Chapter 118: The Bear Goes to Dig Up Bamboo Shoots

Chapter 118:
The Bear Goes to Dig Up Bamboo Shoots

 

RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of my beauty sleep, I heard a light, almost apologetic knock at the door. I opened my eyes, got up, and looked out the window before remembering that oh, right, the sun wasn’t up yet. Fortunately, I didn’t feel drowsy since we went to bed so early. The door slowly opened and someone came in.

“Yuna, are you already awake?” Fina whispered to me.

“I am.” If only just.

“Good morning, Yuna.”

“Morning. Where’s Shuri?”

“We went to bed early, so she’s awake right now.”

Guess that’s how it would be, right? After all, they always woke up early with Tiermina to help out at the orphanage. If anyone was gonna have trouble getting up, it would be me.

“We’ll head out after changing,” I said, “so wait downstairs.” I had Fina head down first, then I changed into my black bear clothes. I recalled Kumayuru and Kumakyu, who were curled up on the bed.

“Sorry for the wait,” I said when I came outside. Fina and Shuri were looking out at the ocean. I guess the sunrise would be coming soon, huh? “You two aren’t cold, are you?”

“I’m okay.”

“Uh-huh. I’m fine.”

Hopefully it wasn’t too chilly—I couldn’t tell either way what with the bear onesie. “If you get cold, let me know.”

The two of them nodded, and we were off. Deigha already stood there at the seaport entrance, gripping a large hoe in his hand.

“Morning, Deigha,” I said. Fina and Shuri echoed me.

“Right,” Deigha grunted. “Well then, let’s get to it!” He shouldered his hoe and headed to the bamboo thicket.

“Is everything at the inn all right?” I asked.

“Aye, we prepped things last night. Long as she cooks things up, Anz will be fine even on her own. If she can’t, somehow, then we’d need to retrain her before we even thought about letting her work in your shop.”

Argh. Here’s hoping Anz could handle stuff on her own, then.

Soon enough, we got to the bamboo thicket. Regal bamboo plants sprouted from the earth.

Deigha knocked on a hard bamboo stalk, making a hollow sound. “Can you really eat these things?”

“Yeah, but the ones you can eat haven’t come out of the ground yet.” I looked around for a place where the ground had risen a bit to try my luck. Maybe…there? I used earth magic to dig and boom, winner: a gigantic bamboo shoot emerged from the soil. I dug it out with precision and grace, if I do say so myself.

“So that there’s a bamboo shoot, eh? It is pretty soft.” Deigha took the shoot and looked it over.

“If you pull off the outer layer and draw out the bitterness, it’s edible.”

“All right, got it. So I’ve just gotta dig up the ground, right?” Gripping the hoe, Deigha started wandered off into the thick of the thicket with all the confidence of someone who’d done it a million times. Which…he presumably hadn’t, so. Hmm.

“Yuna,” said Fina, looking at the shoot, “are we digging these up?”

“That’s right. They’re really tasty.”

“Okay. I’ll work very hard, but I didn’t bring anything to dig with.”

“It’s all right. I’m going to pair you two up with my bears.” I summoned Kumayuru and Kumakyu.

“Kumayuru! Kumakyu!” Shuri ran right over to them.

“Do you two know where the bamboo shoots are?” I asked my bears. They energetically responded with “cwoom.” What else did I expect from animals—or summoned beasts, I guess?

“Well then, Fina,” I said, “you go with Kumayuru. Shuri, you go with Kumakyu.”

“Kumayuru, I’m counting on you!” Fina gave Kumayuru a gentle pat on the neck.

“Kumakyu, let’s work really hard.” Shuri practically leapt on Kumakyu to give the bear a hug.

The bears let out a joyful croon in unison.

“Kumakyu,” said Shuri, “let’s work hard so we don’t get beat by sis.”

Fina laughed. “I’m not going to be beat either. Right, Kumayuru?”

And the two were off with their bears, heading in separate directions.

Everyone was off on their own, so I guess I’d dig stuff up around here.

I paced the space, digging up the spots on the ground that were swelling slightly. I got it wrong sometimes, but only sometimes. While I was doing that, Fina and Shuri brought along their bamboo shoots.

