Sophia met Willow's worried gaze, lightly gathered her skirts, and stepped down from the carriage running board — her movements as weightless as a feather drifting onto fresh snow.
She didn't take Willow's offered hand. Instead she walked directly toward Delilah, who was stepping out of the mud and shallow water.
"Go wash up," Sophia said. "You reek of blood."
She had drawn a clean silk handkerchief from her sleeve, but paused mid-motion as she drew close to Delilah and instead turned her gaze toward the enormous boar lying on the ground, her tone as matter-of-fact as ever.
"Tonight's bonus meal turned out to be rather larger in scale than anticipated."
Delilah wiped the mud from her face with the back of her hand. Those crimson eyes of hers were blazing with an almost frightening brightness, but the grin tugging at the corners of her mouth refused to be suppressed.
"Yes, Your Majesty! I'll see to it at once. This beast... it'll feed everyone well tonight!"
The soldiers worked together to haul the several-hundred-jin wild boar from the shallows to an open space beside the campfire. Faced with this lord of the jungle — its skin rough as weathered stone, tusks jagged and fearsome — both Hailey and Irene couldn't help crowding in for a closer look.
"How much meat do you think that is..."
Irene crouched beside it and poked at the coarse, bristled hide with one finger, then looked over at Hailey.
"Hailey — did you figure it out? How many of me does this boar weigh?"
Hailey chewed the end of her pen, her small brow knotted into a fierce tangle of concentration. After a long moment, she wrote a lopsided number on the page.
"To answer Irene-jiejie's question — assuming you weigh about eighty-five jin... this is approximately five and a half Irene-jiejies, plus the fat little rabbit we caught earlier. Though that is only an estimate, since we don't actually know how much this boar weighs."
"Hey! Why did you add the rabbit?! And you called it a fat rabbit!"
Irene protested indignantly, her pink twin-tails swishing from side to side.
By now Sophia had made her way to the campfire and settled onto the cushion Willow had already laid out for her. She accepted the warm cup of tea Willow pressed into her hands, let her gaze rest on the boar, and spoke with quiet calm.
"Willow. Since everyone seems so invested in this boar, let them watch you work. Wild boar hide and hindquarters of this quality — handled poorly, they'd be a genuine loss for Mason."
"As you wish, Your Majesty."
Willow gave a slight bow and neatly rolled up the sleeves that had been hanging at her wrists.
From her traveling case she produced a set of extremely precise silver knives — custom-made by Irene for processing medicinal herbs and food ingredients. Under the astonished eyes of everyone present, Willow moved.
She did not hack and slash as a common farmer would. Instead she extended those slender fingers first, pressing lightly along the boar's thick shoulder blade and spine, feeling for the hidden seams between muscle and bone like she was searching for a secret.
"Watch carefully," Willow said, her voice as gentle as always — and yet carrying an authority that left no room for doubt.
"When breaking down a large beast, brute force is the lowest possible approach. You follow the grain of the muscle. You find that thin layer of fascia."
Shhhk——
The sound of silver entering flesh was almost inaudible, like a blade parting silk. Willow's hand was utterly steady. The knife tip drew a beautiful arc in the firelight, and in the span of barely a few breaths, the entire thick hide had been peeled away intact — its edges so clean they might have been measured with a ruler.
Hailey stared with her mouth hanging open, her pen flying frantically across the page.
Willow-jiejie's blade tip reflects Her Majesty's will. Her Majesty said not to waste, and so even the most savage of boar hides has been tamed into a docile carpet.
I understand now! This is the truth Her Majesty teaches us. No matter how great the obstacle, if you can find that one layer of fascia, you can solve it cleanly.
Is not Willow-jiejie's elegant movement the very proof of Her Majesty's careful teaching? Even Her Majesty's own attendant can grasp the weight of life with such precision — truly, Mason's future must also be perfectly carved and reshaped by Her Majesty's hand.
"Heavens! Willow, that knife technique is steadier than most precision machine tools!" Irene cried, awestruck. "Look at that fat layer — the cut is practically flat at the atomic level!
"Your Majesty, once Mason has a biology laboratory, Willow-jiejie absolutely must be its chief consultant! No wonder most of the ingredients Your Majesty wants are processed by you — in some sense, you're more reliable than a machine."
"A machine? Machine tools? What are those?"
