if you cast preservation magic on bread, it can't preserve the enchanting buttery aroma of it fresh out of the oven.
We don't even supply that kind of thing to the Imperial Household, and the head personally goes and does everything from kneading to baking himself...!"
Still, it seemed he wasn't happy about it.
What he was saying was valid.
The bakery's meteoric rise was partly due to Ben's outstanding skill, but even more than that, the crucial factor was his innate marketing ability.
Skill was something you obviously had to have; the reason he became the most famous name in the capital was because he masterfully exploited the possessiveness of the aristocracy.
He regularly created "limited edition" products, and no matter how successful he became, he absolutely never opened a branch shop.
Limited items that are hard to acquire intensely stimulate the desire to possess in those who have them, and those who fail to get their hands on them are left seething with frustration.
The more famous he became among the nobles, the more his value climbed.
Even when he received a proposal to supply the Imperial Household, he gritted his teeth and refused.
Instead, whenever the Emperor or the Imperial Household needed anything, Ben personally made a business trip and managed everything himself.
Opening branch shops, regularly supplying the Imperial Household, or properly selling the preservation dough would multiply his income many times over, but Ben resisted the temptation.
He had resisted this temptation to the end because he believed the image value attached to his own bakery was more precious.
It was unbelievable that such a Ben, simply to repay a favor, had sent "preservation dough," something he absolutely never made, out of the capital area... and to the Academy located in a port city, at that.
But Ben raised his fist, delivered a knuckle-cracking thwack to the pastry chef's head, and spoke.
"What, you punk, is baking bread easy? The baking times and temperatures are all different for each type of bread and pastry, and if it were so easy that noble brats who've never touched a drop of water could do it perfectly, then why the hell do you guys get paid?"
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An oven was a cooking apparatus that had existed since ancient times.
You put food into a device containing a heat source and seal it; the food then cooks from the heat sent from every direction inside the sealed space.
In other words, it was a device that heated food by directly blasting it with high heat.
In my previous life, ovens were electronic, and you just had to press a few buttons for them to automatically set the proper temperature and time, making them incredibly convenient cooking appliances, but this world was different.
In this world where many convenient items incorporating the essence of magical engineering were emerging, ovens still remained old-fashioned.
To someone from the modern era, it was the sort of brick oven you'd only see in fairy tale illustrations or a certain children's animation series famous for bread-baking.
There was a hot heat source—in this case, a wood fire below—and rather than exposing the food directly to the flames, the method was to fill the interior of the oven only with the heat and cook with that hot air.
Naturally, there were no sensors or anything like that, so you couldn't know how hot it was inside, and fine-tuning the temperature was also impossible.
Baking pastries and bread obviously requires skill, and even though I'd simplified it a lot, turning prepared dough into proper bread was also a technique requiring considerable know-how.
In other words, it wasn't so easy that people who had only ever eaten bread—never even touched flour—could succeed on their first try.
'Well, I guess that's only natural.'
No matter how much they simplified it, these were scions of noble houses who had only ever ordered others around, gathering together to create something—there was no way it would go smoothly.
Thinking that, it was absurd that only two weeks remained until the Hunting Festival.
If things were like this on the first day, shouldn't they be given at least two months, if not more?
"That can't be... can it..??"
Dorothy Woodville stared at the prepared dough, which had transformed into jet-black lumps like coal, and panicked.
She had thought that if she simply put the dough into the oven and took it out, just as the pastry chefs did, the pristine white dough would magically transform into brown, glossy bread—but instead of brown bread, it had become black coal.
Dorothy wasn't the only one panicking.
Seeing that Dorothy's result—after she'd told them to just trust her—was coal, the students began to murmur.
"By any chance... is there anyone here with expertise in the art of baking?"
At Woodville's words, no one raised their hand.
There was no way such a person existed.
All the exam admission students with any relevant experience had participated in the Hunting Festival, aiming for a jackpot.
They might know very well how to enjoy eating bread and pastries, or the types of bread and pastries, but there was no way they knew how to make them.
"We-well... let's all try our best together anyway...! It's okay even if we burn them all. They say failure is the mother of success, don't they!"
"Ye-yeah!!"
At Dorothy Woodville's encouragement to keep trying until a decent result came out, the students came forward one by one and did their best to get friendly with the oven.