Despite the girls being tiny, they brought in large ones and small ones—shoots of all sizes. They kept coming back with more shoots, but Deigha was nowhere to be seen. I hoped he was digging up the right spots, but he left in the middle of my explanation before I’d given him any pointers on where to find bamboo shoots, so I was a little worried.

Worried as I was about Deigha, I dug on until I felt like I was on the verge of having too many. When Fina and Shuri next came back, I told them we were done digging.

“You beat me, sis,” said Shuri with a disappointed sigh.

“You lost because you went a little too far out, Shuri.”

“I thought there would be tons if I went really far though!”

Fina stuck close by in order to dig, but Shuri tried digging a little further off. Because of that, she needed to carry the bamboo shoots from further away and had lost to Fina.

“It’s just logo-jistics,” said Fina proudly. “Next time, you gotta think about how far you need to carry stuff.”

“Ughh…” Shuri pouted as she hugged her partner. “Sorry, Kumakyu. We lost ’cause of me.” As though telling Shuri not to worry about it, Kumakyu placed a paw lightly on Shuri’s head. Cute, but from far away it might’ve looked like the girl was about to be a bear snack.

Deigha, though…Deigha sure was late. Just how far could he have gone to collect the shoots? I used my detection skill to check Deigha’s location—okay, he wasn’t that far away. “All right, guys, I’m gonna pop over to where Deigha is, so you two just wait here.”

He wasn’t hard to find, partly because he made a whole patch of greenery look like the cratered surface of the moon…and he was digging still more holes. “Deigha, what are you doing?”

“What am I doing? I’m digging up bamboo shoots,” said Deigha, wiping his brow. “I just, ah…haven’t found any yet.”

Yep, this guy was just digging at random. “Deigha, there are tricks to finding bamboo shoots.”

“There are?! Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“You went off on your own before I could say anything.”

“I did?!”

“You did. In order to find shoots, you gotta take a good look at the ground and dig up the places where you see the dirt rising slightly.” I looked around and found a perfect spot. “Deigha, this spot here is swelling, right?”

“Yeah, looks like.”

“Try digging here.”

He dug just like I directed, and… “Oh! Would ya look at that?”

“Mmhm. It’s trying to break its way out of the ground. If it grows, it ends up becoming a hard bamboo stalk.”

“Gotcha.” Deigha dug with the hoe, making sure not to break the bamboo shoot. As he dug, we caught sight of the shoot’s entire form—it was a lot larger than I expected. “This one’s a big guy, eh?” Deigha strained and flexed and—finally—managed to dig himself a bamboo shoot.

A bamboo shoot, in the singular: we were done bamboo shoot digging for the day. Thanks to Fina and Shuri, we secured tons of them. The sun came up again, so I tried telling Deigha that we would be going home.

“But I’ve only got one.”

“We’re out of time. Even if we kept collecting them, the flavor would be spoiled.” I was pretty sure that I remembered hearing direct sunlight would bring out the bitterness in them…at least, that’s what TV and the internet said. When I explained the stuff about the flavor to Deigha, he looked disappointed, but he still listened.

“Yeah,” he grumbled, “ain’t no reason to dig up something bitter and nasty.” Truly the perspective of a cook who cared about preparing good food for his guests. “Anyway, we got a ton of ’em, so it should be fine.”

With that, I put away all of the bamboo shoots into the bear storage and headed back to the inn.

 

When we got to the inn, Anz looked tired. It wasn’t her expression that gave it away, but rather the bit where she was facedown on a table. “Anz?”

“Ah! WhatcanIgety—oh, Ms. Yuna,” said Anz, blinking blearily. “Welcome back.”

“Looks like you pulled through.”

“Somehow, but I really, really don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Yeah, but if you couldn’t do this, you never would’ve been able to make it out on your own.”

Anz nodded. “I’m going to work hard,” she said, and stood up. “Did you get those bamboo shoots?” I pulled one shoot out of the bear storage and she looked it over. “Is this a shoot?”

I nodded. “How about we fix it up to eat it for lunch?” With that, I showed Deigha and Anz how to husk the shoots and we prepped rice.

In the middle of cooking, I slipped in a question I’d been wanting to ask for a while… “Has no one from the Land of Wa come by yet?”

