Chapter 998: Elixirs, Soup, same thing
Meanwhile…
‘Huh…why do I feel like I just dodged a massive bullet?,’ Zhen Liu mused as he paused mid-bite while eating a bowl of sesame noodles.
‘Meh. It’s probably nothing.’
…Now back to the estate’s kitchen where something was clearly happening…
Zhen Feng was understandably stunned silent as Nun Hua, a respected alchemical master from the upper echelons of the Pearl Scale Empire, proposed he marry either her son or daughter. He had heard of pushy parents before, and tactical marriage, but this was absurd!
Off to the side though, as Zhen Feng was still mentally processing this proposal of insanity, Corriandis has gone over to where Zhen Xing was sitting for the sake of answering a simple question.
“Uh…Master Zhen Xing?”
“Huh? What’s up, Corriandis?”
“Forgive me if this question is too forward, but I’ve kind of notice that you scions of the Zhen Clan seem to get involved in rather spontaneous romantic relationships. Is that normal or…”
“Actually…kind of.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. My father met my mother under unusual circumstances, I honestly forget the whole story, but it’s a joke amongst the elders that all the men in this family will get shanghaied into whirlwind romances.”
“Just the men?”
“Learned about this from when we were in Roaring Tide, the women of the Zhen Clan are the ones to sweep others off their feet.”
“Huh…”
While this conversation occurred, Nun Hua still had Zhen Feng right between the palms of her delicate yet surprisingly strong hands. However, this state of being wouldn’t last much longer.
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Having finished her fried rice, and now no longer amused by her friend’s emotional surge, Zhen Xun Tian proceeded to separate the Imperial Alchemist from her descendant.
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Now that they were separated, Zhen Xun Tian proceeded to give the actual reason why she and Nun Hua had shown up today.
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But the fact that a master(?) of alchemy praised him so was probably a good sign…right?
Regardless of his confidence or lack thereof, Zhen Xun Tian extracted a scroll from her person and laid it in front of Zhen Feng. From what the latter could read, it appeared to be the recipe for an elixir of some kind.
Curious of what this recipe entailed, Corriandis returned to over where Zhen Feng was to take a look as well. The moment he did, Corriandis’s pupils dilated like crazy.
“I haven’t heard of some of these before and I can already tell that they’re high tiered components,” Corriandis commented as he looked over the list.
He had no idea what [Sapphire Ocean Lilies] were, but it already sounded like something that would cost him at least ten lifetimes worth of his current paycheck, which was already quite generous.
Seeing as Zhen Feng was silent, probably stunned into being so, Zhen Xun Tian decided to explain a bit more.
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Zhen Feng was silent for a solid five minutes as he looked over the components on the list a couple times over. Once he did, he made a declaration that shocked everyone in the room.
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<"You have?">
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Under the gazes of his matriarch, an Imperial Alchemist, his cousin and a servant, Zhen Feng went about searching his collection of recently acquired alchemical cook books until he found what he was looking for, a book with a title that loosely translated to, [A Thousand meals for a Thousand Different Mutations].
It was originally written in Shadowspeak, the language of the Umbral Spider continent, so it probably sounded a lot more interesting in that original translation.
Regardless, with the recipe book now in hand, Zhen Feng proceeded to flip through it’s many pages until he settled on a page in the “soup” section of the book.
A page titled, [Carrier Bouillabaisse].
<> Zhen Feng stated as he pointed towards the ingredient section of the recipe. <
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At this point in time, Nun Hua had recovered from her ear pulling long enough to be able to do a proper analysis between the elixir recipe from the lost Omninari Empire with this soup recipe from somewhere in the Umbral Spider continent.
Unlike when she was analyzing the kinpira dish, Nun Hua came to her conclusion a lot faster.
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“I do?,” Zhen Xing asked, kind of forgetting that he just tamed the damn thing a literal meal ago.
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*Bing-Bong*
For the first time in awhile, we’re ending this chapter with a historical explaination that could not be added in the main story because it would’ve messed with the flow.
While this part isn’t mandatory, it does provide context.
*Ahem*
The recipe that Zhen Feng produced from the Umbral Spider cookbook, [Carrier Bouillabaisse], is actually a century older than the [Mutant Arc Elixir] that was created by the Omninari Empire.
Created during an era known as the [Shadowtide Era]. This was a point in time in which Umbral Spider was absolutely flooded with [Shadow Water], to the point where people made the comment that the Umbral Spider continent should’ve been renamed to Umbral Spidercrab continent.
People weren’t exactly creative with the names back then either.
As a result of all of this flooding though, many different methods of traversing [Shadow Water] were developed in the land of darkness, with hundreds and possibly thousands of methods being produced by all sorts of sects and factions.
However, near the end of the [Shadowtide Era], all of the flooding [Shadow Water] ended up draining away to the [Abyssal Lands] of Roaring Tide, causing a dramatic change in topology for both continents.
Records are incredibly sparse about how and why this event occurred, but there have been speculative rumors and guesses.
The most popular of these rumors being that a meteor had impacted a fault line between Umbral Spider and Roaring Tide in just the right way that the all of the shadow water in the former just…flowed right into the latter’s underground.
The less popular, but more believable rumor, was that a pair of Aether Demi-gods had gotten into a dispute and had caused the landscape to irreversibly change as a result of their fairly petty squabble.
The reality though, as recorded by a certain library by a pair of timeless weirdos, is somewhere in-between.
A meteor did impact the continents, Aether Demi-gods were involved and there was a big battle.
However, this wasn’t an internal conflict.
Not many people know this, but Otherlander are not a modern phenomenon, rather they’ve been a part of Valresta’s history for as long as Valresta has been a thing.
In those time, some Otherlanders had means of visiting Valresta in a two manner.
And sometimes, some of those Otherlanders had less than…pleasant reasons for visiting this world.
After all, the locals at the time had no idea what to do with opponents that could move mountains with just their minds…
