The Academy Came Alive (1)
"Eilenna! The workers can put the stall up themselves, so let's go get the ingredients!"
"R-right!"
Eilenna and I did nothing at the administration office but confirm the stall permit, then headed straight back outside. Stay in that building any longer and the crowd would have swallowed us whole. A crowd breeds a crowd, and curiosity calls to curiosity. Students who had only come to see what the fuss was—why everyone was swarming the girl with the toast—had piled in after them, and the cluster swelled until it turned into a single current, like the wave pool at a water park.
The stall would get built without us anyway. The frame and the canopy were already made; all that remained was assembly, which might even finish before we could haul the ingredients back.
"Eilenna, can you use magic? Even a little wind magic would make carrying this a lot easier."
"I'm no Elioren, but I can manage. Don't worry!"
"Perfect! Just grab the cooking tools I set aside in the kitchen. I'll handle the ingredients."
"Got it!"
We sprinted all the way to the mansion and packed in a hurry. Thank goodness I'd staged the cookware ahead of time. If I'd been fishing it out piece by piece and washing it now, lunch hour would have come and gone entirely.
The ingredients, though. What was I supposed to do about those?
None of this had been in the plan. There was no carriage, and no guild hands I could call in. The core ingredients were sandwich bread, eggs, cabbage, carrots, and an assortment of sauces. Not many kinds, but without something to haul them, there was no way I could carry the lot.
We'd already stirred up a crowd. Couldn't we simply open tomorrow?
You could think that. But if there is one mindset a small-business owner can never repeat enough, it is this: always assume the worst. Popularity can pack a place wall to wall today and vanish like foam by tomorrow. You don't wait for the tide to come in and then start rowing. You row like hell beforehand, so that when the tide does come in, you're already moving forward.
Aaah. I really didn't want to use it here.
Until now, the only person who knew about my skill, Mana Market, was Iseria. I'd been detained because of the Monster Wave and forced to reveal it, and it looked as though I'd have no choice this time either. I'd wanted to tell Eilenna only after I had something more convincing to offer her. Iseria had worried, deeply, that if I wasn't careful my ability could be branded black magic, or heresy. Hear something like that and of course you get spooked. It was the whole reason I'd been so cautious every single time I used it.
"Eilenna! Could you float these bread crates? Why are they this heavy!"
"Sure. But are the other ingredients all right?"
"Ah... they're fine. Let's just go."
"Hmm. All right. If you say so, Jinwoo."
I dragged out an absurd mountain of bread crates, groaning the whole way, and asked Eilenna for the magic. She looked puzzled that, seasonings aside, I hadn't brought a scrap of the other ingredients—only the bread—but she let it pass, figuring I had something in mind.
Once everything we meant to take was in hand, we tore off toward the Academy. A fair stretch of lunch still remained, but opening a stall and getting it set was no small job of its own. In this moment, time had literally turned to gold.
We reached the Academy having run until our breath climbed into our throats, then slowed our steps, utterly spent and wheezing.
"Aigoo, aigoo, I'm dying. We're here, so let's walk the rest."
"Hieek... hek."
At last my precious stall crept into view. And with it, a scene that was a little off.
"Oh?! There's the boss!"
"He's got ingredients with him. Think he's opening right now?"
"Food!!! Bring the food!!"
The workers had finished the setup, only to be thrown into a panic by the sudden crush of people. Terrified that if they clocked out as they were, the students' pestering would tear the stall apart, they were guarding it for dear life. And stretching out in front of my stall... a line with no end in sight.
"Hey!! Black Hair!! Do something, quick!"
"Agh, thank you. You can head out!"
"Right! Good luck!"
There was no time for a leisurely prep. I ducked straight through the stall's back door and put the setup on Eilenna.
"Eilenna! Get every tool set, and put the fire spirits in the burners! Once they're hot, start with the bread!"
"O-okay! Got it!!"
The moment she heard me, she dropped into the opening routine with crisp, orderly precision. All that practice was already paying off in spades. While she drew every eye of the students packed in front of the stall, I slipped into a deep corner of the place—the storeroom no one outside could see—and used Mana Market.
Cabbage, carrots, butter, eggs, milk, cheese, ham, ketchup, mayonnaise... yeesh. Even more than I'd thought? From now on, I'd buy from the market whenever I could. I'd never exchanged this much in a single go, and it didn't feel as though it would be good for me.
The items and quantities to be exchanged are numerous. Do you really wish to proceed with the exchange?
As if it had read my mind, the status window sent a warning unlike its usual messages. But what, was it going to kill me?
Gotta do what I gotta do.