I myself could do a fair bit of cooking, but baking bread and pastries was a completely different field, so I couldn't get a feel for that at all.
While everyone was focused on the oven up front, Woodville quietly sidled up to me and whispered.
".... Do you have a moment?"
"Me?"
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Dorothy and I quietly slipped out of the practice room and entered a nearby empty lecture hall.
This was my first time having a private conversation with Dorothy Woodville, but I knew her family well.
During my days as a knight, I had met her father, Gale Woodville, the owner of the Woodville Trading Company, several times.
His appearance—a rotund belly, the same brown hair as hers, the classic look of a jovial merchant—had left a lasting impression.
Of course, damn it all, Dorothy was taller than me.
Every time she moved, the tips of her lush twin-tails brushed lightly right in front of my nose, nearly making me sneeze.
Perhaps because she used good perfume, the scent of wildflowers wafted thickly from her hair.
As the door to the lecture hall closed, Woodville spun around in a circle and met my eyes.
The way her twin-tails and wide skirt traced a large circle when she spun made it look like a scene from a musical.
"So, Miss Woodville, what business do you have with me?"
"First, allow me to express my gratitude."
Dorothy abruptly bowed her head to me.
Her sudden bow caught me off guard.
"I don't recall doing anything that deserves your thanks."
"You gave up the Hunting Festival, which was practically a guaranteed victory for you, and stayed behind for the sake of our class, didn't you? No amount of thanks I could give would be sufficient."
The truth was I'd just skipped out to slack off, but her skill at dressing it up was impressive.
Listening to her smooth-talking words, I recalled her character profile.
'The woman who almost snatched the seat of a Golden Duke with nothing but her silver tongue...'
Both Dorothy's father and Dorothy herself were extremely skilled at the conversational art of puffing up the other party and winning them over to their side.
In the original novel, she had come close to gaining the real power to shake the Empire's economy in place of Shahra Phrygia, who had become a demon-touched.
However much she could wag her tongue, her body was weak, so she was on the verge of taking that position before being killed by the demon-turned-Shahra.
If she hadn't died then, the collapse of the Empire in the novel would have been significantly delayed.
"Mr. Nemea, you don't have to do a single thing during this Hunting Festival. Decorating the tea service and the classroom, and even receiving the guests... the other students and I will take care of everything."
"What is this, some kind of hazing? Should I just stand here and stare at the wall?"
"That's not it at all. What I'd like to ask of you, Mr. Nemea, is 'security.'"
"Given my background, there are very many people who don't think kindly of me.
If the harassment were focused solely on me personally, I wouldn't mind, but I'm afraid it might cause trouble for the other students in the class."
The Woodville family was currently noble, but they hadn't been aristocrats by birth.
It was a title purchased by Gale Woodville, a successful bourgeois merchant, with the enormous fortune he had earned.
It was, in effect, buying only the "responsibilities" of the nobility without any territory or special benefits, but Gale had happily purchased the title, calculating that in the long run, the position of nobility could serve as a more valuable shield than the additional taxes he paid.
But nobles who hated them simply for having bought their title with money were a dime a dozen.
Since the Woodvilles' power was strong, those nobles couldn't come at them directly, but it seemed they felt it keenly.
"So you're telling me to just stand there to stop them from trying anything funny? Well, at least I won't be staring at a wall—it's similar."
"I implore you. I... I want to make this Hunting Festival a success, by any means necessary."
Dorothy spoke those words and bowed her head once more.
"But you don't look like you can even produce a proper loaf of bread yet. Think you can pull it off successfully?"
"In the remaining two weeks, I'll do my absolute best so that we can at least put up a decent imitation."
I had worried, recalling the dough turned into lumps of cinder, but Dorothy stared right into my eyes with a confident expression.
"... That's a good look in your eyes."
Those were the strong eyes of someone determined with absolute certainty.
That pleased me.
"Fine. You've taken on the role of the point person for this Hunting Festival, so I'll play along. However, you'd better really be properly prepared in two weeks, got it? I've never been to Ben's Bakery myself, you know."
"You can look forward to it. Whatever it takes, I'll make sure we can bake them perfectly before the Hunting Festival begins...!!"
"No. Whatever legal means it takes, you mean."