Willow smiled faintly, her hands never losing a beat. She had long since grown accustomed to the existence of things she didn't quite understand.
Sophia took a sip of tea and felt the warm liquid trace a path down her throat.
"These are the choicest parts of the whole animal."
Willow extracted the two enormous hindlegs with clean precision, their muscle grain clearly visible. She turned to Sophia with a warm, composed smile.
"Your Majesty, I'll treat these two hams with the remaining wild honey and the rock salt we brought in the supply carts — a first curing pass to draw out the moisture. Once we reach the coastal nation, a second cure with their sea salt should yield something exceptional."
"Mm. Thank you for your work."
Sophia nodded, then turned to look at Daphne, who was standing nearby openly staring and swallowing repeatedly.
"Daphne. Stop gawking. Willow has already portioned the meat — have the soldiers smoke the rest for preservation. As for the ribs left over tonight, if you want some, just ask Willow to roast them for you."
"Yes! Long live Your Majesty! Long live Willow!"
Daphne instantly revived to full energy, clutching her staff and rushing forward to help.
Under the dark of night, the smell of blood slowly gave way to the overpowering richness of rendering fat.
---
The river valley was wrapped in a thin, gauze-like morning mist, the air carrying a mild chill. But the scent drifting through the camp now was no longer the cool fragrance of grass and wood — it was the deeply domineering, soul-stirring aroma of meat, enough to awaken hunger in the marrow.
Under Willow's expert overnight handiwork, the finest portion of that five-hundred-jin boar — those two enormous hindlegs — had been deeply penetrated by rock salt and wild honey and now hung from the rear eave of the supply carriage, gleaming with a tempting, dark-red luster.
The remaining ribs and belly pork had been smoked overnight by the soldiers using pine and cypress branches until half-cured, then stacked neatly in the cargo cart.
Irene was stuffing a crispy slice of the bacon Willow had just warmed into her mouth, muttering indistinctly around it.
"Your Majesty... I feel like this isn't really an incognito tour. This is more like Mason's Culinary Expedition. The smell alone — I'd bet the bandits up ahead are lining up to surrender just for a piece of pork crackling."
Sophia took an elegant sip of warm wheat porridge, watching the soldiers busily processing the remaining by-products of the night's hunt, the corner of her mouth twitching faintly.
She breathed in the meat-scented air. Irene wasn't wrong — it was far too conspicuous.
Traveling through the mountains with a carriage full of smoked meat, Sophia had the distinct feeling she had become an enormous moving lure. Still, this kind of overwhelming material surplus had visibly relaxed the tightly-wound group of young women around her. Just look at Daphne — so overwhelmed by the smell she was already involuntarily radiating faint pulses of Holy Light.
The caravan set out again. But as the journey progressed, the plains that had still been reasonably wide began to narrow.
Even the two experienced merchant women were puzzled. According to the secret map recovered from Orr, there should have been a proper road leading to the coast here — but in reality, the path beneath their feet grew narrower and narrower until it was nothing but a muddy track barely wide enough for a single carriage to pass.
On both sides: near-vertical cliff faces and ancient vine tangles that blotted out the sky. If not for the annotated fragment Sophia held in her hands, they might well have wandered these indistinguishable valleys until nightfall.
"Your Majesty, this place is wrong," Delilah said, her hand pressing to her sword hilt, that ponytail — still tilted fifteen degrees to the right — sweeping in vigilant arcs as she surveyed the surroundings.
"A road like this, forget an army — even a moderately sized merchant convoy couldn't get through. No wonder Mason's maps never showed this place. This is a country that geography itself has forcibly erased."
Hailey sat inside the jolting carriage, her pen tip jumping across the paper with every bump in the road.
Just as Irene was on the verge of being shaken sick, the path opened up without warning between two massive stone pillars.
At the end of that rutted track, a crude checkpoint of rough timber and sea-rock stood across the path. The checkpoint didn't even have a proper flag — only a piece of sun-bleached cloth, tattered by sea winds, bearing a faded sketch of a small boat.
Several soldiers in rough linen, their skin bronzed to copper by the sea wind, were leaning against the wooden barriers with nothing to do. They lacked the sharpness of Mason's troops and seemed almost casually relaxed — but behind their eyes lived the weathered resilience of people who spent their lives wrestling the waves.
"Halt! Where's this merchant train from?"
