Housekeeper in the dungeon

EPISODE 110

This time it was a hit!

S was gazing down at her rising spinach frittata when she heared a blunt voice say.

“I’m done.”

Just in time, it seemed that Yu had finished making the potion as well. He poured the finished liquid into a small glass bottle.

“Bring it to the table and let’s compare.”

Hee-Na clucked her chin as she carried the cooked food to the dining table.

The frittata, which had gotten a B grade, was discreetly stashed on the countertop.

Hee-Na and Yu Yunyi’s inspected each other’s creations.

“Nice color.

“Pretty” was the first word that came to mind when they saw the spinach potion. The light greenish transparent liquid looked very refreshing.

When I stopped admiring it and focused on the potion, the item description popped up.

“Huh? Nine percent?”

It was a lousy effect. Hee-na groaned in disappointment.

“Isn’t this just like raw spinach?” she asked, disappointed.

Just in case she had misremembered, she took out the spinach, but it was the same.

.

The strength buff remained the same, 9%, and the duration increased from 10 minutes to 20 minutes.

“What, this isn’t any better than the B-grade frittata I screwed up?”

I was getting frustrated with the poor results.

“What the hell is this, how did you do it!”

Yu Yunyi’s pale face suddenly leaned in closer.

His mouth dropped open in disbelief and he pointed at Hee-Na’s dish on the table.

“What kind of additives did you put in here?”

“Additives? I didn’t add any chemical seasoning.”

When I hesitantly replied, Yu Yunyi’s patted my chest and probed.

“No, it’s not additives in that sense! I’m asking if you put potions or other special crops in it!”

“Just normal ingredients. Eggs from the supermarket, zucchini, tofu, sesame oil, salt, miso……. Ah, it’s all domestic.”

Hee-Na pointed out the ingredients one by one.

Yu yunyi’s face lit up at the answer.

“Ugh! That’s not true! How can you amplify the potency of raw ingredients like this without any special additives? Even increasing agility? That’s an effect that doesn’t exist in the original ingredients! What kind of human are you? How did you do this? Huh?”

The sight of him shouting at the top of his lungs while his pale face turned bright red was not a pretty sight.

Hee-Na pushed Yu Yun-Yi’s shoulder away from her face.

“I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, so can you please move away? You’ve been bragging about how competent you are, and all you’ve done is brew a potion for 9% and 20 minutes? How good do you have to be to be so confident…….”

Hee-na didn’t hide her inner thoughts, “You’re so arrogant when you’re only that good.

The corners of Yu Yunyi’s eyes rose fiercely as if her pride was hurt.

“It’s not ‘only 9% and 20 minutes’, I’m a genius for achieving this much with the first ingredients I’ve ever used without any optimization screening! Some people can’t even extract the effects properly, so it’s not that I’m incompetent, it’s that your standards are strange!”

He pounded his chest in frustration.

Hee-Na crossed her arms at the sight of him.

“Really? If you’re competent, then the results of my cooking skills are better. That means the ‘special touch’ in the description is limited to me.”

I had expected that.

Hee-na and Hee-won were siblings, and as such, the roles of housekeeper and farmer were closely related.

It hadn’t occurred to her that the crops grown by Hee-won, a farmer, would respond to a different hand than that of a caretaker.

After a few minutes, Yu Yunyi finally mumbled, looking very reluctant to admit it.

“……I guess so. Even if I find an optimized way to make reagents, I’m not confident that they’ll be as good as this food.”

He seemed to be the type of person who was proud of himself but would accept the result.

But after a moment’s pause, his ego blossomed again with a tremendous amount of self-love.

“I do. That’s why this project came down to me because I’m the only one in the Guild who can handle this situation properly!”

“That’s ridiculous.

Hee-na made an openly fed-up face.

“Now that we’ve seen what a ‘special touch’ looks like, let’s get ready to move on to the next step.”

Yu yunyi took a blank notebook and scribbled something in it with a ballpoint pen.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m doing some brainstorming about what we need to find out from this research…….”

Hee-Na glanced at the randomly scribbled words in the notebook.

It went something like this.

