Why Did You Summon Me?

When Hunky Joe finally returned, he found Bald Wu’ke already back at camp, several large bags filled with water propped against each other on the ground close to him.

Nearby, Short Morad had used Wu’ke’s water to clean and prepare the Molebbits Wu’ke had caught earlier. Deftly, he skinned two of the Molebbits before washing them thoroughly. He then delicately buried the games’ entrails carefully into the earth to prevent its smell from alerting any carnivorous wild beast.

“Huh, you’re pretty good at this,” Joe observed, dropping the salt crystal block he had been carrying onto the ground with a thud. From his pocket, he fished out five blades of herbs, a small smile playing on his lips as the air started filling with a distinct, tangy aroma.

Morad recognized it almost the millisecond his nose picked up the scent. Abruptly, he paused in mid-action and raised his head in wonder. “God, is this what I think it is!?”

“Pretty sure it is. We’re in luck, fellas!” Joe erupted into good-natured laughter. “I’ve missed this taste since forever!”

Bald Wu’ke sniffed hard, his mind trying to infer the identity of the blades in his senior’s hand. “Is this a sort o’ cumin?” He asked tentatively as walls of text describing local seasonings, gleaned from his overpriced guidebook, floated in his mind. He remembered mentions of common wild pepper and perhaps other similar plants, but there had been no mention of cumin — he wondered if it was because the original author of the book was not lucky enough.

“Guess so. Or maybe it’s just something similar to it—I mean, they kinda look the same to a botanical noob like me. What I do know is that applying these babes are different from the way we use normal cumin,” Hunky Joe replied. “The point is, you’ll absolutely be smitten over it once you taste it!”

“Hold on, Senior! You’re… you’re not implying that you’re gonna share them with us, are you?” Short Morad interjected in pleasant surprised. “I mean, I heard that you could use Lucky Cumin as a reward to get someone to complete your missions.”

It was not uncommon for one to “hire” a fellow student — much like hiring a mercenary — to complete their missions through rare materials and games found in Mount Parazonium. Indeed, it was an open secret that many capable students often completed other students’ missions for them in exchange for desired food and materials.

It was, unsurprisingly, another aspect of the exam that Baiyi was utterly against; he saw it as a mockery to the Trial’s fundamental purpose. It was preposterous that any student lucky enough to come across something delicious could somehow pass the Trial while scoring mission completion points by that merit alone!

The Hitman, however, had his own take. He had passed Grand Principal Bai’s message to the faculty and the students, but he himself had never completely forbidden students from doing it. The only few objects he had explicitly banned from these exchanges were money and weapons and/or related paraphernalia; everything else — from natural resources found in the environment to games and raw materials from monsters — were fair game. Thus, it was common for students to exchange materials with one another or even undertake someone else’s mission in exchange for rare foodstuffs.

Perhaps the Hitman simply believed that obtaining the food of one’s desire in a precarious environment was a test of its own. He might even think that it would help produce hitman with a variety of skills, too.

Much to the delight of his teammates, Hunky Joe flashed them a beaming smile before confirming Short Morad’s words. “Well, good things get better if you share them with others. Besides, I don’t need to exchange Lucky Cumin to complete my mission; I just need some extra hands… Like yours.”

“Y-yes! Yes, of course! Okay, I’ll help prepare the salt!” Short Morad exclaimed in high spirits and rushed towards the block of salt crystal lying on the ground. He broke a chunk from it and pulled out a sifter from his storage pouch. Placing the chunk on it, he smashed it with his bare palm as specks of salt floated down to the sifter like snow.

Seeing his seniors hard at work compelled Wu’ke to make himself useful in any way he could. Deciding to copy what Morad was doing, he took a small chunk of crystallized salt in his hand as well before attempting to crush them with his bare hand.

He managed to grind it into powder in the end, but he let out more winces and grunts that he had ever expected. Crystallized salt might have been formed from different compositions than a rock, but the difference mattered little to a human’s fleshy hand — especially if said hand belonged to the son of a noble family who had not been one to do manual labors.

Short Morad easily noticed his winces, so he said, “Hey now, you really don’t have to force yourself. I can manage.”

As if trying to prove his point, he sped up, pulverizing chunks after chunks of salt crystals with his meaty palms as if he was working with clay.

Wu’ke was embarrassed. He had always warned his Northern brethren — and himself, in a roundabout way — to never underestimate these “Southern scunners”. However, every time he was around his Southern peers, he innately felt a sense of haughtiness bordering on contempt. He felt he was indefinitely better than the Southerners because, in his eyes, the strict Northern culture and upbringing produced hardy and powerful people not weakened by “indulgence” and excess of “luxurious living”. It was this same nationalistic pride that had fueled him into proclaiming his laughably unrealistic ambitions loudly to his two Southern teammates earlier.

The more time he spent with his two Southern partners, the more he has humbled time and time again. Wu’ke now realized that he was never even near the best in his faculty, their origins be damned. Maybe he might display a slight edge over his two teammates in fighting, but he was as clueless and confused as a common first-grader in everything else.

“Look, if you’re free, can you help me finish preparing those Molebbits?” Short Morad suggested. “Boil some water while you’re at it, too. We’ll need it to purify this pile of salt before we could really use them for anything.”

Wu’ke nodded wordlessly and hurriedly attend what was asked.

Meanwhile, Hunky Joe had found a plot of space somewhere away from the two. He sat, and with the meticulousness of an engineer repairing their equipment, he started cleaning and tidying those blades of cumin. Then, from his inner pocket, he took out a nondescript iron box and stuffed the herbs into it before cupping his hands around.

