Chapter 3: A Chef Trainee in Another World

1

“Perhaps you’re the embodiment of calamity itself, or something of that sort...”

By the time Ai Fa muttered that, she had done up her hair, slipped on her usual clothing, and gallantly tossed her fur cloak over her shoulders.

“Perhaps it is too great of an honor for someone so lowly as myself to ask for, but could you explain what you mean?”

“Normally, a giant madarama snake would never appear at the base of the mountain, but one got washed downstream, and then we were attacked by a giba wandering about the forest before the sun had even reached its peak. Nothing good seems to happen when you’re around.”

Hmph, I see...

Now that she mentioned it, I had also seen her unwed body in the nude. I wanted to bring that up, but considering my life had only just been saved, I thought better of it.

And apparently, that was the right decision to make. After all, when I instead just silently nodded back, Ai Fa made a face like she regretted what she’d just said.

“...Still, even though the situation had been entirely unexpected, it was my fault for letting my guard down and not noticing the madarama. And you ended up saving me in the aftermath, so for that at least, you have my gratitude.”

After that she cast her gaze down a bit, then looked at me with slightly upturned eyes and pointlessly fidgeted with her necklace, before finally muttering, “Thank you...” so quietly that it was barely within the audible range for a human being.

She almost seemed like a small child, somehow.

As my heart pounded fast for no reason at all, I forced out a stupid sounding, “Ah, no, it was nothing... And I mean, I didn’t even realize a giba had gotten that close to me. I mean, you saved my life, so... Thank you.”

Besides, I got the feeling that most everything had been forgiven thanks to Ai Fa’s mood having recovered.

If Ai Fa had been crushed to death by that massive snake... Just the thought of it made me want to keel over and die.

“Now then, regardless of the circumstances leading up to it, we’ve got a giba here. Shouldn’t we finish him off while he’s still nice and fresh?”

The giba whose head Ai Fa had busted in was still twitching at my feet.

It was a pretty small one compared to the giba I had encountered yesterday, but from eyeballing it I’d still say it was around 150 centimeters and 70 kilos. And its horns and tusks were still plenty impressive. It certainly was something, being able to take down such a sturdy looking animal with a single blow...

“Right. Well then, first comes chopping off the legs,” Ai Fa said, grabbing hold of her blade.

“Hold on a second!” I yelled out. “Bloodletting should come before dissection, right? Why are you going to chop it to bits right at the start?”

“Bloodletting...? What’s that?”

“What?! You’ve never even done it before? It’s only natural that the meat would have such a heavy stench in that case!” I cried out. Ai Fa, meanwhile, just looked back at me with a truly puzzled look on her face.

Still, I do love that blank look... But this was a pretty serious issue for the people of forest’s edge.

“Now listen, when meat stinks, it comes from the blood. If you perform bloodletting on it, even giba meat shouldn’t have much of a stench to it, right?”

“...I don’t really understand what you’re saying. Blood flows as it pleases, does it not?”

“I’m telling you, you can’t just leave it at that... Wait, now’s not the time to be casually talking about this! It’ll be too late once the giba’s heart stops. Okay, I’ll explain it all later, but for right now just lend me a small knife.”

Ai Fa handed me a knife with a look of doubt on her face, and then I leaned over the giba’s back.

Now then, I may have talked a big game, but I’d actually only ever seen a member of the hunting club perform a bloodletting. Plus there was no guarantee that a giba and a boar had the same inner workings, so it was pretty much down to luck whether or not this would succeed.

A boar’s heart and veins should be in roughly the same place as a human’s.

I bent over the giba’s large frame, remembering back on the hunter’s words.

I placed the tip up against where the giba’s thick neck met its body, then jabbed it in with a single stabbing motion.

And then... hardly any blood came gushing out.

Did I mess up?

Well, I guess things are never quite that easy.

And so having no other choice, I slid the knife down towards its chest.

The carotid artery, or the aorta... Cutting either would do.

I steadily moved the tip of the blade down bit by bit, struggling with the stiff fur all the while, until finally, fresh blood came spurting out. When I hurriedly pulled out the blade, even more of the dark red liquid came flowing forth.

I did it... probably. As long as I didn’t damage the heart directly, I mean.

“The heart is the organ that helps blood to circulate throughout the entire body. If you can cut one of the major arteries leading from it without damaging the heart itself, then you can effectively drain the body of all its blood.”

The carotid artery would be fine, too, but if I ended up messing up the organs in its throat, the giba could suffocate and its heart would stop. In other words, it would carry a definite risk.

“Honestly, it’d be better to suspend it from a tree for this, but that would’ve been some pretty heavy labor. And this should be plenty fine, anyway.”

Since I didn’t hear a response I turned around to look, and sure enough Ai Fa had the same puzzled expression on her face as always.

“Why would we need to drain the whole body of blood when we’re only bringing the legs back?”

“Huh?”

“Even if we bring it all back with us, it will just end up going bad before we can eat all of it. Large families may bring a whole giba back in order to skin off its pelt, but for the most part people only take the rear legs.”

“That’s a huge waste! You seriously just throw away a feast like this and head on back?”

“If we simply leave it in the woods, then the mundt and other animals will feast on its corpse and clean things up nicely. And besides, to let food spoil without eating it is a sin.”

“Ah, I see. Well, that’s not a problem, then. But why is it that you bring the legs back? Thigh meat’s not bad, but there are plenty of tastier cuts.”

“That’s not true at all. Giba meat all stinks, but the part with the least stench is the rear legs.”

Oh, so that’s it. I suppose if you don’t know how to bloodlet, then the parts inside the torso really may have a worse stench about them than the legs. And when you cut off a leg you would be hacking through an artery too, which would let out plenty of blood.

Still, it almost felt like they were procrastinating here, hunting giba for 80 years but never stumbling upon the idea of bloodletting. When meat tastes bad, you should keep on studying and experimenting until you can make it tastier. That gluttony is precisely what drove the development of mankind’s great culinary culture!

As that thought ran through my head, the flow of blood finally came to a stop. The previously trembling giba also finally ceased all movement.

In other words, it was dead.

Rest in peace, I silently prayed.

