Flaminia looked at the recipe and finally understood why Joey had left her so much money. She had to get Ethereal Cattle meat for this insane attempt at crafting magical food. The only reason she hadn't questioned Joey any further was the fact that the Human had repeated multiple times that he was going to die if she failed. There wasn’t much arguing with that.

"Ethereal Cattle, butter that I need to infuse with magic, and rosemary?" Flaminia looked twice at the piece of paper and turned it to see if there were any other ingredients, but that was it, apparently. Joey had left her the recipe and a few sheets of paper with an insane number of runes drawn in painstaking detail. Flaminia could already feel a massive headache brewing just looking at them.

"This is…" She huffed. "Rotten roots of the World's Tree," she swore before putting everything inside her bag of holding and running to the market.

…

"You what?" Clodia asked in her office at Happy Bakery.

"Take out the stupid truth-stone. I need Joey's money. He's risking his life, Clodia. Can we do this quickly? I need his money. I'm going to be off to help him… Clodia! The stupid truth-stone. Now!" Flaminia shouted at her employer in a panicked manner.

"Rotten roots, Flaminia," Clodia took out a truth-stone and held it between them.

"Joey has entrusted me with his money," Flaminia said, and the truth-stone turned green. "I will be using it to help him survive the stupid training he's undergoing," another time, green.

"Do you need anything else?" Flaminia asked with a rough tone.

"No," Clodia frowned and simply took out a big bag of money. "This is what he's owed for the past three weeks. He hasn't been taking any money. There's more, but I don't carry all that gold on me."

"This should be enough," Flaminia looked at the bag, pocketed it, and then ran away under the stunned eyes of the muscled woman.

"What the—" Clodia was speechless.

…

"I need all the Ethereal Cattle you have," Flaminia elbowed away an old man trying to haggle the price of some ribs with the prime meat seller at the Pratus.

"What?" The [Merchant] looked confused.

"Ethereal Cattle, all you have. Now."

…

"Yes, the best butter you have."

…

"Rosemary, yes. Do you have any that, by any chance, was close to Mana or something?"

…

Flaminia stood in front of the stove at Joey's house and looked at the spread of ingredients in front of her. The butter she had bought, too, was from Ethereal Cattle. That meant it was already soaked with Mana and had slightly magical properties. The Elves had noticed a long time ago that eating Ethereal Cattle was more nourishing than eating normal beef, but no one, not even the nobles, could justify shelling so much gold for every single meal.

"Not Joey, though," Flaminia murmured, looking at the dozens of golds she had spent for the initial batch of ingredients. "By the time thirteen days are up, the tab will reach hundreds of golds."

This is not the time for this. Focus. Joey said his life was at stake, she reminded herself.

So, she took the butter and put it into a big bowl, switching her gaze to the paper where Joey had left some instructions on what to do next.

'You need to soak the butter with even more Mana so that it can act as a primer, like Mana Stone powder, essentially. You can move your own Mana out of your hands with some focus. It's purely based on instinct and sensation. Thanks to [Mana Sense], you should see when the butter has finally soaked up the Mana. When it's saturated…"

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Flaminia stopped reading and turned to the bowl of butter. She had always been so confident about her skills that she had been basically delusional—that's where her severe loss to Joey had come from. If she had tried with all her might, maybe she could have had a chance. Now, though, this was about magic. Not even Flaminia was so full of herself to think that she could breeze her way through this.

[Mages] are damn smart, Flaminia bit her lower lip before inhaling deeply and closing her eyes, putting her hand over the butter in the bowl.

[Mana Sense]

She activated the skill and started thinking hard about moving the Mana in her body toward the bowl. Unlike what she had thought, it was surprisingly easy to do so, albeit slowly.

"Huh," she murmured, her eyes still closed, "I thought it would be worse."

Thanks to her [Mana Sense], Flaminia could see that the butter was glowing slightly more brightly each minute that she released her raw Mana into it.

"Fascinating," she said, excited.

After around ten minutes, a feeling of exhaustion seeped deep into Flaminia, and she snapped her eyes open.