The squad leader — a man with a scar across his face — was already flaring his nostrils at the thick smell of meat drifting from the caravan. He squinted hard at the carriages, which looked plain enough at first glance but were unmistakably being escorted by heavily armed guards — black musket soldiers.
The checkpoint fell into a tense, awkward standoff.
"We're here to trade," the merchant woman said, exactly as Sophia had instructed.
"Trade?!" Scar-Face hawked and spat on the ground, his expression carrying the stubborn insularity of someone who hadn't dealt with outsiders in years.
"The only thing that's ever come through here besides the Orr salt exchange convoy — once a year — is the occasional lost rabbit. You lot, with your cavalry and these carriages carrying markings I've never seen in my life... Speak up! Did the old King of Orr hire some kind of black-market mercenary to come sniff around our territory?"
The two merchant women plastered smiles onto their faces so wide their wrinkles bunched into flowers.
"Officer, now there's a thing — Orr is ancient history. The north has a new master these days. We're with the Northern Dawn Merchant Company, and we're genuinely here to do business."
No matter how much they talked, the guards remained stubbornly suspicious. Some had already started signaling toward the watchtower at the rear, looking like they were about to call for backup and clear the road by force.
Inside the carriage, Sophia tapped her fingertips lightly against her knee. Through the thin curtain, she had read clearly the flash of ravenous hunger buried at the very bottom of those sentries' eyes.
"Willow."
Sophia's voice was barely above a murmur — and yet it carried an authority that didn't need volume.
"Your Majesty."
Willow understood instantly. Her slender fingers had already drifted toward the small silver carving knife at her side.
Under the guards' wary stares, the carriage door eased open. Willow stepped out in a simple, elegant long dress, cradling in both arms one of the wild boar hindlegs from the night before — freshly cured and dehydrated, gleaming with an enticing amber luster.
"Gentlemen, it's been a long road and we're a simple traveling party. Our employer says the path through these mountains is truly rough going, and we haven't brought any proper gifts."
Willow smiled — the kind of smile that made several rough men go momentarily blank.
Then her wrist turned.
Shhhk! Shhhk! Shhhk!
Several slices of ham, thin as cicada wings and glittering with fat, fell one after another onto a clean cloth — paper-thin, perfectly even.
In the morning light, the meat shimmered a translucent, cherry-blossom red. Fine veins of fat were scattered through it like stars, and as the sea breeze carried it forward, the fragrance — wild honey caramel layered over the richest land-animal fat imaginable — detonated in the narrow space before the checkpoint like a small explosion.
"Please, help yourselves. This is Northern Border wild boar ham, cured in polyfloral honey and finished with a specialty smoking process. If it weren't for your fine salt being so appealing to our employer, she wouldn't have parted with even this much."
Scar-Face swallowed audibly. The refusal he had been preparing dissolved the instant the fragrance hit him.
With trembling fingers, he pinched a slice and put it in his mouth.
It was a richness he had never experienced — an absolute fusion of melt-in-your-mouth softness with the interplay of salt and sweetness. As his teeth pressed down, the fat sealed inside overnight burst open across his palate — the deep, heavy, land-animal caloric warmth that people who live on dried sea fish dream of their entire lives.
"Mmh... the... the taste..."
Scar-Face's eyes nearly rolled back. The soldiers behind him abandoned all pretense of military formation and swarmed forward, each grabbing a slice. In under ten seconds, the checkpoint that had been braced for confrontation was reduced to a chorus of sharp, disbelieving exhales and the frantic sound of swallowing.
Hailey pressed her face to the carriage window, watching the soldiers who had been so imperious moments ago now staring up at Willow like eager puppies. Her pen tip trembled with delight.
Fat has conquered the wall.
Her Majesty didn't fire a single arrow. Didn't say a single extra word. Through nothing more than Willow-jiejie's silver knife, she completely dismantled this hermit nation's first line of defense.
I understand now! This is what Her Majesty always says — need determines position. These sentries weren't lacking in loyalty. They were lacking in fat!
Her Majesty used a few slices of ham to forcibly elevate their field of vision to Mason's level. Looking at the way Scar-Face is trying not to swallow his own tongue, I know — the gate is open.
This isn't a trade negotiation. This is Her Majesty conducting the gentlest, most ruthless brainwashing imaginable, through the medium of delicious food.