Then, as I carefully washed off the grass, dirt, and excrement that dirtied the giba’s fur using the river water, I turned and looked back at Ai Fa.

“Alright. Now for the next step... Hey, would it be alright if I go ahead and stubbornly insist that we bring the whole thing back with us?”

“Do as you please. As long as the horns and tusks are intact, I don’t mind,” Ai Fa replied with a shrug of her shoulders and a complex expression on her face that made it hard to tell if she was apathetic or interested.

After shooting her a sidelong glance, I stabbed the knife into the giba’s torso. This thing seemed to have a far better cut than the knife I used back in farming camp, so I had to take care not to cut too deep as I opened up the belly of the beast.

What I was handling now was the removal of the innards.

This wasn’t all that difficult of a task, but there was one point to it that required particular attention: Making sure not to damage the large intestine, gallbladder, urinary bladder, and the like, as they all had a terrible stench. If that transferred into the meat itself, then the bloodletting would be for naught.

I inserted the tip of the blade into the diaphragm, then started to pull out all sorts of organs.

First up was the small intestine, then the large. Next up was the stomach. Then the liver, pancreas, lungs, and heart.

It was actually kind of fun, picking them out one after another.

Apparently a giba really wasn’t built all that differently than a boar after all.

The final hurdle waited for me at the bottom of the nearly empty abdominal cavity: the urinary bladder. I had to be really, really careful so that it didn’t burst...

Hm...?

There were still some sort of organs I didn’t recognize left below it. Were they something unique to the giba? At any rate, I went ahead and carefully removed them, too.

The two big, elliptical objects had been next to each other, and felt fairly firm.

...Ah.

These are testicles, aren’t they?

The boar I’d prepared in the past had been a female, so naturally it didn’t have these.

With great respect, I placed them on top of the rock as well.

With that, I’d finished removing its innards.

Naturally, when I turned around, Ai Fa still had the same blank expression.

“It’s like I’m watching one of those shamans I’ve heard tell of performing a ritual. Is it truly necessary to do all of that just to eat meat?”

“It is. Still, it just plain wouldn’t be possible to handle the rest here, sure enough. We’ll need to get it all the way back to the house, but... how?”

Ai Fa gave a little sigh then tossed out a “hold on for a moment” before disappearing into the forest.

In the meantime, I used water from the river to clean out the giba’s empty chest cavity, too.

Fortunately, ticks didn’t seem to exist it in this world. If they did, then they would surely waste no time in hopping from the giba’s chilling corpse to the warmth of my body.

“Here. This should do fine, right?”

Ai Fa had returned in less than five minutes, holding a wooden pole that was about as long as I was tall. It had a strangely jet black sort of color to it, and though I could spy spots where branches had clearly been removed, it was a perfectly straight pole. I’d guess it was about as thick as my wrist, too.

“It’s from a grigee tree. They’re hardy, so it shouldn’t break easily.”

“Uh-huh. So what are we doing with it?”

Ai Fa silently leaned over the giba, then pulled out some leather straps from her cloak and started tying its limbs to the grigee pole.

“I see! So you’re used to doing this, huh?”

“I just learned from watching others. This is how the men of large families bring an entire giba home in order to skin it.”

“Huh. But you don’t skin off their pelts? Your cloak’s from a giba though, isn’t it?”

“It takes multiple people to peel a pelt, and besides, that’s woman’s work.”

I’m sure the fact that I was thinking but you’re a woman was clearly written on my face. I mean, even though I hadn’t said anything, Ai Fa was still shooting me an annoyed-looking scowl.

“It’s possible to offer up tusks in order to buy a pelt. That means it’s more efficient to just use the time it would take to skin a pelt to hunt instead, since if I fail to do so I’ll end up starving to death. And regardless... I don’t have any family left to do it with. Do you have some sort of problem with that?”

“Of course not. It’s just... I figured if you were saying that skinning pelts was woman’s work, then does that mean hunting giba is man’s work?”

“Naturally. There’s no such thing as a woman who hunts giba.”

“B-But you’re a woman, aren’t you?”

I ended up opening my big mouth after all.

Ai Fa looked away in a huff, then started to bind the front legs.

“I’m the head of the Fa household before I’m a woman. My father taught me how to hunt giba in order to survive, so it isn’t any inconvenience for me.”

“I see.”

Still, just what had Ai Fa’s father been thinking, teaching his daughter to be a master giba hunter? She hadn’t been isolated from the rest of the settlement until after his death, because she had earned the animosity of Diga Suun. As a result of that she couldn’t rely on anyone else and had to survive all on her own. The techniques her father had taught her saved her from that predicament, but there’s no way he could have predicted that his daughter would be isolated after his death.

Wait... This isn’t something I should be thinking so hard on.

I mean, my pops had pounded his cooking techniques into my head since I was a kid. And then he told me to go out and look for something I enjoyed even more than cooking.

Maybe that’s just how dads are.

Still, even so...

Unlike me, Ai Fa wasn’t given any choice. Her only option was to live like a man, by hunting giba. Even though she’s such a beautiful, kind woman...

“What’s with that weird look on your face?” Ai Fa asked, suddenly standing up. There was a blaze burning in her wildcat-like eyes, and her dark brown face had just a hint of red to it. “Now listen here. You committed a taboo. Normally someone in your position wouldn’t even be able to complain if they had one of their eyeballs scooped out. But you saved me from that attack, so I’m overlooking the matter. But if I were to change my mind, I could give you a real painful experience whenever I please.”

“Huh?” I questioned with a tilt of my head, and then I flew into a serious panic. “I-I wasn’t imagining you naked or anything! Just what do you take me for?! And hey, you just made me remember that sight even though I had stored it away in a treasure box in my memories!”

“Shut up! You’re making me think I should take away your tongue before one of your eyeballs!”

“Ugh, this is stupid, so let’s just stop already! Come on, we’re all prepared, right? So let’s hurry up and get to carrying this guy!”

Trying to flee from Ai Fa’s wrath, I leaned over towards the giba’s head. When I did that, I spied the heaping pile of innards I had left. “I really would like to bring these back to try cooking with, too. But considering my skill level and the fact that I don’t even have a refrigerator, that just wouldn’t be possible.”

