Chapter 202 The Dao of Cooking

AN: Im healed and fully operational. Here are the chapters I owe you. About five dropping today.

I looked up at the stars as I remembered what Drean was doing. 

I was here, in the village, helping Medin knead some dough. 

She was practicing her cooking and cultivating at the same time. Rin had let it slip that she could do both and so, here she was, desperately trying to refine her dao of cooking. And she was succeeding. 

The dough was made of golden qi wheat, a high quality wheat straight from the inner workings of the empire. I had bought it from some trader a while back and even then, it was pretty crap for its price. I went and added some quality to it and slightly improved the stuff. 

Chin wanted to plant it but I told him it would be better if he cultivated the wheat he already had. It would sharpen his dao and build up his own skills. Giving him wheat would be like giving a young master a super powerful sword that would protect him. It was functional, but limiting and would make it harder for him to grow. 

Rin Wi worked with higher quality qi, wheat of the fifth rank and she moved to shape it into something better.

Cooking, much like cultivating, was a practice of improvement. You took raw ingredients and moved to make them more than what they were. You turned it into something greater than the sum of its parts. 

Medin worked, hammering her fists into the dough. The idea was to infuse as much of your qi as you could into the food, but that was an oversimplification. 

You could categorize qi into two types when it came to cultivation, what you could absorb and what you couldn’t. Generally, you took in a chunk of qi from the outside world and reworked a part of it into something you could take in. It became nourishment. 

It was like cooking. You took raw meat and vegetables and you turned it into something more nourishing. The poop would be the impurities in this analogy, but that was taking it too far. 

But cooking was also the very opposite of cultivating. You took ingredients and poured your own qi into them, but if the qi was yours, then almost no one would be able to absorb it as it was. The q i of the natural world was hard enough to refine. Qi specific to a person would be even worse.

So you changed it. You took away yourself and made it into something new, something consumable, something nourishing. 

You were feeding yourself to other people, putting one final magical ingredient into the food. 

That was one part of it, the other part was refining the natural qi into the food. 

Medin fought with the nature of the wheat, the desire of the water, and the unmixing shape of the dough. She used her qi to beat it down and cut it up. She refined the ingredients, turned them from one nature to another. From wheat and water, to bread.

It was a fight in that sense, and in this moment, it was a fight that Medin was losing. She tried to hammer the wheat into something else, to form it into a dough but it refused her. It would mix and then separate mere seconds after she let it go. 

“It’s a game of endurance, Medin. You cannot let the dough rest. You have to be constant with your kneading,” Rin reminded her. 

Chin and I were in a corner, playing a game board that he was thoroughly losing at. 

He was great for his age and ability but he wasn’t near my level of intellect. But it wasn’t about winning for Chin, it was about getting better. 

He focused on his game, occasionally looking up at Medin and watching her struggle with the dough. 

Both struggled, both failed. 

Medin sighed and looked at the quickly separating mix of water and dough. 

“What rebellious food,” she commented. 

Rin Wi shaped her dough and shoved it into the oven. Now she pushed, pushing her qi into the fire and giving it the ability to strengthen the food. 

Medin watched eagerly, wanting to learn from her teacher’s success.

Rin fueled the fire, pushing it beyond its normal limits and forcing it to become something more. 

It wasn’t mere temperature or intensity, it was nature. Everything about the fire fed off of her qi and became something more. 

To make, to destroy, to reform, all were important in cooking. 

The dough warmed and Medin watched enthusiastically. 

Chin lost another game and reset the pieces. 

Chin and I played another game, which he lost again and reset the pieces again. 

“You know,” I said to him. “You're not improving nearly as well as you can be. If you allowed me to play worse, then you could improve incrementally. You don’t have to approach the game with such a direct force. How about I play like I’m only twice as good as you? You need to be able to win to grow Chin, you can’t face off against a sheer cliff and hope to climb it yourself.”

Chin frowned. 

The game was a practice ritual of sorts. It was a test of his mind and ability. It was a simple game of Go, an old board game everybody played. But Chin had been playing it since he was a child and with his new rank came a new grasp of intelligence. 

He wanted to get better. 

He had understood the increase in his physical abilities fairly easily but not the mental sides of things. He read books in an hour and remembered all the important things. He had learned the basics of blacksmithing, and he had even spent a day up in the Light Tower, operating it for the first time in his life. 

Now he had crops being imported from everywhere, seeds stored in a giant shed, currently being safeguarded by the critters that Nai controlled. 

“Will the next rank provide the same type of growth,” he asked me as I made the third best move I could have made. 

“Not necessarily,” I replied. “At your current rank, you can consider your intelligence to be above that of all regular humans, but not by that much. You have to understand it’s not intelligence increasing as much as it is your brain working better. It’s the organ that changed, not your mind.”

Chin nodded and Medin had a similar conversation with Rin Wi about efficiency and qi usage. 

Chin lost again, but he could have won, and he’d win one game today at the rate he was going. 

Medin messed up the next batch of dough as well, and while the old couple didn’t defy the heavens, they cultivated all the same and managed to crawl out a small victory against the world. 

One made bread, the other won a game of Go. 

The bread was very tasty.