"This... this lady — no, this honored guest!" Scar-Face wiped the grease from his chin and moved the barrier aside with deeply deferential haste, his tone flipping in an instant from suspicion to abject fawning.
"A generous merchant of this caliber — naturally we'd never dream of stopping you! Please, come right through! Follow the track for about half an hour and you'll reach Cape Town. The salt merchants there will welcome you with open arms!"
Sophia set down her tea, a knowing flicker crossing those pale golden pupils.
As expected. In a country where salt was worth more than meat, top-quality land animal produce was the finest passport imaginable.
And moreover — judging by their complete ignorance of Orr's collapse, the information blockade here was even more thorough than she had anticipated. That would make things considerably easier to maneuver.
The carriage rolled past the crude checkpoint. The rutted track gradually smoothed, and the faint briny tang that had been hovering at the edge of perception finally swept in on a great gust of sea wind and took over every sense entirely.
As the carriages rounded the last mountain bend, the world opened up.
It was a sight utterly unlike the Northern Border wastelands.
A deep-blue sea stretched out like an enormous bolt of silk, scattered with fine points of silver, blending at the far horizon into the pale blue of the sky as though they were one.
Just as Delilah had noted from the terrain: the territory known as the Kingdom of Avalon was in reality little more than a tiny nub of land jutting out from the continent toward the ocean. It was surrounded on three sides by sheer cliffs, accessible only through this single hidden track on one side — while the other faced a sea of immeasurable depth.
"Ah. I see."
Sophia lifted the curtain and let the salt-damp sea wind tangle the hair at her temples. Her pale golden eyes swept over the fishermen mending nets on the rocks below.
"This land is too small to register even as a dot on a map. And yet this narrow strip of coastline has become the most abundant pantry this otherwise barren place has to offer."
There was none of Mason's endless black farmland here — even the pasture was thin and sparse, with a few scrawny goats gnawing at salt-laced scrub grass. But in contrast, the beach was piled with mountains of fish baskets, and silver sea fish hung in rows across every available drying rack.
Stepping into this territory, a singular sensation washed over you: poor and rich at the same time.
Agriculture was pitiful — the wheat heads here were stunted and sorry, and even the coarsest black bread counted as a luxury. But seafood was in such abundance it overflowed.
At the roadside stalls, a copper crab the size of two fists could be had for a dozen copper coins. The common people had no need to worry about protein. What they lacked was the carbohydrates to counterbalance the sea-salt tang, and the fat that came with it.
"Your Majesty, look!" Irene pointed at a child by the roadside casually gnawing on a raw oyster, her pink twin-tails whipping madly in the sea breeze.
"They're eating seafood as a snack! In Mason — in our old Mason, that would have been an unthinkable luxury!"
Daphne pressed in beside her, golden hair blown into cheerful disarray by the wind, gazing at the distant shining sea with unconcealed longing.
"The very air here tastes salty. It feels like someone dissolved a sea-salt Pudding in the ocean."
Oysters? Willow fixed her gaze on the object in the child's hand. She had never seen one before.
Sophia leaned against the window, watching the distant Kingdom of Avalon — its scale smaller than even the City of Hill's inner city, perched on the edge of the sea cliffs — already running rapid calculations in her mind.
Sparse population. Geographically isolated. Resources extremely limited in variety.
This was the most perfect possible result for opening this particular mystery box on an incognito trip.
A micro-kingdom like this wouldn't even require Delilah's cavalry. If handled correctly in terms of shampoo and grain supply, it might be possible — without a single drop of blood being shed — to have the name of this stretch of sea changed to 'Mason's Inner Sea.'
Still... now that we're here, first things first.
Before any business negotiations, Sophia had decided she was going to try the most authentic salt-baked prawns this place had to offer.
The carriage rolled over Cape Town's streets, paved with crushed stone and shell fragments, the wheels grinding and crunching with every turn. The buildings here were mostly constructed from rough sea-rock and driftwood bleached pale by years of waves — projecting a raw, tenacious kind of beauty.
The townspeople stopped what they were doing. Fishermen mending nets, women salting fish, men hauling baskets of salt — all of them stared like they were looking at creatures from another world, eyes fixed on this merchant caravan that smelled of "land-meat" and "money."
To the eyes of these Avalonians, weathered and roughened by a lifetime against the wind and sea, these carriages — sleek-lined and understated yet radiating unmistakable craftsmanship — looked like something that had driven straight out of a myth.