“Are you actually being serious?”

“Of course. I figure every part of a giba but its cry is probably edible.”

People tended to say stuff like that about pigs rather than boars, but whatever.

When I went and placed the end of the pole on my shoulder, I felt an unbelievable weight pressing down on me. Yeah, this guy was definitely in the 70 kilo range.

“If I catch you whining, I’m leaving you then and there and heading back on my own.”

Suddenly the pole lifted up in the rear, lowering the load on my shoulder a bit.

“I’ll work hard for the sake of a delicious dinner. And hey, you just went through that horrible ordeal, so are you really feeling alright?”

“Quiet, you! Don’t bring that moment up ever again!”

Oh, my. Had that incident inflicted even greater damage to Ai Fa’s pride than I had thought? Well, even if she was a strong-minded giba hunter, she was still a young woman. Even if it weren’t for the taboo, it still would have been totally natural to be embarrassed.

But anyway, the real meat of preparing a proper dinner still lay ahead of me.

“Well then, let’s head off! I’ll be sure to make a dinner delicious enough to make up for the effort, so I’m counting on you!”

2

A few hours later, we arrived back at Ai Fa’s house.

“Alright! Well then, let’s get started!” I yelled out, the giba’s huge corpse lying before me.

“Do as you please,” Ai Fa muttered in an annoyed tone, her legs crossed and her back leaning against the wall. She was actually probably simply tired rather than seriously upset. Heck, I was feeling pretty exhausted myself.

Just dragging the giba all the way back from the riverside was a huge undertaking, but after that we also had to make a u-turn and head back for our original goal of gathering pico leaves and firewood. There fortunately weren’t any incidents this time around, but by the time we were done, the sun was almost at its peak. In other words, we were working the entire time from early morning till nearly noon, excluding our “break” for our death battle with the giant madarama snake.

Since noontime on had been set aside for giba hunting, we suddenly found ourselves with an opening in our schedule. And so, I went ahead and got to work on preparing the giba.

I grabbed hold of the knife Ai Fa had loaned me, glancing over at her as I did so. After lighting the stove at my request, her job was done, so she simply plopped down and started chewing at her jerky, looking as if she didn’t care in the least what I was doing.

I had already done the bloodletting and organ removal, so naturally the next step was to skin the thing.

There had been a broken sliding door stowed away in the storage room, so I was using that as my workbench. I couldn’t find any desks or anything of the sort so I had to work on the ground but, well, there was no helping that. I turned the giba’s body face up, then placed some lumber I had prepared in advance on either side in order to hold it in place.

I’d be starting off with the hind legs.

I cut a single line around its ankle, beneath the tough hoof. Then I pulled my blade up from the inner part of its leg to its abdomen. Finally, I jammed the tip of the knife between the skin and the meat and started peeling it back.

Hmm, it sure is fatty. The area between the skin and meat was absolutely packed. It must have been around five centimeters...

That was definitely a good thing when it came to food, but it sure did make this whole process tougher. With a lean meat like venison, you could separate the meat from the skin in no time at all.

Well, it was all for the sake of a delicious meal, though. I angled the tip of the blade, taking care to not rip a hole in the pelt while also trying to leave as much of the fat on the meat as possible, then strongly pulled at the skin.

Before long, both of the legs were completely exposed. They stood tall, separated from the outer pelt, wrapped in a layer of pure white fat. It actually made for a pretty surreal sight.

By that point, the knife had become pretty dull thanks to all the fat clinging to it. The water in the pot was already boiling nicely, though, so I simply dunked the blade inside to wash it clean.

This was the reason it had been impossible to peel off the skin outside.

The inside of the house was already filling up with the smell of blood and meat.

At any rate, I wiped the knife on a cloth I had gotten from Ai Fa, then got right back to work.

Using the exact same procedure, I started peeling the front legs, too.

Now, this was a lot easier said than done, as an hour had already passed by this point. Still, this was still just the early stages of the process. Now that the legs were all done, I’d finally come to the torso.

I had already sliced its abdomen nice and wide open, so that made for a perfect starting point.

The basic gist of the process was the same as it was with the legs. In other words, I placed the blade between the skin and meat, and then peeled it back while cutting. The torso didn’t make for a nice even surface though, so pulling back the skin as I worked proved fairly difficult. Plus my fingers kept slipping, as I just couldn’t get a good grip on it.

To deal with that, I went ahead and opened up a hole on the edge of the pelt, then stuck my fingers right on through. It was a damn thick hide, so even if I pulled at full strength, it wouldn’t rip quite so easily. And besides, even if it did rip, I could just open a hole in a different place.

I also frequently needed to wash off the knife, but I just kept on intently tearing away at the pelt. As a result, I was completely coated in sweat by the time I had finished with the giba’s right half. By my estimate, it had been around two and a half hours. The light coming in through the windows was still pretty bright, though.

“Phew. Guess it’s about time for a bit of a break.”

I placed the knife by the giba’s head, then plopped down on the floor. For the first time in a while, I turned and faced the master of the house... Yup, Ai Fa still had that blank expression on her face, unsurprisingly.

It sure did warm my heart, the way that her childlike little eyes went all wide. Perhaps it was due to the way that her default expression was that thorny glare, but the difference was seriously striking.

“...You’re rather skilled with your hands, Asuta.”

“Yeah. Only when it comes to cooking, though.”

“You’re pretty serious about it, too.”

“Right. But again, that’s also only when it comes to cooking.”

“You can still heat up and eat giba meat, even without needing to go through all this hassle. Why are you so serious about undertaking such unnecessary work?”

I wasn’t petty enough to go and ruin the mood, so I went with a nice non-combative response of, “I just like eating delicious food and feeding it to others.”

Besides, I wanted to have her judge whether all my work was for naught after she tasted it.

“Alright! Back to work!”

During that break, a certain issue came to mind. Which is to say, there was something I needed to take care of before I set about dealing with the left side: I had to sever the neck.

There were all sorts of organs in the neck and head, like the eyes and mouth and nose.

That was why it was easier to just sever the neck at the start and deal with it separately.

