Cookies
Luke decided to brew Yerna a tea good for recovering from fatigue — a small repayment for the woman who had stayed up the entire night fretting over him.
Most mana-herbs ended up as ingredients for mana potions. As it happened, he still had the Manello he had offered her as an apology. A mana potion made from Manello required a somewhat delicate hand when working the mana, but for Luke that was nothing at all. If you gathered every elixir and potion he had ever crafted over a lifetime into one place, the sheer volume of experience would fill a modest lake and still have some left over.
"Hmm."
Brewing an elixir after so long almost felt like slipping back into the past. Between then and now, the shapes of pots and tableware had barely changed across five thousand years.
Slurp.
He stirred with a ladle, tasted a little, and found the mana thoroughly dissolved — more than enough for fatigue recovery. To add fragrance, he rummaged through the teacups and pulled out the leaves Yerna used most often.
Tird Leaf, is it.
Tird Leaf carried a modest fatigue-recovering effect of its own. Blend it in, rouse that property with mana, and the restorative power would climb even higher. He finished the tea, let it cool to a proper warmth, and aged the mana within it. Circles refined the brew still further into a tea of fatigue recovery.
In truth, it was already closer to a potion than a tea. Mana was steeped through it, and though the principle was elementary, the enchantment woven into a mere cup of tea was far more than such a humble vessel deserved.
Luke strained out the leaves and flowers, transferred the liquid into a teapot, and approached Yerna, who was still thoroughly knocked out.
"Yerna."
"Mm?"
"Drink this. It will ease your fatigue."
"Haa… Thank you."
The moment she drank the tea Luke held out, Yerna's eyes opened wide.
He brews it better than I do…
A deep, subtle fragrance, and a sensation that seemed to sink straight into her chest… It really was an excellent tea.
I actually feel the fatigue lifting.
She had steeped tea every single day without fail since she was ten, and the fact that Luke did it so much better left her feeling a little strange.
Maybe I never had much talent for brewing tea after all.
The thought made her faintly embarrassed. Nearly forty years of daily practice, and no talent? But what did talent matter? The tea was superb, and she felt far better already. If she had known it would turn out like this, she would have asked him straight out instead of dancing around it.
Yerna let out a breath and spoke.
"Haa… This really is wonderful tea. Thank you, Lu."
"Not at all."
Watching Luke smile with the teapot in his hands made every unkind thought she had entertained feel suddenly, completely useless. Having nothing left to worry about was a good thing, of course… This time, instead of sighing, Yerna took another sip of tea.
"Hmm…"
With her fatigue fully restored, Yerna left for work, and the house was his alone. Luke tidied the mess, washed the bloodstained handkerchief, and settled in with a book and a can of food.
She had told him, Eat whatever you like, as much as you like! — but cooking anything that required real effort first thing in the morning still felt like a bother. No one could be industrious every hour of the day, and Luke was not the sort who craved strong flavors at breakfast anyway.
"But what on earth is all of this…"
Yerna had bought an entire mountain of snacks in every shape and color. He pulled them out one by one and studied the pictures printed on the wrappers. They all looked appetizing enough.
"Hmm. Is this one made from corn?"
Corn was commonly baked into bread, steamed, roasted, or pressed for oil… but almost never prepared like this. A rather curious form. And why, exactly, had someone drawn a corn cob with eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a thumbs-up on the packaging? Was that the snack's mascot? A simple photograph would have been plenty.
Luke turned the bag over. This side was packed solid with text. Who wrote all of this, anyway? He genuinely wondered who went around engraving such tiny, crisp lettering onto every single product.
"The packaging of this age is rather chaotic."
—…
Pai nodded as if in agreement. Luke read through it carefully, character by character.
Corn, mixed edible oil, seasoning, glucose, fine sugar, milk fat powder, sugar, salt, acidity regulator…
Was this not simply a sweet-and-salty snack made from corn? He picked up another bag and found much the same. The ingredients were never just one or two. What needed so many things just to make a cookie? Reading closely, he found plenty of materials he had never heard of — and a few whose names looked faintly alarming. They would not be sold if they were unsafe to eat, of course… but he still felt a twinge of unease.
The nutrition label listed carbohydrates, sodium, and the like, with percentages of daily recommended intake. Was that a warning not to eat too much? And what, for that matter, were carbohydrates? What was sodium?