"Am I already out of Mana?! Rotten roots," but she had barely finished speaking those words when she saw several potions from the corner of her eye.

…

Flaminia had taken several sips of one of the Mana potions that had magically appeared in the house.

Joey's doing, she thought to herself, pushing more Mana inside the butter until the latter didn't grow any brighter.

"Ok," she huffed, opening her eyes and reading the next step in the recipe.

'When it's saturated, you'll need to use a rosemary branch to distribute the butter on the steak in the same pattern as the rune. You can't manipulate the steak itself since It’s the vessel for the rune. The rune will be effectively channeled by the butter and, hopefully, the rosemary. There's no way of making the rosemary magical, though. It's all about relying on your [Mana Sense] and making sure that you get the right feeling for the reaction. Good luck."

Flaminia stared at the paper dumbfounded, reading it again several times to ensure she understood correctly.

"He's saying that I just need to slater the butter on the steak with the rosemary in the pattern of the rune? That's it? Is he for real?"

…

The room had become ripe with the heat from the rune on the stove, and Flaminia had several butter stains on her new uniform. Her arms were hurting because of all the time she had spent trying to 'draw' the runes onto the steak with butter. She was trying really hard to use [Mana Sense] and follow the instructions of the runes, but she had wasted five steaks already. They were clearly cooked as perfectly as she could make them, slightly bloody and juicy but cooked enough not to be raw.

"The searing is on point," she said, massaging the small burns on her hands due to the oil. She had never gotten a heat resistance skill since she was mostly creating the cakes and pastries before they went into the oven under someone else’s supervision; it had been a while since she had last used an oven herself. It didn't mean she wasn't capable of cooking a steak, but the stinging butter splattering onto her arms distracted her from drawing the patterns over the meat.

Flaminia looked at another raw steak and observed it in silence before doing anything.

This is not working. The butter distracts me. Even when I start getting a feeling that something is happening with the steak, it barely lasts five seconds before it disappears with the next set of rosemary strokes… this is getting stupid.

Flaminia stared at the several branches of rosemary she had already used—and partially burned. What in the rotten roots of the World's Tree was she supposed to do now? Could it be that Joey was wrong? This was entirely a conjecture, right? So, how was she supposed to know what to do next?

"A tier 4 rune," Flaminia muttered, staring at the complicated drawing that she had been trying to follow to the letter. She had seen Joey use a pastry bag and didn't doubt he would have done this in a breeze, but her hand-eye coordination, while not bad, wasn't anything to boast about. She had always been too lazy to focus on the cake decorations and instead perfecting her cakes’ taste above anything else.

That's another thing Joey has taught me.

Without the Human, Flaminia would have never been able to enjoy what it meant to create a beautiful piece of pastry.

She rubbed her face multiple times, completely at a loss for what to do next.

She remembered Joey saying more than one time that trying the same thing over and over again was what crazy people did. He loved to repeat that at the bakery. But then, what was she supposed to do? Get help?

Flaminia's face turned into a scowl. Even though she had told Joey that she agreed with him and that there wouldn't be anything romantic between them, she felt reluctant to bring other people to this trial. First of all, if she weren't good enough for this, it would have been absolutely useless to bring someone like Tiberius or Quintus. At the bakery, no one really had a high enough level to help her with this.

Maybe Camilla? Flaminia reasoned. Clodia would literally kill me if I gave her another edge over us. Magical food? Clodia would flog me.

And she didn't trust Camilla that much to believe she would actually help her, especially after she had insulted her so harshly the last time they saw each other.

There's no guarantee she would want to help, Flaminia scoffed. And I don't want Joey to fall for that little disgusting Dwarf.

There was a conflict in Flaminia's mind: she was torn between wanting to help Joey and wanting to help herself. Finding others would come in between her and what she felt towards Joey—she felt possessive, even as a friend.

However, one thought trumped all her selfishness.

"He could die," Flaminia told herself. "He could die, and I would be responsible for it. But who can I ask to help me with magic?"

It was then that one person suddenly came to her mind.