The Elf Enlightenment Movement (1)
A red tomato gleamed on the stall, beautiful as anything.
Like a man bewitched, I reached out and touched it.
Shwaaak—
A sound only I could hear: something seeping into my body. The tomato had been registered as an item in the Mana Market.
What was I going to make with it?
Tomatoes were the cheat code of the vegetable kingdom, pressed into service as base, main, garnish, and the kick that finished a dish. Simmer them with stock and other ingredients and you had tomato stew; reduce them low and slow and you had tomato sauce. They were wonderful tossed into a pan alongside pasta, and if you sliced them thin and left them in the sun, you even got sun-dried tomatoes. The uses were endless, which meant the fretting was endless too. They'd be delicious in a curry. A simple pasta would do just as well. If I truly couldn't be bothered, I could sprinkle them with sugar and eat them as they were.
While I happily turned the dilemma over, the elf running the stall spoke.
"Human. You buying, or not?"
"Ah—sorry. I'll take it. How much?"
"We don't take that sort of thing."
The stallkeeper waved off the copper coins I held out. Right. Elves bartered, didn't they? And I had nothing on me worth trading. I'd been drugged asleep and kidnapped, so I hadn't brought a single thing. If I'd known it would come to this, I would have at least stuffed an emergency block of tofu in my pocket. I patted myself down in search of anything of value and came up nearly empty.
The tomato was already registered in the Mana Market, so I didn't strictly need to buy it—but there was such a thing as a merchant's ethics. I ran a shop myself. I couldn't pretend I didn't know better. Live that selfishly, and it all comes back around.
"Hsss... haah. I don't know."
"Don't know what, all of a sudden?"
"Shit. Seriously, who even is she?"
"Does the owner look like someone you know?"
I set the tomato down and pressed a hand to my forehead. Veila was staring at my strange behavior in open confusion.
"Who's the elf just standing there doing nothing—after drugging me, locking me up, and kidnapping me—without so much as offering to buy a tomato?"
"Hieek..."
"Shit... I really don't know."
Veila's face had become the spitting image of a guilty side-eye emoticon. At my words she shuffled over to the stallkeeper.
"Just one basket of tomatoes, please... Put it on the tab, under Veila of the Sildiel family."
"Hm. That'll do nicely. I needed the privy cleaned anyway."
"Hic... hic..."
The price of selling Veila off: one basket of tomatoes. For a hopeless elf, I'd say I got her cheap.
Once the tomatoes were actually in my hands, though, a question surfaced. It was April. How were there tomatoes? Depending on the region, it was already a little late even to be planting seedlings. I put the question straight to the stallkeeper.
"Asking something even a newborn elf knows... Ah. Right. You're human. Suppose you might not know."
"Right. Do elven farms have some centuries-old tradition of plastic greenhouses?"
"Plastic... I don't know what that is. But we have the World Tree."
What I heard next was a shock all on its own.
"By the World Tree's power, Nuardel stays mild all year round. There's no such thing as a season, either. Plant crops in a field, offer a prayer, and within a few days they fruit and ripen."
"Insane elf hax."
So while humans were breaking their backs in the fields, telling themselves they had to survive, elves went click—haha! and just plucked the fruit? This was a host's rigged map. Straight-up elf cheat. Unlike me, barely able to contain my horror, the stallkeeper didn't seem to understand what was special about any of it. Was this the average for ordinary elves in Nuardel?
Their elf rating is ridiculous.
To be fair, I used the Mana Market myself to ignore seasons and origins. Still, I'd never imagined a method this fantastical—flooding the land with overflowing vitality just to force things to grow. The World Tree was that powerful a being. No wonder it reached even Silbaerin, sitting at the foot of the same Kalian Mountain Range. Learned something new today.
Riding the momentum, I kept asking.
"What do you usually make with tomatoes?"
"Tomatoes, we just... eat them."
"Ah. A normal stew, then?"
"No. Just eat them."
"Ah, so you make a sauce and have it with pasta?"
"What are you talking about? I said we just eat them."
Ask as many times as I liked, the answer never changed. They had an ingredient this good, and they ate it plain? Why? Cook it even a little and the umami graph shot straight up.
Why...
No. I'd only asked one elf. Maybe this stallkeeper was just a yellow-mutt palate who'd built a wall between himself and cooking. Denying reality, I caught other elves as they passed and asked them too.
"Excuse me—how do you eat tomatoes?"
"Huh? We just eat them."
"You don't cook them?"
"Well, no. You can eat them without cooking, can't you?"
Elves of fresh green growth and beautiful faces, and a benevolent World Tree embracing every life upon the land. Nuardel, born where all of that met, was utopia itself. A beautiful world without a single sharp edge. That was what I had thought.
Until a moment ago.
"Please get me out of this hell."
"J-Jinwoo? Get a hold of yourself!"
"If this is a dream, wake me up already."
I'd swallowed it. This country's red pill. Those elves were pretty enough to slap an idol across the face, and to my red-pilled eyes they now looked like nothing but yellow mutts. No—they even had Elskit, their own hardtack. They baked bread. So why wouldn't they cook a proper meal?
So my eyes are open.
Having learned the truth of this world, I hardened my heart. In short, there was one reason these pointy-eared bastards didn't cook: because it was edible enough without it. Wheat, reduced all the way to flour or grain, was difficult to eat raw, so they made bread. Vegetables too hard and fibrous to gnaw through raw without taking forever—carrots, celery, and the like—they boiled or cooked. That was what elves meant by "cooking." They weren't a race with little appetite to begin with. They'd simply eaten with their eyes covered, nothing but this, until their threshold for taste was crawling on the floor.