"What an age this is. Even making a single snack seems to require alchemy."
Thinking that, he picked up the puffiest bag and gave it a shake. It rustled with air, as if the snack had been packed together with the atmosphere itself.
"Sealed with air so it will not break, it seems."
A rather ingenious idea for packaging. Luke speculated on how it had come about. In his time, sealing and preservation techniques had been so advanced — the equivalent of Fourth-Circle magic — that they could never be mass-produced. Packaging had meant nothing more than choosing a fresh pastry from the bakery that day, wrapping it in cloth you brought yourself, and tucking it into a basket.
And now? He still did not fully understand it, but sealing and storage technology had clearly advanced a great deal. This bag was in a state of perfect seal, was it not? Thanks to that, the shelf life claimed on the packaging was quite long.
"Hmm."
This age was utterly different from the past. Now that goods could be kept longer and more safely, products in packaging like this could be gathered onto countless display shelves and sold over extended periods. There was no longer any need to consume a cookie on the same day it was made.
"Thinking about it afresh, that is how it is."
Luke remembered a time long ago when Renie had asked him to fetch a cookie she was craving — and he had run the errand for her. Using a Tenth-Circle mage as a delivery boy… she had been a rather bold young lady. Well, the cookies had been good enough that people lined up for them.
Quietly, Luke closed his eyes and let the memory rise.
Kiiing—!
Mana stirred. Renie knew exactly what that meant, and who had caused it. She simply watched the space tear open and smiled with her eyes — for the man who would step through, and for the joy he would bring with him.
Step. Step. Step.
"You have come."
From the rift in space, a white-haired man walked out. It was a warp of staggering power — a single leap from a frontier territory thousands of kilometers away, ignoring hundreds of anti-magic wards in the process — yet he only shook his head with a faintly put-upon air and held out a basket. It was, of course, piled high with delicious-looking cookies: a popular item from a bakery he had discovered during the old quest to find the Hero of the Holy Spear.
Renie accepted it gladly, plucked one free, and put it in her mouth.
"Mm. Delicious as always. Still warm from the oven. Thank you, Lord Luke."
Of course it was. The instant he had taken the basket, he had frozen its time and leapt through space. Luke cleared his throat.
"Why have you not simply invited that pastry chef to the royal palace? You could have eaten his cookies whenever you wished."
"Heh. Lord Luke. You know one thing and not the second."
"What do you mean?"
Renie smiled lightly.
"These cookies are at their most delicious when made in that place."
Luke nodded and murmured,
"Hmm. I see. The local ingredients, the particular climate of the region, the subtle differences only that location can produce."
"Well, that is not entirely wrong. But it is not the main reason."
"Oh?"
Renie held out a piece of cookie to him.
"Here."
Luke took it without thinking, looked down at the round cookie, then up at Renie's expression.
"What do you mean by that?"
"That cookie is not made by the pastry chef alone. The people who eat it make it as well. Think about it. When you visited, what was that shop like?"
"Mm…"
Luke cast back through his memory. The baker, smiling as he apologized to the long line of waiting customers — I put a little extra in for those who waited so long — and the regulars answering with a laugh, It's fine, Mr. Mustang. It's not the first time.
Maker and consumer had not been a simple exchange of money. In that place, they lived by interacting with one another.
Luke looked at the cookie again. It no longer seemed like merely a rather tasty cookie. This was the pastry chef's heart.
"If I forced him to come, he would come. But he would never make those cookies with the same joy as before. And that is not the cookie I wish to eat."
"Indeed…"
"Now you understand why I will not bring him into the royal household?"
It was a simple magical truth: a maker's overflowing emotion settles into the work itself. The maker's feelings…
Luke looked at the cookie in his hand.
"Emotion…"
A faint bitterness touched him. He remembered that the bakery had closed in the second generation. The cookies had become ordinary products, made strictly by the recipe — just like this one.
So not everything has improved simply because this is a new age.
Crunch.
The taste was good, yet something hollow remained that nothing could fill. No emotion had been poured into it.
—Luke…?
"Ah, Pai."
At the spirit's worried look and questioning tone, Luke put on an untroubled smile.
"It is nothing. Do not worry. My throat is simply a little dry."
Crunch.
The taste, at least, was still good.