Chapter 10: Remove the Heart, Squeeze the Kidneys, Trim the Side Fat, Tear Off the Leaf Fat, Cut the Tenderloin
Ross had never personally butchered a whole pig before. But in an era where short-form videos had become an inescapable feature of daily life, he had watched more than a few of them — full roast pig, whole roast lamb, roast donkey, roast camel, the complete "roast whole X" catalog — and he had rewatched a particular video of a left-handed butcher who moved through a pig carcass like it was choreography, more times than he could count. He had a working idea of what was involved.
Structurally, the Pork de Roa, ignoring the spectacular nose, was not fundamentally different from a domestic pig back home.
As previously established, the first-stage task set by the examiner with the thundering stomach was called a cooking test, but it had almost nothing to do with cooking. Buhara's actual standard was simple: bring him a roast pig. One Pork de Roa, any preparation quality. Unplucked, unbled, half-raw, completely charred — he would take it all without complaint or preference.
Given that Buhara himself wasn't going to be picky, Ross decided not to put in more effort than the situation required. One elbow strike to drop the pig, a moderate amount of time gutting and clearing the abdominal cavity, and then the actual work: remove the heart, squeeze out the kidneys, trim the side fat, tear away the leaf fat, cut out the tenderloin. He set all of it aside, then ran a thick branch through what remained of the carcass and put it over a fire.
While doing this, he noticed something about his own strength. Hauling a carcass that weighed several hundred kilograms around wasn't producing the strain it should have. It seemed like awakening to Nen had incidentally freed up some of the neurological limits on how much of his muscle he could actually use at once. Interesting.
He kept the pig intact — no removed legs, specifically — on the reasonable assumption that a carcass missing limbs might not count as a "whole" pig in the examiner's estimation.
The offal he had set aside was for himself. His body was telling him, clearly and persistently, that sleep could wait but caloric replacement could not.
A Pork de Roa was slightly larger than an adult rhinoceros. Even roasting at minimum acceptable quality, it was going to take several hours. So Ross built two small side cooking stations while the main fire ran. One held a flat river stone he had cleaned off; the other was suspended with the pig's intact bladder, which was filling with water over the heat and beginning to bubble faintly.
He coated the stone with fat first. When the surface was crackling and spitting, he took the organs — rinsed in river water — cut them into thick slices, and put them on.
He would have liked to try the intestines too, if he had flour to work with.
As for the bladder: awakening Nen had apparently done something to his immune system and physical resilience along with everything else, and in theory he could probably drink unboiled water without immediate consequences. But some habits were older than theory, and the risk of something going wrong mid-exam wasn't one he wanted to take.
He had not anticipated eating this much fat and offal in one sitting with absolutely no vegetables whatsoever and finding it not only tolerable but actively satisfying. His body clearly needed the energy and was absorbing it with something close to enthusiasm, probably because it recognized that this level of caloric intake was not going to be a regular occurrence.
The absence of vegetables was not a philosophical choice. He simply was not going to touch the local plant life without being very sure of what he was touching.
He also set aside some of the cooked offal slices and a portion of the pork cracklings that hadn't fully dried out. Those were going to be useful later.
As a first-time whole-pig roaster, Ross was an amateur. But the other applicants weren't in noticeably better shape — most of them had gone straight to roasting without removing the organs, without burning off the bristles, without clearing the nose, ears, or other cavities that accumulated things better not thought about. By comparison, Ross's rough approximation of actual preparation put him considerably ahead in roasting progress.
When he finally dragged his finished pig back to the examination building — the first applicant to return — it triggered a chain reaction. Every other applicant who had been watching rushed to do the same.
The exam had no stated time limit, but it did have a closing condition: the exam ended when the examiner was full.
Nobody who had made it this far wanted to be cut because the examiner had stopped being hungry before they came back.
Their concern turned out to be completely unnecessary.
Buhara accepted every roast pig that arrived, regardless of preparation quality, with a consistent level of enthusiasm that bordered on alarming. He also demonstrated, in the process, a biting capacity, a chewing speed, a digestive throughput, and a stomach volume that were each individually impressive and collectively difficult to explain without involving Nen.
Seventy-two whole roast pigs entered Buhara's stomach in a span of time that left every applicant watching in silence. His body had expanded to the proportions of a small hill. The pile of bones beside him was taller than he was.
A rough estimate put the total consumed weight somewhere above ten metric tons. Either his digestion processed material at the moment of ingestion with impossible speed, or his stomach itself operated under some Nen enhancement that gave it an interior capacity far beyond anything its exterior implied.
By comparison, sixteen packs of instant noodles and thirty-seven cold fried dough sticks would have been an appetizer.
"Doooone~"
"Buhara! Seventy-two whole roast pigs! All consumed!!!"
The gong rang. The first stage of the second phase was officially over.
This also meant that, before the second stage had even started, the applicant count had been cut in half again on-site.
The two examiners had predicted this stage would bring the number below fifty. It had passed seventy-two instead, which made the current cohort demonstrably stronger overall than previous years.
It didn't matter. Menchi would handle it.
The youngest and most gifted Gourmet Hunter of her generation, a twenty-one-year-old who had traveled the world and eaten her way through its finest cuisine, Menchi had reached a serious standing in her field. That was exactly why expecting her to wave everyone through the way Buhara had was not realistic.
Her palate was considerably more demanding than anyone had prepared for.
"For the second half of the second phase, my assigned dish is—"
"Sushi."
Menchi smiled with the air of someone who knew exactly what she was doing. Most of the applicants looked blank.
Togashi's Hunter world was, at its foundation, a mirror-image projection of real-world Earth. In this world, sushi was a regional dish belonging to a small island nation — it had not spread beyond that context and sat firmly outside the mainstream of common cuisine. Taken at face value, the assignment looked like Togashi endorsing Japanese food. Taken with the added qualifier of "small island nation ethnic cuisine," it raised questions about whether the author might have been expressing something less flattering about the concept.
In the original story, only the ninja Hanzou had known what sushi was.
In this exam, at least seven people knew.
Before anyone else had sorted out their intentions, Ross walked directly into the building.
The space was large. Hundreds of cooking stations stood in neat rows, each one identically stocked: cutting board and knife, pots and bowls, assorted bottles and jars of seasonings.
While the examiners and a number of applicants watched with visible surprise, Ross moved to the station he had taken, reached straight for the wooden barrel set in the upper-right corner, and lifted the lid to find rice inside — steamed, still faintly steaming, clearly prepared in advance.
The other applicants didn't understand what he was doing. That didn't stop them from following him into the building and finding stations of their own.
Menchi, watching Ross move with zero hesitation and a clearly defined goal, felt a flicker of interest. It genuinely surprised her that someone here actually knew this particular dish.
Then Ross followed up with something that left Menchi, and every applicant who had been watching him to learn from the process, staring.
He scooped out a full, heaping bowl of rice. From under his jacket, he produced a small parcel wrapped in a leaf, which he unfolded carefully to reveal neatly stacked slices of roasted pig heart, roasted kidney, and pork crackling. He arranged them in order on top of the glistening white rice. He tapped his chopsticks against the table edge to align them, picked them up, and—
started eating, steadily and without hesitation.