"Your Majesty — excuse me, Boss — that one up ahead looks reasonably clean," Delilah said, hopping down from the carriage with her hand on her sword, that ponytail tilted fifteen degrees to the right springing up cheerfully in the salt-tinged breeze.
She pointed to a stone building with a simple wooden sign that read: Saltwind Tavern.
Sophia lifted the curtain and stepped down from the carriage. Even in the deep-green fine-wool long dress, that aura of cool nobility swept through the surrounding merchant chatter and knocked the volume down by several degrees.
The group entered.
The interior was extremely plain — thick wooden tables still bearing the faint rings left by wet cups. The proprietor was a middle-aged man with a substantial belly and a beard that smelled of sea salt. He was wiping down the table, eyes full of suspicion.
"Where are you folks from? We run a simple operation here — never seen a merchant crew with your kind of setup. Looking to trade salt, or just passing through for water?"
Sophia settled into a seat and tapped one fingertip lightly on the surface of the well-worn but clean table. She didn't so much as glance at the crude menu carved into the wall. She simply looked up with that unhurried calm and said:
"Bring us your signature salt-baked prawns, steamed red crab, charcoal-grilled sea bass... everything fresh — all of it. Double portions of each."
The proprietor froze. His cloth nearly fell to the floor.
"Every dish? Ma'am, we may have plenty of seafood, but the salt-baked prawns use our finest triple-filtered salt, and those red crabs need to be pulled from deep reef rocks before sunrise. A meal like that is going to cost quite a bit..."
"Go ahead and make it," Sophia said, cutting off his hesitation in a tone as flat as if she were asking someone to pour her a glass of water.
"If it tastes good, I'll add a tip on top."
The proprietor still wavered slightly. In this half-enclosed little town, the occasional con artist did make the treacherous crossing through the mountains — rare as it was. He was just forming the words to verify their means when Willow stepped forward with elegant composure.
Willow smiled gently, reached into her traveling case, and produced a small case of dark embossed leather.
Click.
The case opened just a crack. The last rays of the setting sun filtered through the window lattice at precisely that angle.
In that instant, the golden gleam of heavy, dense gold coins nearly blinded the proprietor where he stood.
In Avalon — a tiny nation that ran primarily on barter of sea products, where gold coins were desperately scarce — the purchasing power in that one small case was enough to buy the entire town.
"This..."
The proprietor's knees buckled. He barely stopped himself from falling outright. The look in his eyes as they found Sophia shifted in a single heartbeat from suspicion to witnessing a god descend.
"Honored guest! What... what sort of trade are you in? How does a person earn this much gold?"
Sophia accepted the warm damp cloth Willow offered and wiped her fingertips at a leisurely pace. Faced with that near-devotional inquiry, she simply raised her eyes with complete nonchalance and said:
"Earn? Not exactly. Mainly... I have mines at home."
The air went absolutely still.
It wasn't even a lie.
The coal mines and iron mines of the City of Qubi, combined with all the Black Rose heritage buried beneath the Palace — calling it "I have mines at home" was, if anything, a spectacular understatement.
Irene took one look at the proprietor's expression — clearly a man who had never seen the wider world — and was instantly delighted. She flipped her pink twin-tails back, hopped up onto her chair, and smacked the table with the easy triumph of a cunning little fox.
"Hey, proprietor! Stop standing there staring!" Irene grinned, flashing one small fang, blue eyes dancing with mischief.
"When our boss says something, she never speaks off the cuff. If she says she has mines, she has mines. Not just the shiny yellow kind — all kinds of mines. If you keep her happy, even the scraps that fall off the side would be enough to build yourself a brand-new stone house right here in Cape Town!"
She leaned back and puffed out her chest with the unearned confidence of someone who had been very well provided for by her employer.
Daphne joined in immediately, contributing to the spectacle. She was still eyeing the kitchen longingly and swallowing at intervals, but even draped in a rough linen robe, some quality of the Saint in her projected an aura of lavish, effortless divinity.
"May the Holy Light — ah, may fortune's goddess bless your hearth," Daphne said, nodding at the proprietor with great solemnity, golden hair catching the dim light.
"Stop doubting. Our employer's only flaw is that she has too much money. Your only concern should be whether the prawns are big enough and whether the flavor is good. As for the bill — that entire case of gold coins is just our walking-around money. Now go, and don't keep our employer's stomach waiting."
