Akusare Oil Fried Chicken (1)
Catherine immediately led Narke and the adventurers into the forest.
Karem accepted the heavy pouch of silver coins, yet finding anything to buy in the village with that money right away proved a little difficult. After all, the village had only just finished wintering and was about to restock food for spring when monsters suddenly invaded—so of course nothing was ready. That did not mean there was nothing at all, however. Fungusby was still a place where people lived.
After putting in some legwork, he inevitably found someone who had a private stash. The person in question was none other than the village carpenter. He had hidden a bundle of Akusare mushrooms he had secretly gone into the forest to gather as emergency funds when the snow first began to melt.
Karem bought the entire lot without haggling and headed straight for the kitchen of the village chief’s house—the lodging offered to the three people from the Mage’s Tower while they stayed in the village. He casually brushed off the greeting from the chief’s late-born daughter (though she was still older than Karem), whom the chief had left behind for odd jobs.
“So these are Akusare mushrooms?”
Karem dumped the bundle into a bowl. Walnut-sized mushrooms the size of an adult’s fist poured out of the leather pouch with a clatter. In that moment he understood why this mushroom was the village’s specialty and so sought after across the continent.
“Whoa—what is this smell?”
Even the famously fragrant matsutake did not have a raw scent so intense it seized an entire room. Could truffles be like this? Karem had never seen or eaten a truffle himself. At best he had tried truffle oil and felt something like a concentrated mushroom flavor. He knew that characteristic only from writing—the alien, dense aroma that hit the moment you took it from its container. In contrast, the Akusare mushroom, though he had never seen it before, felt strangely familiar. It was a little large, but its shape already resembled a walnut, so of course. And the smell, too: a savory aroma like walnut-like nuts mixed with roasted beans dominated the kitchen the way coffee beans roasting over fire would.
“If it’s that famous, the taste should be guaranteed, but the looks—”
A little… why was so much juice coming out? From the wrinkles of the Akusare mushrooms that had hit the bowl, a transparent yellow fluid oozed thickly, like a scene from a gore movie. As Karem eyed it with suspicion, the chief’s late-born daughter—who had been watching his expression from the corner of the kitchen—cautiously approached.
“To eat Akusare mushrooms, you first have to sprinkle salt on them.”
“Salt?”
“Yes. You need to separate the juice from the flesh so they keep longer, and they taste better that way—but more importantly, you can’t eat the juice.”
As she said, Karem sprinkled salt over the mushrooms. The moment the snowflake-like grains touched them, the Akusare mushrooms began gushing juice from their walnut-like wrinkles. Watching them react as violently as slugs to salt, Karem stared down at the bowl with trembling eyes. The visuals were the worst.
The chief’s daughter, as if she had already read his mind, smoothly explained the reason for salting. In short, it was for long-term preservation. If you did not sprinkle salt to separate the juice, Akusare mushrooms would not last at all—they would spoil within three days of harvesting. She carefully ladled out the mushrooms that had been piled high in the bowl, now floating on the sloshing juice and shrunk to true walnut size.
“If you wipe the remaining juice clean like this, put it in a sturdy container, and seal it, you can keep it for over a year.”
“Does that mean you’ve never actually done it yourself?”
“Usually the mushrooms sell long before they get that old.”
“Hmm. We’ll figure out the cooking methods as we go. But this juice—does it have any use?”
Karem casually gazed at the golden liquid sloshing in the bowl. To be honest, it looked incredibly appetizing. The extraction process had been grotesque, yet a savory nut-and-bean aroma rose from it, and the color was a bright yellowish brown that could even look golden depending on the light. When he smacked his lips, the chief’s daughter recoiled in disgust and stopped him.
“Just because it smells and looks good doesn’t mean you can drink it! My great-great-grandfather—who was village chief two generations ago, when famine was everyday life—took a ladleful and collapsed on the spot. He suffered for days before he died!”
“Huh? So you just throw this away?”
“No. We sprinkle it evenly around the colonies where the forest’s Akusare mushrooms grow.”
But in Karem’s eyes it was completely different. Knowledge and experience from both his past and present lives were shouting at him.
No matter how you look at it, this is oil.
Generally, juice contained impurities that made it opaque and sticky. Even when the color looked transparent, it was still sticky. The golden liquid in the bowl was nothing like that. Rather than sticky it was slippery, and no matter how he tilted the vessel, not a single impurity showed. Karem thought it through. Two generations ago—roughly twenty or thirty years—going hungry had been everyday life in Iceland. If a frail, starved old man poured a full ladle of oil into his stomach, of course he would have dropped dead. Past-life Karem had a similar experience. Ah, back then he really thought he was going to die. While dieting he went crazy on his first cheat day, ate as much as he wanted, and then his stomach flipped so hard he spent days running to the bathroom. He had also read plenty of accounts of people who had starved for a long time dying of shock after eating fatty meat. If a case from decades of famine had simply been handed down unchanged, the chief’s daughter’s reaction—and her mistaking the oil in front of her for toxic juice—was only natural.
As he turned it over in his mind, a familiar sound reached his ears.
Cock-a-doodle-doo!
“Hm? That sound—so it escaped again.”
“Chickens?”
“Yes. We built a chicken coop on the outskirts of the village. That call means it’s the boss rooster. Phew—we almost had the livestock eaten too. That was close.”
Karem closed his eyes for a moment and thought. Of course, the chickens of Europa—of Iceland—had never undergone thousands of years of breed improvement like modern ones; they were tough and reeked of game. Even the plump birds raised inside Winterhome were the same. Come to think of it, he had wanted to try this for a while. He had simply forgotten because of those two people who lost their minds over sweet donuts, and the idea had languished until now.