The Academy's whole student body was about seven hundred, and there was no way every last one of them would come buy toast. Exchange ingredients for a generous five hundred servings, and that ought to cover it.
Back when I'd cooked for the knight order, the ingredients were already on hand and the menu had been curry, so the mana cost hadn't been steep. A single kilogram of curry powder could make curry for fifty. Outstanding value for the price. Toast, on the other hand, wasn't something you stir-fried or boiled in bulk. Each ingredient was cooked on its own, and they only mixed once they were in your mouth. In every respect, it was a menu whose variety and volume had no choice but to climb.
I squeezed my eyes shut and exchanged only what today's lunch service required.
Shaaaa—
In that instant, along with the familiar sensation of mana draining away...
Crash!
"Agh, shit."
"Jinwoo! Are you all right? That was a loud noise!"
"I'm fine! Just missed a step."
Something like seventy percent of my mana had emptied out in a flash. I had no clear way to measure it, but set against what I usually burned through, I could roughly tell. Using that much at once sent a violent dizzy spell through me all at once. I'd braced my thighs hard just in case before the exchange; if I hadn't, I would have gone down. I still needed mana left over to control the fire spirits, and this was cutting it razor-close to safe.
Five hundred servings of ingredients, delivered in exchange for my mana. I gave them a quick prep so I could use them at once, then packed them to the brim in portioning bins shaped like the stainless hotel pans from a restaurant back home.
You know how, at the banchan refill corner of a neighborhood restaurant, the pickled radish and kimchi sit in stainless side-dish pans? Those are hotel pans. Their sizes are marked in inches—that cursed unit—but modern hotel pans are standardized so well that anyone in the food business ends up using them. Handy little portioning bins. I'd asked Calius for these along with the stall itself, and he'd matched them perfectly.
This world had no stainless steel, so I'd settled for wood. Better to chew on sawdust than on iron filings, wouldn't you say? Kidding. Every one of these wooden pans had already been finished with an oil coating, so they were hygienically harmless. Play games with sanitation at the Imperial Academy and get caught, and I had a feeling it wouldn't end at a simple shutdown of the business.
Clack, clack—
I carried the pans up front and found Eilenna just finishing the setup in a flurry.
"Huh? Where did those come from?"
"I'll explain later. For now..."
"Boss!!! Open up!!"
"At this rate, lunch is going to be over..."
I'd cooked in the middle of a forest in a remote northern backwater, gone off to the land of the elves, and only now, after all that wandering, arrived in the capital. "A fresh swell of feeling" didn't begin to cover the thrill rising in my chest.
"Shutters up! Let's hit it hard!"
"Yeah!!"
It was only a small stall on Academy grounds, but the capital was the capital. In a market on a scale Silbaerin couldn't begin to match, the curtain rose on my debut.
"Two ham-and-cheese toasts, please!"
"Thank you! That'll be thirty copper!"
Clink—
Eilenna took the coins from a girl beaming ear to ear. Elves were, at heart, creatures of little material desire, but the bright ring of metal coins piling up was rather pleasant to hear.
When a customer stepped into the stall, the counter came first, and beside it sat an enormous griddle—a natural layout, matched to the way people moved through the shop.
Ssszzzz—
A griddle big enough to toast twenty slices of sandwich bread at once, if you packed it full. Before that iron, heat rolling off it in waves, Kang Jinwoo made toast with hands that looked possessed. The griddle was split into two zones: bread toasting on one side, fillings on the other.
"Whoa, look at that guy. Ex-knight, you think? His hands are insanely fast."
"Come on. Why would an ex-knight run a stall out here? It doesn't even look that hard."
"Hmm... you think so?"
Students unused to cooking murmured among themselves in front of the stall. Whether they did or not, Kang Jinwoo flipped a thick cabbage-and-egg omelet in one clean motion and kept cooking, tidying the station around him more neatly than a high-end restaurant would. If someone's work looks easy, that person is a master of a very high order.
Eilenna had cooked a little on her own, and after resolving to help at Kang Jinwoo's stall she had practiced kitchen work whenever she found a spare moment. Even so, seeing the full measure of his skill brought to bear for the first time, she could only be stunned. He was neither long-lived nor slow to age, the way an elf was, so what in the world were those hands? His proficiency was beyond imagination, like an old master who had sold nothing but toast for fifty years.
Jinwoo... he's even more incredible than I thought.
Just how packed a life did someone have to live, to build skill like that while still young?
"Two ham-and-cheese toasts, ready! Enjoy!"
"Thank you!"
The girl took the steaming toast from Kang Jinwoo with eyes full of expectation, then bit in at once alongside the friend who had waited with her.