With that in mind, I got to work on chopping off the head.

As I thrust the knife in below its lower jaw, I looked at the giba with its shattered skull and the pathetic look on its face and thought to myself, Don’t worry, I’ll make you nice and tasty.

The rigor mortis had already started to set in, so it felt a good bit tougher than it had back when I did the bloodletting. Plus, when I was cutting it open, a pretty significant amount of blood oozed up.

Well, that was just how things were. It wasn’t as if bloodletting got rid of every last drop of blood in the body, and besides, I was just an amateur. I was nothing but a chef trainee timidly relying on knowledge from three years ago.

I only ever dissected a boar once. My only tool on hand was a single hunting knife. I was nothing but a chef in training without so much as a proper workspace, instead stuck on the ground as I struggled to hack the head off of this corpse.

I’m sure anyone but Ai Fa would be unable to hold themselves back from laughing.

Even so, I couldn’t help but enjoy myself.

I mean, it was just this experience of being surrounded by the smell of the animal’s blood and my own sweat!

I suppose that statement may be the kind of thing that could get me mistaken for someone with rather grotesque interests. But psychos who dissect animals for fun rather than food are lower than dirt.

I just love to cook.

For as long as I can remember I’d looked up in awe at my old man’s back, and by the time I hit elementary school I was already helping out around the shop. Maybe I hadn’t exactly chosen that path of my own volition, and I was just moving along the rails that had been laid out for me. Even so, I wasn’t exactly dissatisfied with the way that things were.

Plus, my pops was always telling me to keep looking for something I enjoyed even more than cooking. Then he’d add with a laugh that if I didn’t find anything, I could just give up and take over the shop. I figure that was probably part of the reason he had me go to high school, too.

But even so, each and every day of my life had been nothing but cooking.

Cooking was just so much fun, so why did I need to go out of my way to look for something else to do with my life? I was never able to see the necessity, really.

My goal was to someday make a dish that would make my old man ooh and aah, and that ended up becoming all I thought about.

I just plain love to cook.

“Phew. This sure is tiring...”

Having gotten about halfway through severing the neck, I helped myself to a cup of water from the jug. It wasn’t even cold or anything, but thanks to how hot and sweaty I was, it tasted incredibly delicious.

Now then, back to work.

The back of the knife was jagged like a saw, probably for the sake of cutting through horns and tusks, so I went ahead and used that to sever the neck bones.

When I finally finished making my way through the rest of it, the whole head fell down with a thunk and rolled along the top of the sliding door.

After thinking on it for a bit, I decided to just peel the skin back where necessary on the head, as I was just slicing off the meat around the neck and cheeks. There were surely other parts that were edible, and the tongue and the like definitely held some strong appeal to them. But even so, there was a limit to my current skill. If only the hunters had taught me a bit more thoroughly...

After that, I peeled back the skin on the left half, then flipped the giba on its side and set to work on the remaining pelt on its back. And with that, I was finally finished skinning the massive beast.

There were some holes left in it here and there, but I had managed to cut it off as a single connected pelt all the way from the neck on down. The thing had come from a 150 centimeter long, 70 kilo class beast, so when it was all laid out, it made for quite an impressive sight.

The body, meanwhile, was still coated in fat, making for a bundle of meat that glistened pure white all over. A beautiful, massive bundle of meat that was missing a head. It had already hit a point where it would be hard to tell just what animal it was from if you didn’t already know.

It was pretty stunning just to look at, but I didn’t have time to just stand and stare. After all, I was finally in the home stretch.

Now that I had finished with skinning it, my last task left was to actually pull it apart.

I started by turning the giba’s now completely naked body face up once again, then jamming the knife into a hip joint. Cutting between the thigh and rear leg allowed me to then twist the joint around backwards. It made a sort of dull ripping sound, and the tip of the femur ended up sticking out of the pelvis. The smooth, exposed bone was a beautiful shade of white.

Next up, I cut through the remaining muscles and tendons, turned it backwards again, then started tearing away at the meat. I ran the blade alongside it in parallel, then finally tore off the rear right leg.

It sure was a big one. Must be about 10 kilos per leg...

Once I finished with the right, I moved on to the left. Then after I was done with that, I tackled the front legs.

The front legs weren’t connected to a pelvis or anything of that sort, so I could just cut them loose.

Now for the climax!

I had completely lost track of time by this point, but the sunlight outside seemed to be taking on a bit of a yellowish tint. It may have been four or five hours since I’d started working...

“...Ah, that’s right. Ai Fa, where’s your saw?”

Even though it had been quite a while since I last looked her way, Ai Fa unfortunately still had the same old blank look on her face. Though with that said, she looked sort of surprised the instant that I turned to her, so it was impossible to tell what sort of expression she had been wearing previously.

“Oh, were you asleep? Sorry for waking you.”

“Of course I wasn’t! Who sleeps when it’s still this bright out?!”

Why are you so angry at me, then...?

Anyway, Ai Fa stood up with a scowl on her face, then disappeared behind the middle of the three doors. I believe that was the room where she kept tools, lumber, and cooking utensils.

When Ai Fa came back out, she was holding a saw with a roughly 30 centimeter-long blade. Well, it was stored in a leather sheath so I couldn’t tell for sure, but once she drew it out, that’s indeed what it was.

The width of the thing was about five centimeters, and the thickness of the blade must have been around five millimeters. That was a bit thicker than the saw blades I was familiar with, but it would do. I mean, the people of the forest’s edge used these things to make such splendid houses, after all.

“I plan to finish up for now with this, so just hold on a little longer,” I said to Ai Fa when she handed it to me. Of course, Ai Fa just turned away and gave me a, “hmph” in response.

The female mind truly was a mystery.

At any rate, I went ahead and sterilized the saw in the pot.

It was time for the climax of the whole dissection process: slicing it down the back. In other words, I’d be cutting straight down the center of the spine. And not horizontally, but vertically. That was, the body would be split smoothly into a right and left half. That is how you dress a carcass.

Once this was out of the way, the rest of the process would be simple... Or at least that’s what the nice hunter told me.