The proprietor was battered senseless by this two-pronged assault of wealth. He bowed repeatedly, shouting "Right away! Right away! Bring out the reddest basket!" as he stumbled toward the kitchen — and nearly tripped flat over his own doorstep on the way.
Irene waited until he disappeared, then scooted close to Sophia's ear, pink hair-tips brushing Sophia's shoulder as she dropped her voice.
"Your Majesty — did you see the look in that man's eyes? When he was staring at the gold coins, his eyeballs were moving faster than the drill operator in my lab. I'd bet everything that right now he's mentally calculating whether those coins, laid flat on the ground, would stretch all the way from Cape Town to their capital city."
Daphne drifted in from the other side, murmuring in agreement.
"He did, didn't he, Your Majesty — that expression of his, wanting to kneel but not quite daring to, looked exactly like the corrupt merchants I used to see trying to flatter the Arch Bishop back in the Imperial Capital. Though I must say — the sheer force of I have mines really is more persuasive than any reasoned argument."
Sophia sat between them with dignified composure, surrounded by her two-woman atmosphere committee, and felt a wave of quiet resignation wash through her.
Mason did genuinely have mines. And Sophia had fully intended to let word of her wealth reach this place — attracting the attention of higher-level figures was the whole point. But in the retelling of these two, she had apparently become a mysterious mining magnate capable of buying a kingdom on a whim.
Still... watching the proprietor scramble around with that energy of you can have my life if you pay me enough, it did seem the quality of tonight's salt-baked prawns was now thoroughly guaranteed.
As the sound of decisive, clean shell-cracking echoed from the kitchen, the primal salt-brine aroma of the ocean broke free of the cooking smoke and began asserting itself aggressively through the entire dining room.
In this isolated little town with no spice trade and no chili — that foreign species from another land — the Avalonians processed their ingredients with an approach that was singular and pure: salt, and absolute freshness.
"Quick! Bring it out! Don't keep the honored guests waiting!"
The proprietor's forehead was beaded with sweat as he carried out an enormous ceramic tray, moving at a near-jog. On the tray lay a layer of scorching white salt, two fingers deep — Cape Town's finest refined salt, now releasing a distinctive mineral fragrance under the heat.
Beneath that white layer, several dozen prawns the size of half a palm had turned a gorgeous coral red.
"Honored guests, please enjoy!"
The proprietor set the tray down with trembling hands, and before he could say another word, Irene's nose was already at the edge of the dish.
In an age without chili, sea salt heated and pressed through the gaps in prawn shells not only locked in the excess moisture of the seafood — it brought the naturally sweet quality of the flesh to its absolute peak.
Irene didn't wait for it to cool. Fingertips blurring, she pinched one up, blew on it rapidly, and began peeling at high speed.
"Ow! So hot — but so sweet!"
Irene's blue eyes went incandescent on the spot. She squeezed them happily half-shut.
"This is completely unlike the roasted meat from the Northern Border — none of that heavy fat weight. Just a kind of... a very clear saltiness!"
Then came a wave of dishes, like the tide flooding in:
Steamed red crab — no elaborate dipping sauce, just a few slices of ginger for the fishiness and a small dish of a secret vinegar with faintly fruity acidity. The shells had been cracked at precisely the right points to reveal the snow-white, strand-by-strand crab meat within.
Charcoal-grilled sea bass — the skin blistered to a gorgeous crisp, scattered with coarse salt crystals and finely chopped rosemary. Every bite came with the satisfying crack of shattering skin.
Poached whelks — every shell scrubbed to a gleam, the jade-green whelk meat fat and plump, dipped in the proprietor's proudly guarded "sea-wind sauce," with a fresh, crisp snap to each bite.
Daphne had long since abandoned any pretense of a Saint's dignity. She held a red crab leg in one hand and was eating with the expression of someone in a state of deep spiritual peace.
"Holy Light above — there's no spice here at all, but this briny, oceanic freshness... I feel like my soul has been washed clean by the sea. Your Majesty, I believe that from now on, the word umami must be added to Mason's culinary vocabulary."
Sophia lifted a silver fork with graceful precision and selected a plump, fatty piece of sea bass belly.
No chili. No soy sauce. Even sugar was desperately scarce here. In this environment of radical ingredient scarcity, the Avalonians had somehow pushed salt to this art form.