"Mmm!! What is this sauce? It's so good!"
"Sweet and salty—this is a flavor I'd want to take home to Father!"
Toast was food you could eat easily even while walking. Spellbound, the students tore into it and headed back toward the Academy's main building.
"Wow... that smell is actually insane. How many are left ahead of us?"
"Almost our turn. Just hold on a little longer."
"If they run out when it's my turn, I'll have no choice but to spread the fertilizer I developed in class. Extremely foul fertilizer."
"Please, I'm begging you, don't..."
The tail of the long order line pointed toward the main building, so the students who had already bought their toast ended up, through no fault of their own, getting under the skin of everyone still waiting. The Academy sorted its students into the Magic, Combat, Alchemy, and Administration departments, and anyone whose department sat far from Kang Jinwoo's stall had no choice but to feel anxious.
Watching the considerable sprawl of the Academy grounds, Kang Jinwoo had vaguely guessed as much himself. The reason commoner students went hungry in the first place was that leaving the Academy for a meal simply took too long. So even as the orders surged without end, his hands never stopped.
Running low on cabbage and eggs. I should slice some carrots, too.
Cabbage went into both the ham-and-cheese toast and the street toast in the same form, and it was hitting bottom far faster than anything else. Kang Jinwoo slapped fresh bread onto the griddle and, while it toasted, pulled out a whole head of cabbage.
Tadadadadang—
He quartered it so it would slice cleanly, then brought the knife down in a blur. The students waiting on their toast stared, spellbound.
"Whoa, that knife work is fast as hell."
"I don't think even the swordsmanship instructor could cut that quickly."
"Now, now, students. A sword and a kitchen knife aren't the same thing."
Kang Jinwoo finished the cabbage and had the waiting students' toast done in no time. The heads he'd prepped were nearly gone; the flow of customers would start tapering off soon.
"Jinwoo! One of each kind of toast. This is the last order!"
"Okay. Let's go!"
He set the French toast—the one that had to brown slowly over a low flame—on a separate burner, and his hands moved with mechanical precision.
Vivid red ketchup spread smooth over a cabbage-and-egg omelet cooked to a golden brown. Sugar scattered without stint across the viscous ketchup, and a blanket of sandwich bread came down over the top. On another slice he first spread that tangy-sweet sauce on thick, then laid in an egg omelet cooked snug and tight so the bite came out cloud-soft. A little ham and cheese, a heap of crisp shredded cabbage, and the ham-and-cheese toast was finished too.
Meanwhile a soft, pillowy aroma rose from the burner off to the side—the signal that the French toast was done just right. A surface seared lavishly in butter. The gentleness of milk settled fully inside the thick bread. Sugar and honey went over the top without holding back, and the French toast was complete. At that same moment, the French toast, the ham, and the cheese all ran out.
"Three toasts, as ordered. The stock ran out right on your turn. Enjoy."
"Lucky us. No need to spread the fertilizer after all."
"Hey, don't say useless things. Thank you!"
The students said something he couldn't quite follow, but the last order was done. The forecourt that had been packed shoulder to shoulder opened up all at once, and only then did closing for the day feel real. Kang Jinwoo rolled his hunched shoulders wide.
"Nnnghh!! Great work, Eilenna. Was it manageable?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. You had it worse than I did. I knew you were amazing, but I got to see it all over again."
"It's nothing. Just a small talent."
While the stall had been a madhouse, they'd been too busy to talk. Now that there was room to breathe, she could ask. Eilenna put forward the question she had been holding back.
"But where did all the ingredients come from? They weren't stored at the stall ahead of time, were they?"
"Ah, that's..."
There was no particular suspicion in it. Just honest curiosity. The amount of food clearly couldn't have been thrown together on the spot. And yet, at that simple question, Kang Jinwoo floundered in a way he rarely did. He brooded hard, the look in his eyes that of a man standing on the edge of a major confession, and the sudden seriousness of it made Eilenna tense all at once.
Just as his mouth was about to open—
Click, click—
"Hmm. Business seems to be doing all right, Cook."
"E-Ermia? What brings you here..."
"What do you mean? I told you I'd stop by."
Lunch hour had passed, and a street-side stillness had fallen in an instant. The quiet tap of heeled shoes broke that stillness and came all the way to the front of the stall.
"Make me one too, won't you? I can't help wondering just how good it is, for our students to line up like that."
A talent so extraordinary that even her own master had envied it. A walking strategic weapon, and the highest authority of Arcadia Academy.
Ermia Belfast had come to Kang Jinwoo's stall.