Born a Monster

In a time of half rations, imbuing food properly is valuable. I had even unlocked the Cook ability, Love is Food, which gave me a reserve of points specifically for imbuing food. There was a balancing ability, Food is Love, which allowed me to gain extra nutrition from imbued food.

The problem is, that even though you could imbue food with fatigue, most people just didn’t do it. It required time and attention and effort. And, if you didn’t have a System method like Omnivore, which allowed you to pick up physical traits in exchange for nutrition (it’s a little bit more complicated than that), the difference between nine and twelve nutrition a serving was a matter of a bit of tin.

But I brought that up because I was cooking stuffed duck, a recipe I didn’t know. Normally, a person would just reach out to their Culinarian method, pull out a point or four, and add the recipe to their System cookbook. When I reached for those points, I had found them missing.

During the time I was out, my System had given me a new trait, Well-Fed. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where the points for that trait had come from.

Some of my abilities, likewise, had been combined. I think the best case of this was Woodland Lumber, Woodland Firewood, Jungle Lumber, and Jungle Firewood all merging into a new ability called Woodland Foraging. It was the same bonuses, all combined under one ability. I just... I’d honestly forgotten I had them, not having to search for firewood for several seasons now.

System only knew where the points saved by those mergers had gone.

There was a new Valor trait, Veteran. Like most of my ability traits, it was listed at thirty points, plus one with a maximum of five. But it hadn’t come from my Combat experience, so I was wondering where those points HAD come from.

I stirred the stew, which was gaining heat from the stove too fast. But I didn’t dare take that heat away as Fire mana, lest I ruin the duck. Supposedly, infused with lemon juice, duck gave a bonus to resolve when testing courage. I hadn’t seen anything like that in the recipe, but then maybe their Systems saw something mine couldn’t.

.....

My new Resolve trait was Vengeful, and missing points from the Malice, Rampage, and Madness methods accounted for most of that. It’s just... I didn’t feel that vengeful, did I? Not to the degree that it would be something I could pull power from, except that apparently it was.

I’d always used Insight for my senses rather than the skills it provided, with the exception of Linguistical. Those had become extremely valuable since coming to the Daurian island, which made my new trait, Scientific, all the more confusing.

Sure, I’d worked on keeping up on developing my scientific classes, Naturalist and Biologist above the others. But again, it didn’t SEEM like something I ought to have a trait in. Except... if I were going to uncover the secrets of the universe, science wasn’t the worst of tools to do it with.

Similar was the last trait, Clear Mind, raising my Psyche from one to two. That one I could actually feel; my thoughts had been much less impeded now that I had my main goal in life.

But... why was Lore, my magical skill, still lingering at one. Where was the trait improving that, or my Charisma, or even my Agility, which I was using to keep the stew moving so it didn’t burn?

Stupid stew. If the rice would just cook faster... I swapped the position of the pots on the stovetop, which activated Boil, Boil. There. More heat for the rice, less for the stew, all good.

“Is that water boiling yet?” Sister Yoshi asked. She was short, extremely rotund, and somehow made herself heard without raising her voice. I’m pretty sure it was an actual ability from her system, but it may have just come from having eight kids.

“Boiling and infused with Nature mana, ready for mingling with herbs and bandages.” I said.

“Excellent.” She said, using a towel to protect her hands as she hefted it and puttered off toward the infirmary. She could call upon the Miko Light twice a day, but generally made do with the same herbal poultices and medicines the rest of us did.

Well, that and she made my healing potions look like the shameful things they were. It was an unspoken agreement; I would work in the kitchen, providing the champions at the Rice Gate with nutrition. They would gorge themselves, and four hours later (yes, my System provides me with the benefits of eating faster) would drain that away for a day’s worth of healing.

True, they could only do that once per day, but Captain Feng hadn’t been joking. Some of the champions were consuming over two hundred nutrition a day, and none of them less than a hundred.

I was debating getting Food is Love to make the nutrition I got last just that little bit longer. Some cooks get by on taste samples and pot scrapings, but with my sense of smell, I just didn’t need to sample the food. The soldiers, as I may have indicated, were very good at getting as much food out of the pots and pans without actually cleaning them.

That, and I don’t think they’d been eating properly, any more than I had. They griped about vegetables as though they were little children, so I had to trick them with stews and rice mixes. (It wasn’t proper fried rice, which would require cooked rice to survive a day. That just wasn’t close to reality.) They weren’t fans of fruit, but would eat it if used as garnishes and they would devour fruit sauces.

Me? I got to smell all of the food, slobber and desire and temptation. But no, most of my biomass came from bales of hay. I had nobody to blame but myself, I’d long ago set my Omnivore evolutions to survive on the stuff.

And yes, that meant using those broad flat teeth in the back that I didn’t like all that much.

I got to wonder where Madonna and Kismet had gotten to, but there were just no facts on that.

“How is the next set of meals coming along?” Leng Li asked. He was thin and short for a male, one of those that could easily pass for a female if he were wearing a gown and not overlapping metal plates. He was also Lieutenant Leng, Captain Feng’s second and the one who would be in charge tonight. “I don’t want the men fighting Shi Xinyi tonight without every bonus they can get.”

“Is that likely? Doesn’t Shi Xinyi also need time to heal?”

“He’s got some broken chi ability that lets him heal at double normal rate. Two healing potions a day, too. So we’d best plan on fighting him every night until we can figure out how to trap and kill him.”

What? Why hadn’t I heard about any such ability?

[No such ability currently available on visible advancement tracks.]

“How common is that ability?” I asked.

He waved his hand. “Some heroic level bullshit the rest of us can’t hope for. The meals, Monitor! How are the meals?”

“The duck is almost ready, and the stew can go up now, but the rice will be a while.”

“Excellent. I’ll send someone for the stew and duck shortly. Start new dishes once you have the room.”

And that was just who he was. Like Sister Yoshi, he had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in. Like all of us, if I’m being honest.

I had concerns about the duck not being cooked all the way to the bone, but it having heard complaints about the last one being too dry, I just slathered it in lemon sauce and let the normal soldiers carry it away.

At least someone else was plucking out the feathers and dressing the meat. I hadn’t had time to mix the bread cubes, broth, spices, and vegetables together into stuffing, but I started the process. My mana was all but depleted, my physical fatigue barely existed, and the mental and emotional fatigue just didn’t help trying to figure out what my System had done this time.

And more importantly, how. How was my System, inanimate as it was, pulling these points from my various cultivation methods and ...

Wait, couldn’t I put those points to use? If my system was pulling from three or more methods, couldn’t I do the same?

[Trait Dark Magic costs thirty development points. You currently only have seven.]

I nearly spilled the bread stuffing when it worked.

Black Madonna was at the main gate, having a fun time with massive amounts of fire. It is said that she burned Scorched Mai, but it is also said that Mai set herself on fire with a poorly worded invocation. Kismet was retained writing insulting poetry that was exchanged back and forth between nobles, a task which she enjoyed and supposedly was quite... talented at. Gamilla was still inside the citadel, having brokered a series of trades... but I get ahead of myself.