Man, this thing is so big that I really wish I had a chainsaw to use for this part... It’s not like I could get the electricity for it around here anyway, though. And besides, I was ready to take on any amount of physical labor necessary for this.

And so, I went ahead and got to work.

As expected, this final task really did prove to be the most physically taxing part. But I just kept on sawing away at it, regretting all the while that I hadn’t been able to hoist it up to make the work easier.

As far as the cutting edge went, well, I had no complaints. Heck, if I was into home carpentry, I probably wouldn’t have much trouble with it. But I didn’t have any such hobby, of course, so it did prove to be a plenty difficult task. I mean, it put up a real fight. It was no minor task to vertically saw down a spine that was all slippery with fat.

Occasionally I had to stop to wash the fat off the blade, and I took some breaks here and there. All told, it must have been around an hour later by the time I was done.

I pulled out the split spine and went about removing the ribs one by one, then cut off nearly all of the meat from around the hips. With that, I had completely separated all the meat from the bone. And so finally...

“I’m done!” I yelled out and collapsed flat on the floor, only to shoot straight back up. I had finished the task itself, but that didn’t mean that I was done for the day. “Alright, now I’ve got to hurry up and pickle it in the pico. Can’t let any of this precious meat go bad!”

I only had Ai Fa help me here at the end, but we managed to safely submerge the mass of meat in the mountain of spice.

Considering it had been a 70 kilo giba, I estimated we should have gotten between 40 and 50 kilos of meat off of it. Honestly, I felt like I did pretty damn well considering I was just a trainee, and all of this was outside of my field of expertise anyway.

“Maaaaan, I’m wiped! I feel like I can’t even lift my arms!”

This time, I let myself stay there when I collapsed.

The sunshine coming in through the windows had now completely taken on a sunset hue.

So all the way from noon till sunset... That meant this whole thing must have taken around six hours or so. In the back of my exhausted mind, I wondered if a day was 24 hours in this world, too.

“...Hey. What do you intend to do with all that?” a voice called out.

When I turned to look, Ai Fa was standing imposingly next to the stove.

On top of the door by my feet, there was a large pelt folded in two, a head with the face shaved down on the left and right, and a mountain of bones.

“Ah, right. It’s a shame, but I guess I’ll just have to get rid of the rest of this. What do you normally do with pelts...? Even if you’re just using the legs, you still need to peel them off, right?”

“They’re generally thrown out after shaving off the fat still clinging to them.”

“So it just gets thrown out, huh? What a waste. There are other households that handle pelts, right? What about offering it to one of them?”

“Getting involved with me means making an enemy of the Suun family. No family around here would want a pelt badly enough to do that.”

“Tch. What a narrow-minded bunch... Ah, you use fat as fuel, right? But how do you get it off exactly?”

I tried to sit up as I said that, only for Ai Fa to coldly state, “Stay where you are” and push me back down. “If someone as exhausted as you tries to help out, it will only end up making more work. Just go to sleep.”

“But...”

“Collecting fat and removing the tusks and horns are my jobs. Your task is to prepare dinner, so rest up until then.”

She may have spoken in an incredibly blunt tone, but I was still unbelievably grateful to hear those words. I had been abusing my poor body since this morning, so by this point I had literally drained every last ounce of strength I had. Honestly, my eyelids had been feeling heavy for a bit now...

Unable to even remember if I said, “You really are kind” out loud or just thought it, I drifted off into dreamland.

3

When I woke up, I found that it was pitch black out.

Ai Fa, who had been transferring flame from the stove to the candles, suddenly shot me a sharp glare.

“So you’re finally up, are you? I was just about to throw some water over you if you didn’t wake up soon.”

“That’s just plain mean... How many hours was I out for?”

Ai Fa silently turned her head back around and threw some fresh firewood into the stove.

Maybe here at the forest’s edge, people really didn’t have a habit of dividing up time into units. When the sun rose you got up, and when it sank you got ready to go to sleep. That was an unwritten rule out there in nature.

“I threw the giba remains down into the valley, and cleaned off the sliding door... I’m quite hungry by now, naturally.”

“Got it. Then I guess it’s time for me to get to work!”

Feeling a little amused at how well this division of labor was working out, I headed off into the pantry. I grabbed six of the pseudo-onions, and four of the pseudo-potatoes, plus one of the giba’s rear legs which I placed atop one of those rubber tree leaf looking things.

Naturally, the giba meat I grabbed wasn’t the stuff that had already been in storage, but came from the one that I had prepared earlier. Normally it would be best to use up the older meat first, but I wanted to let Ai Fa experience the joy of real cooking and a proper meal as soon as possible, so I begged her to let me do so.

“Now then... This is our quota for the vegetables, right?”

I couldn’t help but wonder if the meaning of the word “quota” made it across. At any rate, Ai Fa just shot back a, “If you don’t eat anything but meat, you’ll die.”

Of course, humans needed to eat a properly balanced diet in order to live healthy lives. But even so, I still hadn’t figured out how to deal with these vegetables just yet.

Well, whatever. For now, I’ll just do what I can.

I started off by washing the large board that served as the lid to the pot, then carefully enshrined the giba meat atop it.

And then, I grabbed hold of my old man’s Sakaki knife. The one that held his very heart and soul.

Gripping the ebony handle tight, I pulled it loose from its white magnolia sheath, revealing its 20 centimeter long steel blade.

Even though my old man had used it for more than 20 years, its cutting edge was still perfectly straight and incredibly sharp. Engraved on it was the single word, “Sakaki.”

I’m going to go ahead and borrow this, pops.

I gently, carefully slid the knife into the giba meat. It was pretty tough compared to aged pork, but even so the blade slid on in without any resistance.

I may have been awash in the glory of its cutting edge, but my hands remained calm and composed, starting off by cutting the meat from the bone.

The surface was coated in white fat, but inside it was tightly packed red thigh meat. I went with a pretty rough cut to allow some room so that the blade wouldn’t hit the bone, and then I followed that up by thinly slicing the meat.

I may have called it a relatively tough meat, but it was still plenty fresh. It wasn’t the sort of thing I could go and cut super thin right off the bat, and with my skill 7-8 millimeters was about as good as I could hope for, but fortunately that was just the right thickness for a stew.

