The Snack Bar Owner Hides the Tteokbokki (2)
I tucked the gold coins I'd received from Kariel into a separate pouch.
They shone so brightly I didn't trust them anywhere near the stall's cash box.
Nothing needed to age, and a drink I could throw together in no time.
"Just a moment, please. It'll be right out."
"Hm? Sure. Ishilla, shall we go another round tonight?"
"Mmm... I'm a little tired. Just once?"
I left that suspiciously lily-scented exchange behind and slipped into the corner of the stall.
Then I opened the thing I hadn't touched in a while: Mana Market.
Apple
Peach
Grape
Milk
▼
No need to drag the other fruit into this. Peaches would be plenty.
The only other option was pineapple, and I hadn't so much as seen one of those around here.
I exchanged for peaches and milk through Mana Market.
Shaaaa—
A familiar sensation, and with it a thin stream of mana slipping away. Last time I'd collapsed without warning, so I was metering every bit of it as carefully as I could.
A moment later, soft peaches brimming with sweet fragrance appeared before my eyes, along with a whole bucket of milk.
I gathered them up as if they'd been ingredients I'd had on hand all along and stepped back out front. The sugar I already had. What I still needed was—
"Lady Eilenna."
"Hm? What is it, Jinwoo?"
"Ishilla."
"Yes? What is it?"
"Be my food processor. And my refrigerator."
Bread dough, mayonnaise—those I could manage on my own, one way or another. Grinding peaches and milk together until they had no shape left, though... that was beyond human strength.
Which meant otherworld biotechnology. Spirit magic. And among its tools, a wind spirit's Wind Cutter.
My Beginner Spirit Arts weren't nearly as practiced as Eilenna's, so I couldn't handle a spirit at that level. Asking Ishilla to play refrigerator came from the same place. I hadn't dumped the whole job on Eilenna because I felt bad about it. And Ishilla—you weren't doing anything just now anyway.
"Uh... you want all of this ground together?"
"Yes. Would that be difficult?"
"No. It's not hard. It'll be quick."
Wiiiiing—!
Eilenna eyed me with open suspicion, clearly unable to guess what I was trying to make. Even so, she raised her mana as asked and ground the peaches, milk, and sugar down evenly.
The original recipe called for peach puree, not raw peaches. Or at least something cured, like canned peaches. But what am I supposed to do when I don't have it? In the end, everything follows the state of your wallet. And even made with raw fruit, only the drink's texture would change. The flavor would land close enough.
I lifted a spoonful of the well-ground drink and tasted it.
As expected of Mana Market, which procured nothing but the finest ingredients. I still had no idea what that skill really was, but when it came to quality alone—now that was something else. Nothing on the markets of this world could keep up.
Peaches this sweet meant I didn't need another pinch of sugar. And yet... the mouthfeel of the raw fruit bothered me more than I'd thought.
The classic Coolpis from back home went down perfectly smooth, nothing catching, gulp after gulp. Mine had a faint chew to it. At this rate, I was better off throwing the whole concept further off course.
"Ishilla, could you make me a little ice?"
"Ice? Ah—you're teasing me right now, aren't you?!"
"No, for real. Just a little. Drop it in here. I'll make you something good."
"Hmm... all right."
Plop—!
Fat chunks of ice plunged into the thick drink.
"Lady Eilenna. One more favor, if you would."
"Another outrageous recipe. All right."
Run it through the biotechnology one more time, and what came out was a little different from Coolpis—closer, if you had to name it, to fresh peach juice.
Kang Jinwoo's peach smoothie was complete.
Right on cue, the tteokbokki announced that it was done, radiating a fierce presence of its own. Better to hand them over together and have everyone taste it now.
An esophagus and a stomach fired up by the heat and the spice of tteokbokki. Then you evolve that with a cool, smooth peach smoothie, ice and all ground in? With only a little exaggeration, this was truly...
A flavor that kills you dead. Delicious unto death.
Like lying under a blanket with the air conditioner on. A supreme feeling no one who hasn't tried it could ever understand.
I portioned tteokbokki and peach smoothie into small cups and passed them around.
"Here. Eat that while it's hot first, then go straight for the drink."
"Heh. Ask you for something and you knock it out just like that. Another thing I've never seen."
"The sweet, soft scent is wonderful. So if you grind the ice in with it, you can make a drink like this..."
"Thanks, Jinwoo! This looks so good..."
Eilenna ate daintily, Kariel with gusto, Ishilla in the most ordinary way imaginable. Three women, three approaches to the same tteokbokki.
Then, the instant they all drank the peach smoothie together—
Ishilla, so happy she rose onto her toes and fidgeted, happiness written through her whole body. Eilenna's ears not merely perked but standing bolt upright, her luminous blue eyes gone perfectly round. And even Kariel, glaring at the peach smoothie with a look that said, This little bastard's interesting.
Apparently there was no problem at all with the flavor or the pairing.
Well. Sharp, spicy food and a fruit-based milk smoothie. How could that fail?
An addictive heat that burned deep at the root of the tongue, and still you couldn't stop. Sometimes, eating it with the broth, the boiled eggs, and the fish cakes, you hit a stretch where you've clearly had enough. That's when you need this soft, cool fruit drink. Personally, if we're talking pairings with Korean snack-bar food, isn't this the one fight cola actually loses?
"Khh... This is truly supreme. It tastes like sleeping under a soft quilt on a stifling night with a cooling artifact running."