– Identify the difference between reagent manufacturing skills and cooking skills

– Check recipes (optimized recipes?)

– What is the minimum amount of spinach ingredient needed to produce valid results?

– What is the definition of cooking? → Need to check

– Ease of consumption and portability?

And so on…….

yu Yunyi’s handwriting is cursive and full of jargon, making it difficult to read.

His use of abbreviations made it hard to read, and it sounded like he was talking in a frenzied manner.

Hee-Na looked at the lists with curiosity, and then her eyes flickered.

“Now you look like a researcher.

Maybe it was because first impressions are the worst, but I was more of an asshole, but now I felt like a person who researches and studies things.

“What should I do next?”

I asked, and Han Yu shook his head.

“First of all, I need to understand your abilities. How far can you tell me? By the way, this is a top-secret, and I won’t reveal it to the outside world. I’ve sworn an oath on a magic stone.”

Immediately, Hee-Na opened the description window for the skill ‘This is the Flavor’.

It was a bland description, so there was not much room for hints.

As I read the skill window verbatim, Yu Yunyi’s expression changed strangely, as if the description wasn’t worth the effort.

“That’s all the skill description? No additional explanations? You’re not hiding anything or lying?”

“Yep. Oh, and there’s a passive skill that increases your skill level with it.”

Yu Yunyi demanded arrogantly.

“Explain that too.”

Hee-Na’s stomach dropped a little at the way he acted as if he was some kind of authority figure, but she swallowed hard and answered obediently.

“It’s called ‘Fingertips,’ and it’s a passive skill that helps you do things that require skill.”

Hee-na had just recently gotten her skill rank up to B. The skill was called ‘Fingertips’. It was the result of my daily work.

Hearing about the ‘This is the Flavor’ and ‘Nimble Fingertips’ skills, Yu Yunyi pondered.

“They’re both dexterity skills. It must mean that the effect of the spinach is amplified only when it is directly processed by your hands somehow.”

Then he muttered to himself.

“I’ll have to find out what level of touch is required for the skill to manifest. Does it just need to be washed and trimmed, or does it need to be touched by fire, or does it need to produce a specific dish with a name…….”

Yu Yunyi chewed on the nib of her ballpoint pen as she asked a million questions.

“So many questions”.

It was strange to hear a short skill description and then have to nitpick at it.

‘Were all alchemists like this, or was this how Awakened people were supposed to analyze their skills?

It was a strange way of thinking for Hee-na, who was more of a practical person than a theoretical person.

She practiced her skills by using them whenever she could.

“First, I need to see how you cook.”

After organizing her thoughts, Yu Yunyi’s stuck out her hand toward Hee Na. It looked like he wanted her to serve him something.

“What?”

“Give me the lab notes. Or, in this case, your cooking notes?”

“I don’t look at recipe books.”

Hee-Na’s answer made Yu Yunyi’s raise her voice a little higher.

“It’s not a recipe book! You don’t have a notebook where you write down the order of things or anything unusual while cooking?”

“No.”

Cooking was something you could just do if you had the ingredients, the tools, and the kitchen.

And she didn’t cook anything super complicated. She cooked ordinary food that most people would eat.

But to Yu yunYi, Hee-Na’s common sense seemed to be an emergency recipe.

“Oh my God, no lab notes? That’s crazy. How can we check the factors that vary from one experiment to the next? Records are important, they’re the key to our research!”

He pulled a notebook from his arm and opened it. It was the notebook he had been writing in while making reagents earlier.

The notebook was crammed with neatly written notes.

“Hey, look at this. What year, what month, what day, what time, what was the weather, what was the temperature, what was the humidity, write down how you went through each step.

What was the temperature, how many minutes and seconds did you heat, what was the stirring speed, what was the rpm, how many centimeters did you cut the sample, how many grams of the main ingredient did you use…….”

Hee-Na threw up her hands at the nagging.

“What’s so tricky about cooking? You know the general order of things.”

At the other person’s stunned response, Yu Yunyi’s exclaimed.

“Roughly? By feel? That’s an unacceptable word! How can you be so complacent in your research?”