Chapter 6: The Amber Weed
The market opened at dawn.
I'd barely slept—two hours on my barracks bedroll, mind churning through possibilities—but the exhaustion felt distant, manageable, overwritten by the amber glow that still burned in my memory.
Tempest's eastern market was less a market and more an organized sprawl. Stalls and carts lined three intersecting streets, vendors calling out prices in a pidgin that mixed goblin dialects with fragments of common tongue. Produce dominated the near section—vegetables I recognized, fruits I didn't, mushrooms in varieties the forest caps couldn't match.
I moved through the crowd with purpose, scanning stalls for the weed I'd pulled from the garden.
It had been a nothing plant. A scrub weed with grey-green leaves and thick stems, the kind of thing that grew in disturbed soil and got ripped out by anyone who cared about actual crops. I'd kept it because something about the texture reminded me of an herb I'd read about once, in another life, in a wiki deep dive about fantasy cooking.
"Swamp scrub. If this world follows the same logic as the source material, it's considered livestock feed. No culinary value. No magical properties."
But the system had flagged it amber when combined with the right catalysts. The system saw something the wiki hadn't mentioned.
I found what I was looking for at a stall run by a lizardman.
The vendor sat behind a cart piled with marsh plants—roots, tubers, and yes, bundles of the grey-green weed I'd been hunting. A hand-painted sign labeled them with a word I couldn't read, but the lizardman's sales pitch filled in the gaps.
"Swamp scrub, good for pigs, good for composting, three copper for a bundle, ten copper for the cart—"
"I'll take two bundles."
The lizardman blinked. Vertical pupils contracted, expanded, contracted again. "For pigs?"
"Cooking experiment."
A silence stretched. The lizardman's tongue flickered out, tasting the air in a gesture I couldn't interpret.
"You're from the central kitchen?"
"Permanent staff, recently assigned."
"Interesting." The lizardman wrapped two bundles in rough cloth. "Six copper. I'll remember your face for future orders."
I paid with coins I'd saved from my first week's wages—construction work paid daily, kitchen work paid weekly, and I'd been too busy learning to spend anything—and tucked the bundles into my apron.
The ticker pulsed as I walked away.
[New Contact: Merchant Class — Commercial Relationship Initiated]
Another category. Another type of interaction the system tracked. Commercial relationships were different from social relationships, apparently, and both fed into stats I was still mapping.
The kitchen was empty when I arrived.
Morning prep didn't start for another hour. I'd planned it that way—early arrival, uninterrupted experimentation, results before the day's chaos began.
I set out my ingredients.
Forest mushroom. River salt. Swamp scrub.
The Cooking HUD labeled them immediately:
[Forest Mushroom — F-Grade, Fresh: 91%][River Salt — F-Grade, Purity: 85%][Swamp Scrub — F-Grade, Nutrient: 34%]
F-Grade across the board. Nothing special about any individual component.
But when I moved them closer together, the labels shifted.
[Combination Detected — Investigating...]
[Swamp Scrub: Catalyst Potential +42% (when combined with fat-soluble medium)]
"Fat-soluble. The weed needs fat to activate whatever property it has."
The forest mushrooms were low in fat. So was the salt. I needed something else—a fourth ingredient to bridge the gap.
I raided the cold storage.
River fish—caught fresh from the tributary that ran through Tempest's eastern district—sat in stone-lined containers. The HUD labeled them F-Grade with a fat content indicator I hadn't noticed on other ingredients.
[River Trout — F-Grade, Fat Content: 18%, Fresh: 87%]
I filleted a fish with hands that had learned the motion over nine days of kitchen work. The fat rendered when I heated the flesh, coating the pan with a thin layer of grease that the swamp scrub could absorb.
I added the mushrooms. The salt. Watched the HUD's combination indicator shift from grey to yellow to—
[Recipe Synthesis: 67%... 78%... 89%...]
The integration bar climbed. The ingredients in my pan began to change—not visibly, not in any way the eye could catch, but the system labels updated in real-time.
[Recipe Created: Laborer's Vitality Stew — Simple Tier]
[Buff: +5% Physical Strength, Duration: 2 hours]
[First Craft Bonus: +18 CM, +15 SysXP]
Stronger than the Recovery Broth. Longer duration. And the ingredients were cheaper—the swamp scrub was practically free, the river fish was standard kitchen stock, and the mushrooms grew wild in the forest outside town.
I tasted the stew.
The flavor surprised me. The swamp scrub added something earthy, almost meaty, that complemented the fish in ways the mushroom alone couldn't achieve. This wasn't just a buff delivery system—it was actually good food.
"The system doesn't just track mechanical effects. It tracks culinary quality too."
I checked my CM stat through the stat screen.
[CM: 48 → 53]
The first craft bonus had pushed me closer to whatever threshold mattered for the next tier of recipes. At this rate, I'd cross 50 within days.
Dinner service was a calculated risk.
I made the Laborer's Vitality Stew in quantity—thirty portions, enough for one construction crew—and served it alongside the standard menu. The orc work team that had been assigned to the eastern wall renovation got the enhanced stew; everyone else got normal food.
The buffs were invisible. The taste was good. Nobody asked questions.
