Welcoming the Guest at the Holy Dormitory (2)
It was sweet.
“Hwaaah…… This, thisss…… Wha, what is thiiis…….”
Sweet, soft and chewy, the moment it entered my mouth it sprang back against my teeth with a lively bounce, then suddenly melted away like silk, letting a flowing sweetness slide down my throat as gently as a spring stream. It was the first sweet food I had ever tasted since being reborn in the body of Kaira, the girl from the bakery.
Even after it slipped into my stomach, the aftertaste lingered, a sweetness that still tickled the back of my throat and soothed the deepest parts of my soul.
The words I had just let slip were not spoken by my own will. They were simply an involuntary exclamation, uttered in a dazed, foolish expression after being utterly intoxicated by the first sweet flavor I had ever known.
The girls stared at me with clear amusement, as if they found it hilarious that the great hero herself would melt into such a sloppy, gooey face over a single dessert. They were watching someone who looked as if she had never tasted such food even once in her entire life, even though they themselves only ate it on special occasions once or twice a year.
“It’s custard pudding! The Light Denomination only makes it for truly special occasions. It’s half a ceremonial dish. They bake it while infusing it with the holy power of light, then chill it in flowing water before serving.”
Malinka smiled brightly as she answered the question I had muttered like a delirious sigh.
“Pu… pudding……”
Pudding.
Puddiing.
That’s right… they used to sell it at convenience stores back on Earth. But… but……!!
‘So this… is what pudding tastes like…?’
⟨ Heaven on the Tongue ⟩
I couldn’t even remember anymore. I had hardly ever bought those delicate, girlish sweets back on Earth.
What was certain was that the taste was addictive. Dangerously so.
For five whole years I had lived in Riaska, where it rained endlessly, where terrifying thunder and lightning cracked across the sky every day, where harvesting proper grain was nearly impossible and even walking off the beaten path was difficult. My tongue had grown accustomed to coarse, rough food. That was why.
“Hup.”
Reluctant to finish the pudding, I tried a piece from another plate. A neatly sliced arc of cake, one portion set before each person.
I had never eaten cake before either. Our house had been a bakery, the kind that supplied an entire district of the city with a day’s worth of food. The only bread we baked was large, firm, tough, protein-packed, chewy bread meant for meals.
Father had disapproved of baking the kind of fluffy, delicate bread made with soft flour that nobles would only make for entertainment. A waste of wheat flour, he called it.
But now I was eating it. And yet… and yet…….
Even on Earth, sugar only became widespread after imperialist nations acquired tropical colonies and began operating sugarcane plantations… or so I had learned.
I remembered hearing in herbology class that alchemists extracted sugar from a plant similar to sugar beets. Honey collected from flowers could also be used as a sweetener. Come to think of it, even the nauseating nutritional fluid that the parasitic wasp had forced me to drink had carried a faint honey-like sweetness.
In this world, where any ingredient capable of producing sweetness was either produced in pitifully small quantities or was impossibly rare, this kind of dangerously addictive sweetness was entirely new to me.
“Wow… Look at Lady Kaira’s face. Ahahaha……”
“She looks so happy……”
“She’s adorable! Ah, she’s seriously so cute!!”
I paid no attention whatsoever to the embarrassing words being exchanged around me. I simply enjoyed the pudding, the cake, and the fragrant tea made from dried leaves imported from a far western country beyond the ogres’ western plains.
Whatever they were saying, I couldn’t hear any of it.
Sugar… Yes. After twenty years, I had finally encountered sweet snacks again. There was no way I could spare any attention for anything else. I had to savor it. All of this had been prepared with great effort by the seminary girls—no, more precisely, by the dormitory matron and a few priests who wanted to treat me.
No matter how wealthy the Light Denomination was, its followers adhered to doctrines that did not demand asceticism but also did not encourage luxury. It seemed even seminary students could not easily enjoy such food. Though they didn’t look quite as stunned as I did, seeing it for the first time in their lives.
But……
Even if I had been completely lost in a flood of sugar I hadn’t tasted in decades, even if the noisy girls were staring at me with sparkling eyes, even if they kept making slightly embarrassing comments while squealing as if they were looking at an adorable animal, even if I had been confident I wouldn’t turn my head no matter how much they fussed—I still could not ignore this.
“Petting Lady Kaira!!”
“Ehh… Hwa, hwaaa……”
From behind, one mischievous student placed her hand on the crown of my head and began vigorously stroking it. She rubbed my soft, bread-colored hair—streaked with a few white strands—so hard it felt like it might wear away.
“Haaa… Her hair feels so nice…… I’m so jealous of the mage who learned the magic of youth……”
“What are you talking about, Helen? Even priests who serve the Light don’t age easily thanks to His grace. It’s just Lady Kaira’s natural constitution.”
“Still……”
The student named Helen, who still refused to remove her hand from my head, was gently pushed aside by another girl.
“Besides, you’re not supposed to enjoy Lady Kaira like that.”
…Was I some kind of toy for them to play with…?
While I was thinking that, the girl’s soft, squishy cheek pressed against the top of my head. I flinched violently, my whole body trembling for a moment.
“Hyat…?”
“See……? It’s so soft and nice to touch. Rubbing my cheek on it feels just like a pillow. A soft pillow dried well in clear sunlight… It’s nothing like the rough sheets at the seminary.”