“The chickens in the coop. Sell me three hens—no. Five of them.”
Who would refuse after that? The chief’s daughter, pocketing several times the usual market price, grabbed a butchering knife and went outside.
As the sun began to set, a faint orange glow beyond the gloomy sky lit Fungusby, where untimely winter snow still lay, and the villagers and adventurers swinging tools and equipment at the still-frozen mushroom golems.
Catherine, who had gone into the forest with a few adventurers, returned and walked the snow-covered path, Narke trailing behind her.
“Well, as expected, the reason the golems appeared is—”
“Because of the Mana Supersaturation phenomenon.”
A general term for the phenomenon in which mana saturates above average inside a given space. The causes were extremely diverse, and the side effects were as varied as the causes themselves. It was one of the factors that made undead generate naturally—and a classic reason golems also appeared on their own, just like the mushroom golems that had attacked Fungusby.
Narke crushed a piece of undead bone riddled with holes in her hand. With only light force, bone dust fluttered into the air.
“Th-the reason undead don’t appear around here is also because of that?”
“After the first outbreak, every bit of mana that would have produced undead was siphoned off as the source for the mushroom golems.”
“Th-that’s a headache. If it’s Mana Supersaturation…”
“Not only are the causes diverse, but of all things—mushrooms. Even if it were dangerous, if some other natural object had been the medium, the cleanup would at least be cleaner.”
Catherine clicked her tongue lightly in dissatisfaction.
“Th-the foundation of the spores has been twisted for a long time already.”
“Yes. Even if we solve the cause, mushroom golems will keep appearing. The fact that this village was one of the safest in Iceland is now a thing of the past.”
Narke fiddled with her staff, looking regretful.
“Ah, Akusare mushrooms taste so good. Of all things, from now on they’ve all become golems.”
“I know. Geesh. It’s one of the five most expensive mushrooms in the world. Given what they’re made of, once they turn into golems there’s no real value left except the core.”
“Th-then isn’t this village in big trouble?”
Narke’s drooping ears suddenly shot straight up.
“Y-you said most of the income here comes from Akusare mushrooms.”
“I’m troubled too, so stop there. Haa… how am I supposed to turn this fief back into a golden-egg-laying goose?”
Catherine rubbed her throbbing brow with the hand not holding her staff. To think a new fief would come with a problem like this. With the sudden workload that even a great mage’s mind had not anticipated, she was suffering her first real headache since the spring business trip.
Ah, whatever. This is all because I haven’t been able to eat proper snacks and have been working nonstop until now.
If Karem had overheard Catherine’s thoughts he would certainly have been flabbergasted, asking whether she had already forgotten the shortcake cookies she had eaten on the way here.
“But I’m worried about these, uh, undead traces I keep sensing.”
“Hmm. Come to think of it, there was an alien aura nested at the center of the mushroom golem’s core.”
Arriving at their lodging—the village chief’s house—while still talking with Narke, Catherine shook her head. In any case, she decided to leave the rest for tomorrow and opened the door in a much lighter mood.
Whoooosh!
“Hm? What’s that sound?”
“Wow… th-that savory smell.”
A familiar sound and aroma she had often smelled in the kitchen of the Mage’s Tower. Along with the savory scent came the roar of a heavy rain or waterfall. As they closed the door and drew nearer the kitchen, both the aroma and the noise grew louder and louder.
“D-donuts or something being fried?”
“I told him to cook mushrooms. Donuts made of mushrooms?”
Mushrooms and donuts—two words that did not belong together at all. Catherine furrowed her brow. Of course she did not doubt Karem’s skill. The countless dishes and techniques the boy had shown her, and the visible improvement even then, made her certain the taste would be more than guaranteed. No—wait. Suddenly thinking like this made her anxious. Come to think of it, it was not as if there had never been suspicious precedents. He had once pickled an amount of Red Witch’s Fingers that looked as though he intended to murder someone; later he had adjusted it to a level others could eat. Yet whenever the chance arose he still produced dishes loaded with Bulmason powder that looked more like torture food than anything edible, then sat alone grumbling while he ate them. Even certain mages who had initially looked down on him as a mere servant or cook had been shocked speechless and thereafter pretended not to know him. Unbeknownst to Catherine, however, she had already been trained to tolerate food roughly three times spicier than the original versions. Even so, by Karem’s standards she was still a spice wimp, but that had not changed yet.
Unaware of the transformation that had taken place on her own tongue, Catherine opened the kitchen door, unable to hide her bewilderment, from which the vigorous bubbling of oil could be heard.
Crunch!
An irresistible sound struck the ears of both mages. It was a crispy noise that spoke directly to instinct. Even Catherine, who would normally have maintained her dignity, could not endure this intensity of sound and smell. After finishing hard outdoor work and dragging her exhausted body home, her stomach was seized by the oil boiling fiercely like a waterfall, the crackling crunch, and the savory fat aroma of nuts and beans. The result of that sound and scent—chicken piled mountain-high in several bowls, each piece encased in bumpy golden batter—made Catherine’s instincts try to cast reason aside. Narke was no different.
Neither of them realized the two mages had already entered and stood dumbfounded. With his back to them, Karem tasted a piece of the results that had turned out better than expected and asked his taste-tester.
“Mm—mmm!? Th-this is…”
“Hehehe. How is it? The taste of the oil that used to be nothing more than fertilizer for mushrooms?”
The chief’s daughter, who had just taken a bite of fried chicken, wanted to answer Karem’s question yet had no way to form words. He set aside a few pieces for the completely soul-departed girl, sent her out, then turned to greet the two mages.
“Please take your seats quickly. The chicken will get cold.”