Chapter 67
There had been a great deal of mysteries to confront, complexities to untangle, and struggles of a mortal town to bear with. That was to say, Lei’s life was quite the roller coaster ride as of late, and now another layer seemed to have been slapped over the multi-layered cake of questions.
The talk with that Senior Brother didn’t help with any of them. The man seemed, all things considered, a mighty figure of his own, treating the tribulation clouds as a mere nuisance disturbing the peace of his conversation with his new Junior Brother.
That was Lei, and now he was facing the newly upgraded System with all the tell-tale signs of his life’s accomplishments being laid in front of him in the form of numbers and stats.
So this is the second phase.
He let out a weary sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose, blinking for the third time to check the screen. Other than his skills, which he’d long grown accustomed to, he now had four new stats and a stat point section, a level and an experience bar, and a Dao that seemed aligned with his general path of cultivation.
None of those felt more miraculous than the fire burning under his chest, though. The ethereal tongues brushed silently against the membrane of his heart, fluttering joyously there and emitting a strange, yet harmonious song that droned inside his mind.
With but a thought, Lei called it. He was waiting to see from where it would emerge when his fingers tingled curiously. Fiery tongues rose from the tips of his right hand, and wavered against the wind until they coated his palm like a pale crimson blanket.
It took only a moment for the flames to splatter across the sleeves of his long robe. Rather than eating away at the cloth, however, they trailed silently up his arms and just… floated there. Warm. Intimate.
“Huh.” Lei’s eyebrows arched at this scene.
He sent the flame back to its cage and moved on to check his stats. He had played his fair share of RPGs back in the day, so he had an idea about what they represented. The real question was their implementation.
I can just distribute the stats, then, right?
Just like how he used his skills, he focused on the Strength stat and willed one of his stat points toward it. He felt nothing out of the ordinary, just a slight breeze brushing against his chest. Scowling, he gave another point, and another one, until the Strength stat reached 30.
That was when something jolted under his skin. Muscles tightened. Skin stretched and prickled with a curious sensation. His Spiritual Sensitivity skill sent a tremor of alarm down his back as the mana stirred within him. Tendrils of it moved in circular fashion and coursed through his veins.
What surprised him was that this energy was clearly staying away from his meridians. Instead, it streaked across his veins and muscles, slowly feeding into them. He felt a sudden strength swell in his chest, in his arms, and in his legs. Fingers clenched painfully tight with a new force.
Then came pain.
A blinding agony filled his mind. He doubled over, breath rasping in his chest, muscles convulsing all around his body. Thousands of invisible needles stabbed at the nape of his neck as the spiritual energy spilled defiantly from his meridians.
Like a predator out for a hunt, streaks of it sprang through his meridians. Something snapped. Lei felt a sudden stab in his stomach when a thick lump of spiritual energy coiled around a stray mana thread.
The clash of two forces only lasted a second before the thick spiritual energy line consumed the mana thread in an instant. Then it moved on through Lei’s veins, searching for other intruders.
Sweat trickled down Lei’s cheeks. There was hardly a place in his body that didn’t ache from the sudden confrontation of two forces. Everywhere, the spiritual energy lines attacked the stray mana threads, as if his being were rejecting this unnatural force.
The world spun madly around him, and the ground slipped slowly away from underneath his feet when a sudden warmth bloomed in his heart. The Inner Flame rose like the sun on the horizon over the chaos within his body. Tongues darted from the big ball of ethereal fire, coursing freely across his veins and easing his pain.
Whenever they encountered a clash of two forces, they coated over them, just like how that fiery blanket had covered Lei’s whole body when called. Then slowly, and stubbornly, the flames patched the two opposing energies together and established a strange balance that felt somehow natural to Lei’s senses.
The Maiden’s Flame repeated the process until the invisible clash ended within seconds. With that, the feeling of sudden strength returned to Lei’s muscles and drove the pain away.
“That was…” Lei breathed, hard. “Dangerous. So that’s what Maiden’s Flame does?”
It basically made it so that Lei could use mana that otherwise would’ve fought fervently against his core being. The Maiden’s Flame turned what was unnatural into something manageable, and patched it into the natural spiritual energy to create a sort of new source which still felt spiritual, but in a different way.
“I guess I can live with that,” Lei muttered, shaking his head. That was one mystery solved, to his thinking. He now had a way to use the mana he’d been gaining from people eating his dishes.
A look around his body showed no visible changes, but the feeling was still there in his muscles. Unmistakably, he had grown strong.
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Taking another breath, he immediately moved to Constitution and Dexterity, and gave them five points each. His bones and tendons squirmed strangely as the mana rushed to feed them.
This time, since he coated his body with the Maiden’s Flame in preparation, he only felt a slight sting around his bones and tendons. His skin still crawled strangely, but at least the pain was manageable.
Constitution and Dexterity made subtle changes to his bone frame, but when he tried to give a point to the Mana stat, a notification blinked in his vision.
[Mana Stat has been restricted due to limited supply in your location.]
“Okay,” Lei muttered. “It’s to be expected, I guess?”
Expected, as in, there was no mana in this world. In his diary, that Elder Huang had talked about this occurrence with sheer lament. The lack of mana even made it nearly impossible for them to access the System, which felt odd at that time, as Lei had had no trouble using his skills.
But then he knew that his skills didn’t consume mana. Not to his knowledge, at least. In his case, the System had seemed to just let him use them without a need for that foul source.
“And now the skills…”
Though he now had an idea of the Inner Flame, he still checked to see if the System had anything more to say about his new skill.