“No, no. Move aside, Lidike. This is how you do it, like thiiis……”
The girl who had been grinding her cheek against my head was promptly shoved away, and another girl took hold of me from behind. Even as my body trembled with an incredibly ominous feeling, I felt pathetic for also feeling a wet, expectant thrill at what might happen next.
“…!!”
“Kyaaat?!!”
A wind blew.
In this dining hall that could only be reached by descending a windowless staircase leading underground, a wind that should never have been able to blow suddenly stirred.
The girl who had buried her face deep in my hair took a powerful breath, filling her lungs to the very bottom, then exhaled. The refreshing breeze that rushed in to fill the empty space carried what seemed like clear motes of light blessed by the God of Light.
“Haaaa……”
A cool wind tickled the bare skin at the center of my scalp, near the crown where my hair parted slightly. It was a strange sensation.
It was something I had felt before, whether from Arun or Iskil, something many people had done because they liked the scent that came from me. Yet this was the first time I had been so vividly aware of the peculiar texture. It was the kind of sensation I probably would have been too embarrassed to ask for even if I had the chance.
Because of the happiness,
Because I felt like I might melt from it, I closed my eyes slightly and let my body shiver.
“Aah, Lady Kaira… It smells so sweet. Like the dark morning when rain patters against the wooden walls of our house, when Mother nags me to wake up, when I drag my sleepy eyes open but my stomach is still growling so I sit at the table, and the scent of oat porridge boiled with a little milk……”
Perhaps jealous that the girl was enjoying my scent all by herself, the other students immediately swarmed in. The Helen who had been pushed away earlier, Lidike, even Malinka who had first brought me here—all of them……
“It’s not like oat porridge. This… is definitely the smell of black bread! I’m from the north, so I know. If you mix Mittenburg rye with water and leave it in the kitchen for two days, that sour……”
“Sour? Do you not have a nose, senior!? This is riverside pancake baked crisp after mixing freshwater shrimp into the dough……!!”
“Ehh, w-wait, wait a second! Wait, pleeease……”
I flailed between girls who were larger than me, some slightly smaller, most about the same size as me. Even though they were still students, their bodies were already filled with the power of light, making them not just warm but almost stiflingly hot as they pressed in around me.
“No matter what anyone says, Lady Kaira smells like bread!!”
“Right. Not wheat bread, but rye sourdough. You don’t even know……”
“It’s not bread, it’s rice!!”
It doesn’t matter what the smell is, okay…! I-I’m… right now… being smothered between all these girls… I can’t breathe……
“Cough… Kek… M-my chest… is touching… me… squeezed between… breasts… I can’t… breathe……”
Only after I let out a moan that sounded like I was about to die did the startled girls finally pull their faces, their bodies, and… someone’s chest that was easily five times larger than mine away from me.
“Hek. Heeeek……”
I could finally breathe again, but the overall formation of girls surrounding me did not loosen. They adjusted so I wouldn’t suffocate, but they still held me, touched me, sniffed me… and there was even one who licked me.
I had no immunity to this kind of wave of girls. Since I had just made them panic by moaning pathetically, I felt sorry and couldn’t bring myself to tell them to stop. I simply blushed bright red.
“Lady Kaira, your body temperature seems a bit low… It’s cool and feels nice.”
“Don’t make the same mistake again! Even if you touch her, do it gently. Sniff sniff……”
“Hehe. It smells like milk cream. So fragrant… cool, soft… It would be nice to hug her while sleeping……”
As I watched them and let out a sigh, the words “cool and soft like cream” made me think of something.
Cool? Perhaps it was because a little of the aura of death still clung to me, making my body temperature close to that of a corpse. Come to think of it… ah, that’s right……
Recalling something, I looked at the large hall cake that the girls had been so busy fighting over me that they hadn’t even touched yet. Taking advantage of the moment their attention was completely on me, I cast the reverse magic of the “Perius Igniter” that Viran had scribbled down like graffiti onto the cake.
In Viran’s notes, the following comment had been attached:
It was a mystery to me why no one had ever imagined applying the reverse of such a simple spell. The reason is actually quite simple. There is little meaning in cooling or freezing objects. If the same amount of mana and effort is required, it would be far more efficient for offensive purposes to burn the target and inflict greater pain to incapacitate them. Though I suppose it might be useful for a traveler in a tropical jungle trying to cool their body temperature.
Viran was wrong.
If you freeze it…
It becomes delicious.
I flailed my arms and legs for a moment to shake the girls off. They looked slightly startled that the meek me had suddenly begun struggling. To the girls who were anxiously wondering what they had done wrong, I spoke carefully.
“Um… I made the cake that was on the table… cold with magic. Since it’s a rare delicacy that’s hard to taste without a mage, if it’s not too much trouble, would you like to try some?”
The girls tilted their heads as if they didn’t understand what I meant. But when I picked up a fork, took a bite of the hall cake, and made a blissful expression, they finally began picking up their own forks one by one to taste it.
And in an instant, the entire room fell silent.
The children’s eyes sparkled. Twinkling, glittering. Expressions so warm and happy it was as if they had taken the God of Light they loved so much into their mouths. Even I couldn’t help but smile at the sight.
If angels smiled, I thought, it would look just like this.
Looking at the girls’ happy faces, I made up my mind. Once I settled down later, instead of opening a magic tool shop, I should open an ice cream store.