Living Life As A Game: Through And Through 27 Time For Breakfas

After Elizabeth left for the umpteenth time to get into clean clothes, she returned to meet up with Sun and make breakfast. It wouldn't matter to her how many time she needed to shower as the thought of being dirty was, on its own merit, unappealing. Even she was surprised by how she reacted when treating Sun, as before, it would've needed much convincing to get her dirtied up once more after just recently cleaning herself.

Anyways, when she was done with everything — taking another shower and cleaning off what she could of her breakthrough's byproducts… — she walked back from her room to find Sun. She found him clad in the white pajamas she had created for him just outside the bathroom she had left him in. Naturally, the clothes didn't suit him as if tailor made, but at least it seemed to fit him; in Elizabeth's books it was a win.

She gestured for him to follow her and the two of them made their way to the kitchen area. She sat him down behind the kitchen counter and asked "What do you want to eat?"

"What can you make?" Surely she couldn't know how to make everything. Thus, Sun felt the need to ask this of her first.

"Anything..." Elizabeth didn't lie, her [Saintly Cooking] combined with her already existing experience with cooking theory could probably let her create any dish someone asked her to make.

"Oh? Ok then, can you make some Lox?" Sun just asked the first thing that came to his mind.

"Lox… Bagels?" Elizabeth asked as she raised one brow.

"Yeah..." Sun realized it was rather idiotic of him to ask Elizabeth to make such a rare and exotic dish — rare and exotic for an American anyways. But, he was surprised to see her not bad mouth him and just go to the refrigerator to begin cooking.

Elizabeth knew what Sun was talking about as it was a dish that had made an impact on her once when she was brought to the Scandinavian region of Europe on vacation with her parents. She really enjoyed the cuisine, but given its rather extreme quantities of cholesterol, calories, and fats, she couldn't eat it too often.

Normally, a person wouldn't just be able to prepare the dish without at least a heads up in advanced as it required very fresh ingredients. But, because of her background, Elizabeth could cheat a little. Her parent, as the owners of Quantum Inc. naturally gave her some goodies of their company, and two such goodies where the Imperishable Fridge and Closet.

They were just prototypes of the envisioned products, but they were extremely practical. The ideal versions of the Imperishable line of products would see that anything stored within would be sealed away in a perfect quantum freeze, where all the atoms of the sealed product would stay totally static as long as there was energy to supply the storage vessel.

Alas, Elizabeth's Imperishable Refrigerator and Closet would only let fresh goods stay fresh for a hundred times the normal time, but that was enough for her. She walked up to the fridge and took out a whole salmon, some cream cheese, and some capers. After setting them down by the counter, she went to the kitchen closet and retrieved some bagels.

After retrieving a wooden cutting board, and her personal chef's knife, Elizabeth returned to where she set aside the rest of the ingredients and began to work her magic. Now was a real chance to try out the methods of [Saintly Cooking] and she wouldn't forgo the opportunity.

For this simple dish, Elizabeth used up a total of four of the five principles of Cooking. She used her knife skills to practice the principles of Accuracy and Precision, while handling the still whole salmon; cutting off near perfectly even sized fillets and then portioning the fillets accordingly. Then for the rest of the ingredients, she activated her Inner Strength to accomplish Energy Integration, and her own intuition to practice the principle of Combination.

Boom! Bagels became perfectly toasted. Boom!! Cheese cream was added and consequently started to melt, making the bagels all the more enticing as it also caused the room to smell more delicious… Boom!!! Still fresh and perfectly portioned slices of salmon were added to the bagels and the dish, and for as simple as it was, it began to look like a work of art. As Elizabeth took the capers in her hands and fused her Inner Strength with them, they actually began to lightly glow, because of their small size. As shiny black decorative and tasty ornaments of salty delight atop the salmon bagel combo, the two dishes she prepared — one for herself, the other for Sun — began to inspire feelings of worship from Sun…

As Sun watched her cook he had long since stopped being impressed… Full on worship for the craft of cooking had begun to manifest, as he had never seen something so… beautiful? Even he didn't know what it was that he felt while watching that display of skill and talent. And as the ever charmed Sunny boy stared at the food he would momentarily have the pleasure of eating, Elizabeth was skimming along the notification of her first Mortal Grade Dish.

[Milestone Alert!

The User has prepared a Low-tier Mortal Grade Meal for the first time!!

Hidden Quest: Chef Milestone #1 (Complete)

Difficulty: F

Objective: Prepare any Low-tier Mortal Grade Meal ✔

Description: Congrats, you now qualify as a Mortal Chef. Oh? Your first dish was actually a breakfast item? Well… I guess you can have more recipes for that category then~

Reward:

Crafting Tree: Mortal Breakfast

+300 Cooking Exp

Cooking Level 1 → Level 2 305/625

Status

Name: Lox Bagel

Grade: Low-tier Mortal Grade Meal

Description: Crafted by the user, this is a magical meal imbued with Inner Strength and various Sub-Basic level principles of the path of cooking. For the mortal world, it can be treated as a delicacy, as it provides mild empowerment effects.

Effects: For Level 5 or below: + 0.5 Strength + 0.5 Speed + 0.5 Endurance + 0.5 Defense + 0.5 Intelligence for 3 hours and + 400 Inner Strength recovered.]

'Whoa that's pretty friggin insane!' Elizabeth said while communicating to P.

P just scoffed at her amazement and said "This ain't shit kid... Just wait until you start using Magic to cook. Then you'll shit your pants with how insane the cooking profession truly is..."

Still, even though P was the one to confirm how underwhelming this first meal was, Elizabeth knew it in her heart to be true. Even for her first supernaturally concocted breakfast, she new it wasn't that great, as her practice in the various principles required more time to further develop. Taking just the + 400 Inner Strength as an example, it could have easily been + 500 or + 600 if her application of the principle of Combination was a bit higher.

Elizabeth dwelled on some potential areas she could improve for just a short while longer, before Sun's borderline look of betrayal shook her out of her thoughts. He looked like a dog that had been mercilessly beaten with hurt eyes and a facial expression of pity as he look at Elizabeth with hope in his eyes. Hope, that one day, she would recognize his existence and let him eat that heavenly food that was just sitting there before him.

"..." She extended one of the plates carrying with it a Lox Bagel "sandwich" to Sun, and the man could not physically get any happier. He piously took the plate from her hands and thanked her twice or thrice before taking his first bite…

Joy… Pure unadulterated joy for being given the chance to eat such amazing food flushed through Sun's entire body. Better yet, he actually started feeling his body warm up with an extra hint of power and the Dantian underneath his navel started devouring all the Inner Strength that would have ended up replenishing an already existing capacity.

Naturally, because his Dantian was just recently restored and completely empty and untrained, Sun didn't manage to taken in all that much energy for himself. Though, he did get more than he would have since the energy he received came from Elizabeth who trained in Top-tier Mortal Grade Meditation techniques.

He would still need a lot more training if he wished to make a breakthrough, but this was definitely a good start. Sun continued to eat the breakfast he requested of Elizabeth until not a single bread crumble of the bagel was left before he eyed Elizabeth down like the most precious treasure he had encountered in all his lifetimes…

Elizabeth squinted back at his covetous glare as she ate her own plate, but given that Sun's status as Forever Loyal didn't change, she didn't think too much about his intentions. As she ate her meal, she too felt the effects and after completely eating her own bagel sandwich, the two of them moved on to talk a bit more.

Chapter end