Taking a deep breath, Soren finished preparing the foundational ingredients, arranging thick cuts of marbled beef and chopped moon-stalk celery neatly on the counter.
His gaze then swept over the rest of the ingredients.
'...This single meal cost me almost 200,000 credits,' he thought, his chest tightening slightly at the sheer numbers. 'I absolutely cannot afford to fail this.'
He focused entirely on the workspace before him, letting the lively chatter from the dining room fade into distant background noise.
Cooking with these premium items required extreme precision due to their volatility. A normal chef might just toss everything into a pot, which would let the elemental essence escape into the air. To prevent such a waste, Soren had to use his own mana to coat the ingredients, locking the pure frost energy directly inside them during the heating process.