[Maiden’s Flame - Adept 1]: (The signature flame of the Maiden’s Sect, granted by the Yellow Maiden herself.)
That was it?
Disappointed, Lei moved on to the other blinking notification and willed the System to show him the available skills he could choose. As always, three different choices welcomed him.
[Soothing Touch - Novice 1]: Infuse your spiritual dishes with a sedative aura that affects both you and the consumers of the food, reducing stress and fatigue.
[Cookbook - Novice 1]: Adding a recipe to your cookbook will brand that recipe with your spiritual energy, allowing you to gain mana from people eating food prepared using the same recipe. Current slots in the cookbook: 0/1
[Chef’s Touch - Novice 1]: Your Dao carries the essence of both mana and spiritual energy. As the 99th attendant who came in touch with a Dao Seed, you can infuse the spiritual ingredients used in your dishes with your unique essence.
“Oh?” Lei arched an eyebrow at the choices.
He was familiar with the first two. The Soothing Touch still seemed alluring as he felt like the skill had wide potential. Reducing stress and fatigue could come in handy, and he was sure that in the next stages the skill would do more than just that.
The Cookbook, on the other hand, was a great skill. Aftar all, even the System acknowledged the fact that he was in a world where mana had been restricted due to limited supply.
I’m pretty sure the description has changed, though. It didn’t outright state that it grants mana before.
That little oddity aside, on top of his own food, he could impart his own recipes to other chefs and get a constant line of mana from their customers with this skill.
If, say, he could hook dozens of restaurants and convince them to use his recipes, then that meant the skill had infinite potential. The question was the use of his recipes. Branding the recipe with his spiritual energy seemed almost like trademarking that recipe in some heavenly way, which wouldn’t make the dishes cooked by other chefs spiritual just because people used his recipe.
Still, the taste alone could give him an edge. There was no way people would say no to a pizza recipe just because it wasn’t spiritual. Spiritual food wasn’t all that common in the first place. Well, not around mortal cities, that is. Things could be different in Immortal Cities, but even then Lei could just give them a recipe prepared by using spiritual ingredients. There had to be spiritual wheat somewhere out there.
The third and last skill choice was the most bizarre one. His Dao carried the essence of mana and spiritual energy?
Lei’s eyes widened as it dawned on him. Until now, all the mana he’d gained through his dishes had been dormant, almost wasted as it just limped there in his body. It felt like an odd coincidence right after he’d gotten the Maiden’s Flame, the System decided to end the tutorial and give him the stats with which he could tap into that mana source.
One thing was clear, though. Without the Maiden’s Flame, he couldn’t imagine how he would’ve handled the clash between mana and spiritual energy. That agonizing battle would’ve probably left him breathless in the end. But the Maiden’s Flame had somehow blended those two together, taming them like a strict Master handling two impish brats. It turned them into a usable, somewhat safe new source.
Does this mean I can give people this new source as well? A blend of mana and spiritual energy? Coupled with the Essence Enhancement skill…
Lei shuddered. The Essence Enhancement skill already boosted the spirituality of spiritual ingredients used in the dishes. If, before that, he could infuse the ingredients with this new energy… Then he could basically give people the perfectly balanced mana-spiritual energy blend, boosted with the Essence Enhancement skill. This new blend was spiritual too, after all.
I’m going with this.
In the end, he opted for the third skill because of his immediate circumstances. The Cookbook would have to wait for another time.
That done, he lay there in the backyard, mind throbbing with all the thinking.
Then a wave of warmth washed over him, easing the fatigue of his mind. Lei smiled as he patted the left side of his chest, then frowned when he felt the Inner Flame barely stirring under it.
It isn’t coming from there?
Curious, he checked his body to see where this sudden warmth originated from, only to freeze when he found a strange bead around his stomach.
This… What is this?
In Lei’s spiritual vision, it oddly looked like a newly sprouted seed, one that was barely larger than a fingernail and had a brownish color. The tiny sprout, however, was a stark green, radiating an almost heavenly energy about itself.
An intimate connection bound them, one that he could feel deep in his soul. Then from nowhere, he felt it. Somewhere, somehow, this bead had always existed, but only now could he see and even feel it with his touch.
When he focused on it, scenes from the past came alive in front of his eyes. That time he cooked his first steak under Chef Lorenzo’s strict gaze. Or the other time when he and Fatty Lou nearly overdosed on spiritual food, hugging each other with confused bliss. Then there came a familiar face, a young woman’s face, with a little squirrel beside her as they both gobbled down some fries.
The bead held within it the scenes of people eating his dishes and his own struggles throughout his lives. Everything seemed to have coalesced around him. He felt at that moment, with pristine clarity, how long he had been trying to move up against an invisible current, forcing his steps across the waves of an ethereal river.
Nothing seemed pointless now. Not even the times he locked himself in that one-room house, sulking alone after a long day of work. Or when he sweated under Chef Lorenzo’s tight control over the restaurant staff. He had learned valuable lessons from that man.
His second life, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. Faces crowded the visions. Little ones eager to try his dishes. Fatty Lou was there, his brother-in-arms, with his beaming smile and his unshaken belief in Lei’s abilities. Never a moment in which Lei was left alone. Never a moment in which he seemed sullen.
Even now, when Jiangzhen was under a great threat, Lei didn’t feel alone. He had people he could depend on. People with whom he could strive for a better future.
This duality of lives had bloomed into a single sprout.
That was his own Dao. His Dao of Cooking.
…