He mustered his combat chi to his palms and projected it onto the box in his hands, cooking the herbs through the heat from his combat chi. Leaving the cumin to dry on its own speed could take days, so Joe decided to speed up its dehydration with a trick he had learned from his own seniors.

It would be interesting to trace the origin of such an ingenious invention, but its inventor and story had all but lost in time. However, it did make one thing certain: humans were creatures of boundless creativity and resourcefulness, especially when they were driven by the pressure to survive.

The rest of the day was spent completely on their dinner preparation. After filtering grains of salt using his sifter several times to remove impurities, Morad poured them into a pot of boiling water and waited for it to evaporate. When that happened, all that was left would be edible table salt, although it would probably be inferior in taste than salt bought from a market.

Waiting for the pot to boil took a little too much time than Wu’ke could wait. As he watched forks of timid flames caressing the base of the pot dandily, he felt more and more impatient until finally, he decided to fuel the fire with his elemental combat chi.

His effort proved to be helpful. The water boiled very soon and left as surges of steams pouring out of the pot until all that was left were tiny specks of white salt clinging to the bottom. Gingerly, Morad scraped the salt off and transferred them into a steel wok he had recently warmed. As he started grilling the salt, he explained to a wide-eyed Wu’ke, “It’ll taste better this way.”

While his two teammates worked, Hunky Joe’s attention had been solely directed to cooking those blades of Lucky Cumin, not moving a single muscle since he started. Controlling one’s combat chi to make sure that the heat within the iron box was constantly at an optimum was a demanding and bothersome process, so it was quite surprising that someone who looked like a restless gym bro had the patience for it at all.

Even more surprising was the fact that all of their monkish dedication was only for cooking dinner!

As the sky began to darken and all three were starting to feel the gnawing of hunger in their bellies, Joe finally put the iron box down and nodded at Morad. Morad, meanwhile, had just finished preparing the Molebbits on sticks before roasting.

Joe removed the dehydrated cumin from the box. Now, they had lost their verdant vibrancy as well as its zesty aroma and had instead shriveled into dried grass as every molecule of water stored inside had been vaporized by combat chi.

Again from his inner pocket, Joe took out a few pieces of papers resembling modern-day aluminum foils and wrapped the dried herbs tightly before placing them right into the flames. Quickly, Morad propped the Molebbits sticks against a pole suspending on top of the fire and allowed the meat to cook.

As the flames blazed around the aluminum foils, the aroma of Lucky Cumin slowly returned in stronger and stronger tides. The scent, propelled by heated air, rose upward and enveloped the Molebbits completely and seeped into their juicy meat.

As a son of a noble, Wu’ke was no stranger to all kinds of delicacies before, but his mouth watered uncontrollably the moment he perceived the aroma. He was not alone; his teammates were swallowing their own saliva just as audibly.

They managed to control themselves for a good few minutes for the meat to cook before Hunky Joe, losing to his own hunger, jerked forward. With lightning speed he grabbed his share and started tearing off a piece from the smoked Molebbit’s hind leg.

A surge of tangy spiciness attacked his tongue. Juice burst out from the meat the moment he sank his teeth into it. To his delight, there was no taste of excess, nauseating fat even when he was actively sucking out every liquid out of the meat. It was cooked just right, the texture perfect — such a simple meal, but it tasted so heavenly that the burly, manly lad’s eyes started to tear up.

Wu’ke, meanwhile, had completely lost his ability to think the moment the smoked Molebbit met his mouth. He had lost every sense of composure and was operating on his base instincts, chomping down the entire Molebbit down like a hungry wolf until all there was left was a pile of bones.

Lamenting the briefness of his experience, Wu’ke licked his fingers several times, hoping that the lingering taste could prolong it longer. When it was clear that he had finished his food, his awareness gradually returned and he scanned his surroundings with a new sense of satisfaction. He could not fathom how a simple meal — cooked and prepared in a rough-hewn method in a harsh environment, using only simple seasonings — managed to beat every posh delicacy he had ever tasted throughout his life.

“By th’ gods… I hae ne’er expected heaven in a place loch this,” Wu’ke sighed.

“Nature is heaven, my friend,” Hunky Joe slurred. He was already intoxicated with his experience as he looked at the bone in his hand. “This, right here… This is pure, unadulterated taste offered by nature that you can never find in other places.”

He folded the used aluminum foil carefully and stuffed it back into the iron box. He could reuse the aroma of the Lucky Cumin the next time they wanted to make smoked meat again.

“Ho, there are many more to enjoy here, man. If we’re always this lucky, we will be able to taste them all,” Morad chirped in happily. “Like that Shield Gar in your mission! Do you have any idea how delicious their roes are?!”

“Oh ho ho! I see you’re a man of fine taste, Morad! Shield Gar roes are one the finest things your tongue will ever have the pleasure to meet… and you can still make them better by matching them with Popoberries! Pair that with the egg white of a lindworm’s egg… Gods, I’ll sacrifice my life just to eat that again!” Joe cried.

Excited, the two seniors started recounting the best food they had ever tasted in Mount Parazonium with more and more extolling details. Listening to them made Wu’ke’s mouth watered once more while his face was mired with yearning and wistfulness. How he wished he could just taste every single thing his seniors had mentioned right now!

He failed to notice that he had completely forgotten about his inability to complete side-quests — in fact, he hardly remembered his actual purpose of being in Mount Parazonium. All of a sudden, it was as if he was here just for an unforgettable dining spree.