“Not yet. It’s a problem, since we haven’t been getting rice and a lot of other stuff along with it. Thanks to the lord of Crimonia, we’ve got wheat flour coming in, so it’s not like we don’t have enough food…but I really miss ingredients from the Land of Wa.”

Oof. If they didn’t have any rice, I guess they’d be forced to eat fish with bread. How could anyone do that? I tried imagining eating sashimi with bread and…shudder. Nope, not right.

But then again…maybe a fish burger could be pretty good? The sauce that went with it, at least, was good. I could get fish real easy, so if I could only…err, oops, I was getting ahead of myself. Right. Bamboo shoot time, let’s go and see if I can get these suckers to taste good.

After boiling the bitterness out of the bamboo shoots, I whipped up the main course: bamboo shoot rice. I also pan-fried some shoots, flavored them, and bam: we had a meal of bamboo shoots two ways.

“Seems like you know what you’re doing,” said Deigha with an approving nod.

“Ms. Yuna, you’re so good at this.”

“Glad to hear that from two cooks.” Now I chopped away at the shoots using a knife.

“If you’re this good at cooking, do you even need me around?”

“Yeah. See, I can’t fillet a fish very well.”

Anz tilted her head. “Really?”

“I mean, I know how to cook one, but I haven’t done it much. I’ll be in trouble if you don’t come, Anz.” General knowledge was different from experience, after all.

“That’s reassuring,” she said with a smile. “There are things even you aren’t good at.”

“Oh, a ton. I’m an adventurer, but I can’t even butcher a monster.”

“Really, now?”

“Yep. I’ve got to ask the guild or Fina to butcher for me. Fina’s great at that.”

“That’s amazing! And she’s so small, too.”

Yep. Small, but crazy talented.

As we talked and cooked, Shuri made her way into the kitchen. “Yuuuuuuna, I’m hungry.”

Oops. We’d gone out to dig up the shoots without eating breakfast. “We’re almost done, so just wait a little longer.”

“Uh-huh, okay.” Shuri obediently left the kitchen. What a sweet, well-behaved kid…but still a hungry kid, so I had to whip this up quick. I sped up the cooking, and before long, I lined the table with the dishes I made.

“They look so good!”

“It’s not white today?” Shuri asked, looking at the bamboo shoot rice.

“It has the shoots you looked for today in it, Shuri. It’s really good, so dig in.”

Shuri nodded and ate some of the bamboo shoot rice. “Ohmigosh! Yuna, it’s so tasty!”

“Yeah, Yuna, it’s great!” Shuri and Fina wolfed down the food, though they seemed to enjoy every bite. It felt good, seeing them savor something I worked so hard on.

“All right if we have some too?” asked Deigha.

“I made sure to cook up enough for you.”

I lined the table with the portions of food. Naturally, I made a helping for myself, so soon enough I scarfed down shoots with the rest of ’em.

“Tasty,” said Deigha. “And it’s soft. I had no idea bamboo could be this soft.”

“Once they’ve grown,” I said, “you can’t eat them anymore.”

“Yuna, it’s yummy,” said Fina dreamily.

As for Shuri, she was way too busy eating to say anything, but that was a compliment too.

“I feel almost like you’re more of a cook than I am, Ms. Yuna,” said Anz as she dug into more bamboo shoot cuisine.

“If we could just get rice to come in more often,” said Deigha, “we’d be able to serve bamboo shoot rice at the shop.”

I shook my head. “Bamboo shoots are tasty even if you haven’t got rice.”

“Right, right. The other dishes seem tasty enough. But are you sure about this? You really don’t mind us taking all those bamboo shoots? It would help us out, but…” Deigha had only dug out one. The rest were all thanks to my magic, my bears, and the kids.

“It’s fine,” I assured him. “We found tons because of these kids. If I need more, I’ll just come by and get ’em. But Deigha, are you sure you’re okay digging them up on your own?”

“Heh. There sure was a trick to digging them up, but I’ll be fine next time. You taught me plenty, after all.”

Oh man, I hoped that was true. Then next time I came by, maybe I’d have a few meals featuring bamboo shoots…

A little bit after we finished eating, the people gathering to eat lunch came by. Since Deigha and Anz would be busy, we ducked out of the inn to stay out of their way.