Which made me the two-eyed man in the village of the one-eyed. And Iseria, Seiran, and Veila, who had eaten my cooking for a long while, would be no different.
Grrgle...
The moment the thought landed, a faint hunger sounded beside me. Veila was gulping down water. But can you hide the sky with the palm of your hand? Her ears and shoulders had drooped, and her steps were unsteady. I got the picture.
"Hey. Veila."
"Yes..."
"You were hungry."
"Ngh..."
At that quiet line, Veila bowed her head and wiped at her tears.
"Ever since I came back to Nuardel, I haven't been able to eat a thing."
"Yeah. Figures."
"Is something wrong with me? If I'd never known the taste of your food in the first place..."
"No. It isn't your fault."
This insane world is the one at fault.
I set my resolve and tore through the market like a man hunting lice. Tomatoes first, then basil, carrots, celery, onions, and on and on.
"Put it under Veila of the Sildiel family. You can have her do whatever you like."
"Hm. Much obliged. We were short on hands anyway. Perfect timing."
"Veeeilaaa!!"
Of course, every debt went on Veila's tab. Living on nothing but tasteless food was pitiful, but favors and grudges had to be settled clean. If anything, this would let her hold her head a little higher. Whether she understood my heart or not, her ears drooped.
There was nothing left to buy, and a good deal of time had passed since we'd left the mansion. The light had stretched a little; evening must have been drawing near. I returned to the mansion, went up toward my room... and did not go. I headed straight for the dining hall.
Still, the place had pretty much everything a kitchen needed. Probably because this wasn't an ordinary elven household, but a house with a name. Iseria still seemed to be getting scolded somewhere, and I hadn't so much as seen Seiran. I sent Veila off as well and stood before the counter with an easy heart. After I'd declared that I would see to dinner, the kitchen was mine alone.
What should I make? Things they'd been eating all along under the comfortable notion that they were "edible enough"—and yet, cooked properly, delicious enough to snap both ears straight up. To land an impact like that, what would be best? I worried over it for a while, then settled on a menu. There was time to spare, and evening was exactly when you wanted something hearty enough to lay down a foundation and eat your fill.
I'll open your eyes for you, you elves.
Shwaaak—!
The clean sound of a blade cutting air rang across the barren training ground.
Shwaaak—!
An elf of platinum-blond hair, a tall and handsome face, and pointed ears was drilling a beautiful sword form. Beads of sweat gathered and fell, and he ignored them, lost in the sword—until the moment he was deepest in it.
Shwaa—
Grrgle!
"Ngh."
The hunger he had barely managed to press down started up again. Seiran lowered his practice wooden sword. A fellow elf approached with impeccable timing.
"Seiran, that's enough. Come eat lunch."
"No... I'm fine."
"You barely ate breakfast."
"Ahem..."
His comrade was right. The proof was that Seiran's stomach kept sounding even as they spoke. In the end he went with the other elf to the dining hall. He hadn't been all that hungry in the morning, so perhaps now he could eat and enjoy it. He realized at once how naive that thought had been.
"World Tree, who gives us this day's bread—thank you."
"...Thank you."
His comrade offered the brief courtesy and began to eat. Seiran, by contrast, could not lift a single spoonful.
Is there really nothing else to eat?
Tofu? Bibimbap? Soybean-paste stew? Scallion pancakes?
Had all those delicious things been nothing but an illusion? He closed his eyes and opened them again, and the food before him had not changed. Carrots, celery, spanips—vegetables too hard and fibrous to eat raw. A vegetable stew with those things dumped in any which way, barely seasoned at all. Wheat bread that looked nothing like chewy. Tomatoes with nothing but the dirt washed off. By the elven average, it was a meal beyond reproach.
But Seiran was an elf whose eyes had opened. An enlightened elf, his old standard of fine dining smashed to pieces.
Grrrrgle—!!
His stomach howled like something mad. Even so, the brain and tongue that remembered taste wanted nothing to do with the food in front of him. One who has learned the truth can never go back to what he was. Seiran let his head fall before that cruel reality and ended the meal at the bare minimum of nutrition.
"Hey, you all right? Did somebody mess with you in human society?"
"No. No. If anything..."
If anything, it was the opposite. He brushed off his comrade's worry and threw himself back into training. At least while he trained, he could forget the hunger.
Shwaaak...
Shwak...
But Seiran's sword path had lost its spirit, the same as his heart. The wooden sword wobbled along of its own accord.
Should I go to Kang Jinwoo right now and beg him to make me anything?
Blinded by a moment's gluttony, he had kidnapped Kang Jinwoo only last night. He had not met him since. There was the shame of a dishonorable act, and it was also true that he had no particular reason he had to see the man. Lord Elioren, besides, had wished to face Kang Jinwoo first. But Seiran could not endure it. After he learned the joy of eating, the torment of hunger had grown dozens of times worse. Clutching every anguish, he kept on with his training.
Orange dusk stretched long across the training ground.
"Seiran, that's enough."
"Ah... Veila."
Before they quite knew it, evening had drawn close, and the two elves whose eyes had opened met. Their conditions matched as if stamped from the same mold. The difference was that there was light in Veila's eyes. Seiran studied them, puzzled. She looked as if she had starved all day, the same as he had—so what was she hoping for, that she had put such a keen brightness in her gaze? Then Veila spoke.
"Mr. Jinwoo... says to come. For dinner."
"W... what?"
A single line left Veila's mouth like a benediction. She was the one bringing the news, and her face was brimming with rapture.