This pure, unobstructed freshness was, for Mason residents accustomed to heavy oil and heavy salt and bold flavors, nothing short of a dimensional assault on the palate.
And yet Sophia had noticed something.
For all that salt was so abundant here they could bake anything in it — their side dish was nothing but a single bowl of coarsely textured, slightly bitter seaweed paste. This carbohydrate-deficient dietary structure was exactly the gap her potatoes and wheat flour could stride through unopposed.
The reactions of the rest of the party were a different matter entirely. For several of them, this was genuinely their first encounter with these creatures of the sea.
Delilah was staring at the plate of red crab with the focused, grave intensity she reserved for dangerous adversaries. Those crimson eyes of hers — the ones that had stared down battlefields — were written with the gravity of someone facing a formidable foe. The ponytail tilted fifteen degrees to the right swayed faintly as she bent her head, looking slightly tense.
"Your Majesty... is this thing truly not some species of miniature creature wearing red plate armor?"
Delilah extended the hand she usually used to grip her longsword and prodded the hard shell with an experimental fingertip, listening to the crisp sound of nail against carapace, brow furrowed.
"The defensive capability looks sturdier than our soldiers' breastplates. I'm trying to decide whether to shatter it with an inner-force strike, or use the tip of my sword to pry apart the seam."
She genuinely did not know how one was supposed to eat this thing. In her world, food was a simple ritual of replenishing energy. This creature had produced in her the unsettling sensation that a tactical assault was required.
It wasn't until she followed Sophia's example and cracked a crab leg to reveal the crystal-white fresh meat within that this God of War's expression shifted from bloodthirsty intensity to pure, undiluted shock.
Hailey, meanwhile, demonstrated the particular curiosity of a born chronicler. She set down her pen and leaned across the table edge, face inches away from the plate of poached whelks and the strangely-shaped fish, studying them in close detail.
"These creatures... they seem to have been designed entirely at random," she murmured, nose nearly touching a whelk shell.
"Your Majesty, look at this shrimp — it has so many legs, and they're all transparent! Is this what people call the many-legged sea-horse of legend?"
She exclaimed in wonder while rapidly sketching the seafood's outlines in her notebook. In her small mind, she had already begun constructing a magnificent mental image of all these creatures lining up in the deep sea to offer tribute to Sophia.
Willow's reaction was the most composed of all — but those violet eyes of hers were equally full of wonder. She lifted a plump whelk on a slender silver pick, examined the jade-like translucency of the flesh, and felt her fingertips tremble ever so slightly.
At first, she hadn't quite dared to eat it.
But watching Her Majesty, Irene, and Daphne eating with such obvious enjoyment, Willow gathered her courage.
"This is a texture that defies all familiar logic," Willow said softly. She was accustomed to handling heavy pork, beef, lamb, and dry wheat flour; rarely had she encountered a meat that seemed to carry its own moisture, springing back gently at the slightest pressure.
"Setting aside the somewhat fierce appearance — the penetrating quality of this freshness is more commanding than the most precious spice. Your Majesty, this minister is thinking: if we could solve the problem of spoilage during transport, this gift called seafood could drive the Northern Border's nobility to absolute madness."
She tasted slowly and carefully, mentally rebuilding Mason Palace's menus from scratch. In her eyes, these were not food. They were the blue spoils of war from Her Majesty's coming conquest of the sea.
Sophia looked at the three retainers bent over their plates like curious children, dissecting and marveling, and calmly sucked the crab roe from a shell.
I have mines. Looking at their expressions — people who clearly hadn't seen enough of the world — Sophia rather felt she had said that line too soon.
In this world, the gap in knowledge was more staggering than any gap in wealth.
Who would ever have imagined that the Northern Border's fearsome God of War would be thoroughly stumped by a single crab?
Though... there was something undeniably soothing about being the one who got to open up the map for them, let them unbox the world alongside her.
Hailey continued wrestling gamely with a stubborn whelk, and wrote:
A meal in Cape Town.
Her Majesty is evaluating this nation through taste.
The food here has no chili, yet carries a persistence like the tide.
____
________________________________________
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💖 Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 100 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter to warm your hearts.
🚀 Community Reward: If we reach 20 supporting members, we'll have a +5 chapter marathon across all stories! The romance won't stop.
👻 Come to our secret corner: Search for GirlsLove on (P). You know that's where the magic happens... 😉