After slicing off around 500 grams, I left the rest as a block and returned it to the pantry. As long as I shaved off the rest of the meat still clinging to the rather impressive femur, that would be plenty for a dinner for two.

“Ah, right, I forgot to ask a pretty crucial question. Hey, Ai Fa, do you have any other ingredients or seasonings?”

Ai Fa had been silently watching me as I worked, and now she looked up at me with a quizzical look.

“Eating giba, aria, and poitan should be enough to stave off any immediate issues.”

“Right. But you had some other smell coming off you too, didn’t you? I don’t know if it was a flower or a fruit or some sort of herb, but there was definitely something else there that I haven’t been able to pin down just yet.”

I seemed to spy a hint of red about Ai Fa’s face after I said that.

“Asuta, I thought I had driven this point in thoroughly enough yesterday, but... Stop saying such strange things about my scent and the like.”

“Hey, don’t worry so much about it. Saying you smell good is a compliment, after all!”

“Maybe so, but I’ll never last if you keep trying to eat me as a result!” Ai Fa yelled, holding the left side of her neck as she stood up in a huff. I guess those teeth marks hadn’t gone away just yet... That made me feel a little embarrassed, too.

Anyway, Ai Fa went stomping off towards the pantry, then returned before long holding some strange little things in her hands. It was a teapot with a wide opening and a round body, and one of those pseudo-rubber leaves that was in the shape of a sphere.

The teapot looked like it would hold about a liter of liquid, while the leaf bundle was around the size of a human fist.

“Fruit wine and salt.”

“Salt!” I yelled out before I could stop myself, much to Ai Fa’s displeasure.

“The salt is used to make jerky. Just this small amount goes for a copper coin, which is the equivalent of one giba horn.”

I opened up the package as a little fanfare went off in my head, and found a clump of beautiful, wonderful crystals with a bluish tint.

This was probably rock salt. The rock salt I was familiar with was pink or yellow, but I’d heard that a bluish type existed, too.

I scraped up a bit of the fine powder with the tip of my finger and gave it a taste, only to be hit by a striking explosion of salty flavor.

Yeah, that was good. Maybe it was because I’d sweated out all the salt in my body over the course of the day, but it was so delicious I could just die.

“Salt is a precious resource. Don’t waste any.”

“Of course I won’t! So, you said this one was fruit wine?”

When I removed the wooden cork-like stopper, the scent of a sour wine filled the air.

“Give that here,” Ai Fa said, violently snatching the teapot from my grasp. Then, after a quick gulp, she thrust it back at me.

“Umm... Exactly how old are you, Ai Fa?”

“17,” she casually answered, licking the corner of her mouth. It was a real wild, sexy look.

“I see. I’m 17 too, so I guess that makes us the same age... Is this fruit wine valuable, too?”

“I just traded for it with the excess I had left after purchasing what I needed. I mean, I didn’t exactly feel like bothering to bring copper coins and the like all the way back here with me... So it doesn’t exactly have all that much value when compared to the salt and ingredients.”

“I see. This sure seems like it’ll be a big help in the future, too... Neither of them seem related to your smell, though, do they?”

“How would I know?! I haven’t even touched anything else but the fruit used to ward off poisonous insects, and the herbs used when making jerky!”

You don’t need to get so angry...

Well at any rate, this was plenty for the time being. And the introduction of salt to the mix was something I was indescribably grateful for.

“Ai Fa, could you loan me your blade one more time?”

After taking the knife from the sour-faced girl, I used it to shave the rest of the meat off the bone.

With that, my preparations were complete.

Giba thigh meat, roughly 500 grams.

A pile of shavings of meat cut off the bone, about 400 grams.

Pseudo-onions, six.

Pseudo-potatoes, four.

A pinch of dried pico leaf, which had the flavor of black pepper.

And lastly, rock salt.

Those were my ingredients for the day.

I started off by crushing the rock salt into powder with Ai Fa’s guidance, then added just a tablespoon’s worth into the boiling water in the pot.

Just like last night, the pot was a bit under halfway full of boiling water. I got the feeling that I could go even lower, but this was the amount I needed to use for the sake of trial and error.

Next up, I added the 900 or so grams of giba meat. The red and white flesh swayed and danced within the pot.

“Ah, Ai Fa, you don’t need to add more firewood just yet.”

Ai Fa, who had been moving towards the stove, turned and shot me a quizzical look.

“But if you don’t carefully heat the giba meat after adding it to the pot, it won’t exactly end up as something edible.”

“Right. That’s why the plan is to slowly heat it over a low flame.”

Last night, Ai Fa had rapidly continued to stoke the flames. It had only taken around 20 minutes or so to do it using a strong flame like that. That had been enough to make it so you could tear it apart with your teeth, but it still more or less had the texture of rubber to it.

Boar was the type of meat where the more you heated it, the softer it got. That was probably the greatest difference between it and domesticated pigs.

“Ah, there it is!”

Around a minute after adding the meat in, an impressive bit of scum made its appearance. Using a wooden ladle and bowl I had prepared in advance, I carefully scooped up all the scum and foam that was bubbling up. Perhaps because I had left even more fat on it, it was bubbling up even more fiercely than yesterday.

Yeah, now that I think back on it, the thigh meat from last night had been a bundle of red flesh with hardly any fat on it. Both boars and giba only had fat in their thighs between the meat and skin, so with Ai Fa’s cooking method of shaving meat off the surface, almost all of the fat would be used up the first time around.

As it was low on fat, boar meat (and likely giba meat too) wasn’t well suited to for being used in a stew. I figured that was why it ended up with that rubber texture last night. Then what if I used the leftover meat from last night for yakiniku or something... I thought to myself as I scooped up scum, the scope of my plans rapidly expanding.

“Now then, the real issue is these guys...”

After I got rid of most of the scum, I went and placed the lid back on. Then I took a seat where I could keep an eye on the stove’s flame, and faced off with those imitation onions and potatoes.

“The pseudo-onion... No, the aria, was it? It’s pretty much just like an onion, so I feel like I’ll be able to do something with it. The real issue is this guy... Hey, just what is this poitan thing, anyway?”