"Oh, yeah! That's exactly how it felt to me."
"Mmm..!! My head's ringing, but it's so sweet I can't stop..! The other elves are going to love this!"
A cooling artifact and a blanket.
Other world or Earth, people live the same way everywhere. Still, if that was a luxury only the wealthy Princess Kariel could indulge, this drink was different. At least you could taste that paradise for less than a cooling artifact, or the microfiber quilts they used in the imperial palace.
While Kariel and Ishilla lost themselves in the peach smoothie, I packed the finished tteokbokki up tight and handed it over.
"Carry it carefully. If the sauce gets on your clothes, it doesn't come out easily."
"Thanks. Could you put the drink in this?"
"Huh. A tumbler?"
Did a princess of another world just carry a tumbler around? I'd been stuck for a decent way to package the drink anyway, so it was convenient, if nothing else.
"Tumbl... I don't know what that is. This is an artifact made specially for me. When I use fire magic I run hot, and without cold water I can't hold out."
"Ah. So that's the trouble. Ishilla, you're fine?"
"Yes. Even when I use a lot of ice magic, I don't get terribly cold, or come down with chills, the way a certain someone does!"
She said it as if she very much wanted the red-haired woman beside her to hear.
Kariel, still fondling the cold cup of peach smoothie, struck without warning.
Shhhk—!
Those chilled hands slipped straight down Ishilla's back.
"H-hyaaak?!!"
"Hahaha! So the cold is hard to take after all, Ishilla?"
"Y-you...!"
The kind of prank only close friends pull. I savored Ishilla's glorious overreaction and filled the artifact bottle to the brim with peach smoothie.
"Your peach smoothie."
"Yeah, thanks. We ought to get going."
"Kariel, you... just wait until we get back to the dorms!"
"Oh my, I'm terrified. From someone who folds against me every single day."
And just as they'd arrived, the two headed back to the dorms bickering the whole way.
The weather was warming up. Maybe I should put the peach smoothie on the menu.
Judging by that reaction, it didn't look likely to fail, and a single drink seemed like exactly the right thing to sell. Ice was hard to come by without magic, so better to hold the temperature with spirit arts. There's always that machine parked out front of snack bars and trampolines—those bouncy castles. The one that spins inside so the drink doesn't freeze solid, but turns to slush. If I just kept it cold in that spirit, and stirred the drink myself now and then, it ought to be fine.
Even so, no matter how I arranged it, Eilenna would be the one taking the brunt. Before we opened I'd have to grind a huge batch with Wind Cutter, then keep the whole thing cool with spirit arts. I was buying ingredients at the market these days, so my dependence on Mana Market had dropped, but the mana cost hadn't vanished. Handle fire and cold with Beginner Spirit Arts, and now and then trade for ingredients in Mana Market on top of that, and I might well collapse all over again.
"Hehe."
"Hm? What is it?"
"Nothing. It's just... new."
While I was buried in plans for a new menu item, Eilenna was grinning beside me, soft and foolish with it.
New. What, exactly, was new? She saw food she'd never seen before every single time—was a new dish like the peach smoothie really that astonishing?
"I decided on this trip to the capital out of nowhere, while I was helping build your hardtack factory, and every day is new. Me, who'd been stuck living in Nuardel, even meeting an imperial princess."
Mm. From Eilenna the elf's point of view, that was fair enough. An imperial princess was new to me, too. Even for a human, that isn't someone you meet easily.
I held my answer. She didn't sound finished.
"Everything is new, and with your food on top of it, Jinwoo, ordinary days feel happy. A little busy, though."
"Lady Eilenna..."
She looked so genuinely glad that something caught in my throat.
Right. Busy enough to savor the day. Get so busy you can't see straight, and you're finished.
I scrapped the menu expansion I'd been turning over. The person working beside me had just said something that moving, and I couldn't very well answer, Mm, yeah, yeah. Let's make things a little newer, and dump more work on her.
Thinking about it, there wasn't much reason to linger at the academy any longer. Around next month's hardtack delivery, I ought to head back up to Silbaerin. If I rushed, I could leave tomorrow... but it wasn't that urgent. For now, I would focus on the capital days that were wholly mine. The shop. The people.
Click, click, click—!
A few days later, I was packing up after the afternoon trade like any other day when a great many footsteps came down on me. Startled, I turned.
"E-excuse me."
"Yes?"
Sky blue here. A deep berry-red there. Orange farther along. Young ladies in dresses—students, in other words, to whom the words noble young ladies fit better than to anyone—had arrived at the stall in a pack.
Until now, every student who showed up had been in uniform. This was the first time anyone had come in a full private-dress ensemble.
I was just about to ask, puzzled, what they wanted, when the sky-blue young lady at the front beat me to it.
"Is this the place that sells... that? The thing you use, and you end up soaked through with sweat, and your whole body gets hot—no, burning?"
"Fuck no."
"Hieek..."
Seemed another bizarre rumor had gotten loose somewhere. Just from the wording, that was an aphrodisiac. This shop sold only food that had passed sanitation and quality inspection. A wholesome, model establishment. The inspection standards were my own subjective ones, granted.
Anyway, some misunderstanding had clearly taken root. Even as my blood pressure shot up and the dizziness hit, I straightened my posture.
This stall was mine. If I didn't clear up the misunderstanding... who would?