Two hours later, Dolk returned to the kitchen.
"The eastern team finished their section early." His voice carried the same confused suspicion as before, but sharper now. "Three hours early. They lifted stones that usually take multiple workers."
Haruna looked up from inventory counts. "Same crew as yesterday?"
"Different crew. Same food." Dolk's eyes swept the kitchen, lingered on me for a moment, then moved on. "Whatever changed, it's consistent."
"The new cook's been experimenting with ingredients," Haruna said. "Local herbs, seasonal adjustments. Good instincts for what helps workers."
Dolk grunted. "Keep the eastern crews on his rotation."
He left.
The ticker froze.
[Achievement Unlocked: Goblin Stew Pioneer — Uncommon]
[First to create a buff-food recipe using previously unconsidered ingredients.]
[Reward: +25 CM, +15 CR, +1 SP]
The warmth hit harder than before. Uncommon achievement—a rarity tier above the common ones I'd been collecting—and with it, my first Skill Point.
The stat screen updated before I could process the implications:
[System Level: 6 — Progress: 34%]
[CM: 53 → 55]
[CR: 28 → 43]
[SP: 0 → 1]
Numbers climbing. Progress accelerating. And a new resource—SP, Skill Points—that I had no idea how to spend.
"Save it. Save it until I understand what the options are. Don't waste the first SP on something I'll regret."
The advice was solid. The urge to spend immediately—to buy something, anything, that made me feel less fragile in a world where F-rank adventurers could probably kill me—was harder to ignore.
I served the next customer with hands that wanted to shake and a face that showed nothing.
The night after the achievement brought complications.
I sat in the empty kitchen, reviewing the day's data, when footsteps announced Haruna's return.
"You're here late."
"Cleanup duty."
"The cleanup's done." She sat on a prep table across from me, an unusual informality that put me on edge. "I've been watching you, Tarruk."
"Here it comes. The questions about why the food is different. The suspicion about what I'm doing."
"You work harder than anyone I've assigned in three months. You experiment with ingredients nobody else considers. The crews that eat your food perform better." Her eyes—old eyes in a middle-aged hobgoblin face—studied me without blinking. "You're not from Tempest, are you? Not originally."
The question cut close to truths I couldn't reveal.
"I came from a village that got destroyed," I said carefully. "Before Lord Rimuru's time. We had... different cooking traditions. Some of it stuck."
"Different traditions." Haruna's expression didn't change. "My grandmother used to talk about herb preparations that nobody remembers anymore. Village secrets that died when the wolves took the eastern settlements."
"She's not suspicious. She's nostalgic."
"The old ways matter," I said. "Someone should remember them."
Haruna nodded slowly. "Lord Rigurd's office asked about the eastern district's improved metrics today. The crews there are outperforming every other sector, and the only variable is the food rotation."
My stomach dropped.
"They're not asking about me specifically," she continued. "They're asking about the kitchen's methods generally. But you should know—when results get noticed, people start looking for causes."
"I understand."
"Do you?" She stood, preparing to leave. "Keep doing good work, Tarruk. Just... maybe spread the improvements around more evenly. A tide that lifts all boats attracts less attention than one that lifts only the eastern dock."
She walked out.
I sat in the empty kitchen, surrounded by ingredients with invisible labels and a system that tracked everything I did, and contemplated the shape of the problem.
The buffs worked. The buffs were measurable. And now the buffs were generating attention from Tempest's administration.
Rigurd's office meant reports. Reports meant documentation. Documentation meant patterns that someone—maybe not now, maybe not soon, but eventually—would connect to the new cook who'd arrived right when everything started improving.
"Dial it back. Spread the effects across more crews. Make the improvement look like kitchen-wide quality upgrade, not one person's secret technique."
Tomorrow's batch of Vitality Stew would be weaker. Enough to help, not enough to make orcs lift boulders.
The SP sat in my stat screen, unspent, a resource I couldn't afford to waste when I still didn't understand the stakes.
The ticker pulsed steadily in my peripheral vision—achievements nearby, progress available, the endless grind continuing whether I was ready or not.
I checked the time. Nearly midnight. The night shift would arrive in six hours for breakfast prep.
Sleep called, but so did the herb bins that hadn't been fully catalogued, the ingredient combinations I hadn't tested, the frontier of culinary possibility that the system kept revealing one experiment at a time.
"Rest. You need rest. A tired cook makes mistakes, and mistakes draw attention you can't afford."
I forced myself to leave the kitchen. Forced myself to walk toward the barracks where a bedroll waited.
Halfway there, the ticker flashed.
[Achievement Hint: Community Chronicler — Begin recording the unwritten history of a people. Progress: 1/10]
Garrdo. The old hobgoblin with stories nobody asked about. I'd promised to find him, to listen, to record whatever he remembered about the shrine and the time before.
"Tomorrow. Garrdo tomorrow. The kitchen in the morning. The cultural project after."
The grind didn't stop. Couldn't stop. The system rewarded engagement across multiple fronts—cooking, social, cultural—and stopping in any direction meant falling behind in a world where I had no other advantages.
I reached the barracks.
Sleep came reluctantly, filled with dreams of amber-glowing ingredients and administrative reports with my name somewhere in the margins.
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