“...A poitan is a poitan.” Ai Fa was seated with her back against the wall again, her chin resting on her hands and a sour look on her face. “Two poitan and three aria. Eat those alongside giba meat covered in pico leaves, and you’ll have the energy needed to get through a day. That is the knowledge my people gained over the course of 80 years living here at the forest’s edge.”

And they must gain the necessary amount of salt from the jerky they ate every day.

I replied, “I see,” and gave a nod of my head. “By the way, what’s the average life expectancy for the people of the forest’s edge?”

“‘Average life expectancy’? If you’re asking how long we live for, then it varies. Most die not from illness, but rather from being attacked by giba or other beasts, after all.”

Ai Fa’s gaze suddenly shot downwards. Perhaps she was thinking back on her father.

“But, let’s see... I believe none have died before the age of 60 without either starving or becoming a corpse out in the forest. The oldest amongst us, Jiba Ruu of the Ruu clan, has already passed the age of 80.”

“Hmm... So it doesn’t seem like you people are all that short-lived compared to the ones from back home.”

As I said that, I crawled over towards Ai Fa on all fours. Despite the displeased look on her face, I closely inspected her upper left arm. Her dark brown skin positively shined in the orange light of the fire. There may have been white scars about it here and there, but it was still incredibly smooth.

With a “hmm...” I reached out and touched it, confirming just how soft it was. Naturally, a fist immediately came slamming down onto the top of my head.

“Ah, sorry. Those are some seriously high quality muscles you have there. They’re soft to the touch, but still have some real tension in them. I figure they’re just about the best that an athlete could hope for.”

I had intended to tease her a bit to break the solemn mood in the air, but apparently I didn’t quite stick the landing on that one. Ai Fa had a dangerous look about her now, like a wildcat with its hackles raised.

“No, you see, I just wanted to check how healthy the people of the forest’s edge are! At the very least, it looks like there’s nothing seriously wrong with your diet, Ai Fa.”

That meant I really did have to meet the quota of those vegetables each and every day, then.

“Hmm, this is a real tough one! I’ll have to start tackling how to deal with those poitan from tomorrow on. But for today, I’ve already got my hands full taking care of the giba meat.”

Ai Fa still had a scary look in her eyes, so I hurriedly retreated back towards the stove. I scooped out the fresh scum that had bubbled up, and carefully regulated the firewood so that the flame didn’t grow too weak. For a while, I just kept repeating those steps.

“...I’m hungry. Just how much longer do we have to wait before eating?”

“Hmm? I’d guess it should be 60-90 minutes... My estimate is that it should take 3-4 times longer than what you did yesterday.”

Once the look of shock passed from her face, Ai Fa gave a seriously disappointed sounding sigh.

“Sorry. I’m getting hungry, too... Looking back on it, maybe I should have started cooking right after I finished the dissection.”

“I’m the one who told you to rest, and I’m also the one who left the cooking up to you. There’s no need for you to feel responsible.”

Despite her kind and fair words, Ai Fa’s face looked pained.

I couldn’t help but feel a little amused at the fact that she was so hungry. After all, an empty stomach is the greatest seasoning you could ask for.

If this didn’t satisfy Ai Fa, then it would be solely down to my skill coming up short.

Win or lose, the outcome of this battle would be decided in the next hour or so.

4

“Alright, it’s done!”

By the time I was able to finally declare that, it had been around an hour and twenty minutes since I first placed the giba meat in the pot, according to my internal clock. During that time, I was devoted to scooping the scum, regulating the flame, checking the hardness of the meat, pacifying a starving Ai Fa, and occasionally actually saying something that was at least a little bit serious. It was a fun but difficult 80 minutes.

The inside of the house was absolutely overflowing with the irresistible scent of giba meat. I figured the main reason it smelled even more strongly than it did last night was because of all the fat.

Still, I had no interest in such petty matters at the moment. After all, now it was finally time to eat it!

“Sorry for the wait. Go ahead and eat as much as you please.”

I stirred up the contents of the pot with the ladle, then scooped up the first bowl’s worth and handed it to Ai Fa.

In the end, I decided not to add that pseudo-potato, the poitan, just yet. 60 minutes after I started the meat simmering, I added thinly sliced pseudo-onions (aria) and pseudo-pepper (pico leaves), but that was all.

And yet, the soup was still cloudy. It was a semi-transparent white soup, where the meat stock was clearly visible.

Yeah... This was more of a “giba soup” than a “giba stew.” After thinking on it, I decided that name was more fitting, considering I was using a meat base and just salt and herbs to flavor it. And if it’s a “soup,” then there’s no problem with using onions. It sure would be nice if poitan tasted like what they resembled, though...

In other words, self-suggestion is also a key point to enjoying a meal. And so, I presented my beloved benefactor with the dish I had crafted under the name of “giba soup.”

“It’s a strange feeling somehow, not having the poitan as part of the dish...” Ai Fa said with a deeply doubtful look as she smelled the soup.

Well, the stew from last night already had a pretty much perfect smell to it, so there wouldn’t be much difference at this point anyway.

After filling up a bowl for myself, I sat down in front of Ai Fa.

“To be perfectly honest, this is really more of a first try. It’s not exactly like I’m brimming with confidence over here. My plan is to use this as a starting point that I’ll keep iterating upon so, well, go ahead and tell me how you earnestly feel.”

“I don’t care in the least about how something tastes, so I can’t see any point in seeking out my impression.”

“I get it, I get it... Well then, let’s dig in!”

Ai Fa closed her eyes, brought a finger on her left hand to her lips, seemed to almost draw a line to the side, and then muttered something inside her mouth. Perhaps that was the ritual you performed in this world before eating. Though I got the feeling Ai Fa didn’t do all that yesterday...

But I mean, it actually made me feel sort of happy. It would be just plain depressing to be a chef in a world that didn’t know how to show proper respect to a meal.

But putting all that aside, it was time to put my creation to the test.

I started by scooping some of the soup up with my wooden spoon. A shining, invisible membrane of fat floated over the whitish liquid. The black powder sprinkled here and there throughout was made from pico leaves.

In terms of both smell and appearance, it was absolutely perfect. But even so, that wasn’t much different from how things were last night.

I had taste-tested several times throughout, but I didn’t know how it had all come together in the end. My expectations high, I finally gave it a sip to find... that it came out just right, and was absolutely delicious.

I didn’t use any miso or soy sauce in the rather rustic soup, so instead the somewhat quirky flavor of the giba meat was left to be accented by the pico leaves. The flavor wasn’t overly strong, but it had a richness to it that profoundly stimulated my appetite.

Ultimately, about a third of the water in the pot ended up evaporating, so the dish required some rather careful calculation. And I didn’t add any water, either. As a result, I ended up with a soup with some seriously dense, rich flavor to it.

Now, though, the issue was the giba meat.

I had only used a stick in place of long chopsticks to check the toughness, so it really was my very first time tasting it.

I went ahead and scooped up a slice of thigh meat rather than one of the chunks I shaved off the bone, and saw the ivory-white meat and the fat on it wobble rather charmingly. I took the little bit of meat, about four centimeters square in size and five millimeters thick, and chucked it on into my mouth.

As I bit down on it, I could feel the sensation of the meat coming apart. Man was it soft, even more so than I had been expecting. And yet I could still definitely sink my teeth into it, too.

The gelatin-esque fat and more elastic red meat blended together in my mouth, filling it with an absolutely delicious flavor.

Aah... This really is a top notch ingredient, just like I had thought.

There was no way it would lose out to that boar stew I had eaten three years back, even though the meat hadn’t even been aged.

Naturally, the effort I put into preparing it, as well as my exhaustion and hunger, were flavoring my thoughts on the matter. But even so, I had no intention of changing my opinion.

I had hardly used any other ingredients, so it was like the delectable meatiness was being conveyed to me directly. That untamed deliciousness of wild meat... I could definitely feel its presence. This was the true worth of wild game... Well, it may be strange for someone who’s only had wild game a few times in his life to say that, but that was what I was truly feeling at the moment.

I tried eating some aria along with it too, and now that it was a bit softer than it was yesterday, it seemed to fit just right in the soup. When I put it together with the soup and meat, the depth of the flavor only heightened. It seemed a bit more on the sweet side rather than having the sharp taste of an onion (well, it wasn’t actually an onion), I’d say. It really elevated the dish, as an ingredient that didn’t over-assert itself in terms of flavor or texture.

Yeah, this turned out pretty damn fantastic for a first try.

I looked back up as that thought passed through my mind, and caught sight of Ai Fa standing up with her bowl in hand. With that usual sour look on her face, she silently headed towards the stove. Had she already finished her first bowl?

I was glad to see that she was eating plenty, but I couldn’t help but worry if she was really savoring the taste...

After getting her second bowl, she returned back to where she had been sitting. She wasn’t even so much as looking my way... Now that we’d hit this point, the anxiety brewing within me reached a point where I couldn’t hold it back any longer.

“So, how is it? I’ll admit I’m biased, but I think it turned out pretty darn well.”

After taking a sip of the soup, Ai Fa tilted her head.

“What do you mean? I already said there’s no point in seeking my opinion, didn’t I?”

“No, I mean, you did say that, but...”

For some reason, I just felt antsy all over. There was some feeling I couldn’t identify welling up in me, almost like it was trying to lean forwards in search of a place to go. Anger or sadness, misery or unease... I had no idea what it was, but I could tell that it definitely wasn’t a positive feeling at all.

“U-Um, I know my dish took a while, so, er, are you still saying that was all meaningless...?”

The look on Ai Fa’s face grew even more doubtful. Then, she suddenly looked down at the contents of her bowl.

The orange light of the flames caused her long eyelashes to cast shadows on her cheeks.

What should I do...?

I could feel my heart pounding in my chest like crazy.

All I could feel was an overpowering sense of dread.

“...At least to me, when it comes to food, there is no good or bad taste. A meal is just a means to keep on living.”

“Right...”

“I’m troubled, to have you seek an opinion on taste from someone like me. I simply don’t possess the vocabulary to express such things.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

“But the one thing I can say for sure...” Ai Fa started, looking up slowly and staring straight at me with her beautiful blue eyes. “Is that this must be that thing they call, ‘delicious.’” Her pink lips seemed to be having a bit of trouble forming words. “It’s like... the act of eating itself can be fun... and pleasant... and bring great joy. Is this what it means, to eat something delicious?”

I was at a loss for words.

Ai Fa frowned, looking just a bit pained.

“I understand now, why you’re so ridiculously passionate and serious when it comes to cooking. Or at least, I think I do... Maybe I don’t, actually, but at the very least, I have no intention of trying to deny the purpose behind your efforts.”

“Ai Fa...”

“I simply can’t find the words I should be saying right now. I can’t explain it any further. But I do believe that you did the right thing.”

And then, ever so slightly, Ai Fa’s beautiful mouth... started to pull into a smile.

“So please, don’t make such a pained face. This cooking of yours, it tastes good.”

I gave a single nod back, then silently devoted myself to eating.

I just couldn’t get what was going on, somehow.

The bundle of anxiety in the depths of my stomach had completely disappeared, but now the back of my neck felt hot, and there were chills running down my spine.

I felt like if I let my guard down, my heart would suddenly clench up.

In all likelihood... I was seriously, incredibly happy right now. And then my powerful emotions were mightily shaking me up in turn.

I must have craved Ai Fa’s approval even more strongly than I had thought, deep down inside.

Ai Fa was still the only one who understood me in this whole world, and I also owed her my life.

She’s stubborn, and blunt, and every bit as violent as any man, but she’s also kinder than anyone I’ve ever known, and likely carries some heavy scars deep inside, plus she’s had to live without relying on anyone else. This mysterious girl named Ai Fa was strong, beautiful, brave, and delicate, and I... I wanted her to acknowledge my existence.

Damn it...! Still, I’ll show you that this isn’t all there is to me!

That caused my fighting spirit to roar, and I ended up violently chewing away at the giba meat.

My battle still wasn’t over yet.

With that determination freshly renewed, I glared at my hated enemy. It was that pseudo-potato that lay off to the side of the stove: the poitan.