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Chapter 01
“One hundred seventy-seven… one hundred seventy-eight… one hundred… seventy… nine!”
Luciella, who had been crouching on the kitchen floor, straightened her back.
Just ten seconds of rest.
Exhaling deeply, she looked at the enormous pile of potatoes she had prepared.
The potatoes, all peeled smooth and shining, looked plump and delicious, but only a sigh escaped Luciella’s lips.
She had peeled a staggering one hundred seventy-nine potatoes since morning.
Which meant there were still fifty more left.
“Ugh… it hurts.”
She tried to stretch her stiff fingers, but they refused to cooperate.
Before starting on the potatoes, she had first removed the scales from poisonous thornfish because she remembered the head chef shouting at her the previous day.
As a result, her left hand was practically half-paralyzed.
It would have been nice if someone in the kitchen had lent her a protective glove, but no such miracle ever happened.
Most of the kitchen staff were relatives of the head chef.
And every one of them was mean.
From the moment he first saw Luciella a year ago, the head chef had intended to dump the kitchen’s most dangerous and exhausting tasks on her.
More precisely, from the moment he saw how quickly and accurately she could prepare ingredients.
“Oh? You managed to butcher a Red Bison? At only thirteen?”
Back then, she had thought he was a good person.
Her hunger must have damaged her judgment.
“Let’s start you off as a trainee. Normally we don’t take children your age, but I’m making a very special exception. Do you know how competitive this position is?”
“Okay!”
Because he smiled so kindly, she had believed every word.
Not that she had many other options.
It took less than three days for the head chef to begin dumping every dangerous and unpleasant job in the lord’s castle kitchen onto Luciella.
“Peel ten sacks of Blood-Red Onions. They’re ten times stronger than normal onions, so stay away from everyone else while you do it.”
“Hey! You’ve finished organizing the underground ice warehouse, right? If anything’s missing, you’ll pay for it.”
“You little brat! You still haven’t finished removing the mucus from the Rainbow Octopus? What, it’s hot and you got burned? Shut up! If you don’t hurry, you’ll regret it!”
The friendly tone from the first day gradually disappeared.
Sometimes he even hit her.
But Luciella endured.
Partly because she had no money for travel as an unpaid trainee.
More importantly, because she still hadn’t found any trace of her mother.
A year ago, the last place her mother had worked before disappearing was this very place—the Lord’s Castle of Nor.
Her mother disappearing and reappearing somewhere completely different was nothing unusual.
The problem was that some of her belongings had vanished from the castle.
“My daughter, I wrote down every setting from the original story in a diary. If I don’t come back, make sure you keep that safe.”
That was why thirteen-year-old Luciella had gotten a job in the place where the diary was most likely to be hidden.
She only realized later that she should have read the employment contract much more carefully.
“Ten seconds. Over!”
Giving up on stretching her hand, Luciella picked up her knife again.
After the potatoes, she still had to clean the shell of an Iron Turtle.
Still, at least there would be a snack first.
She glanced at a plate holding steaming potatoes roasted with butter and skewered on sticks.
Not just ordinary potatoes, either.
They were “tornado potatoes,” one of her favorite snacks.
Luciella had recreated them exactly from her mother’s description of a food she used to eat in her original world.
She had even spent extra effort applying a buff to them.
Once she ate one, today’s work would go much faster.
The magical energy required for the buff would make her pass out later in the afternoon, but that wasn’t a problem right now.
“Today is an important day, so I have to work even harder.”
Her bright green eyes shone beneath her golden hair.
When today’s work was finished, Luciella’s life as an unpaid trainee would finally end.
She would become a regular employee.
In other words, she would finally earn a salary of two gold per month.
And once she officially became part of the castle staff, she could move around areas outside the kitchen to search for traces of her mother.
After that, she could save money and eventually leave this place.
“Let’s do this!”
Determined, Luciella clenched a fist with hands covered in scars and calluses far beyond what a child should have.
Just as she finished peeling half of her one hundred eightieth potato—
BANG!
The kitchen’s back door burst open.
A man strode inside.
“Hey there, kid.”
It was Nigel, the castle’s head chef.
Spotting Luciella, he greeted her while his enormous belly jiggled.
“What’s this? You still haven’t cleaned the Iron Turtle shell?”
His face twisted into a frown as he looked at the shell resting in the corner.
“I told you it was urgent. You’re unbelievably slow.”
“…I’m about to do it.”
Luciella barely suppressed her irritation.
Regular employee. Just think about becoming a regular employee.
“Yeah, well hurry up.”
Nigel prodded her back with the tip of his shoe.
“We need to close the kitchen early today for a celebration party.”
“A… celebration party?”
“That’s right. This great head chef received a twenty-gold bonus from the lord.”
A heavy-looking pouch hung from his belt.
Luciella stared at him in confusion.
“A bonus… why?”
She swallowed the words she really wanted to say.
Because your cooking sucks.
“Why? Because lately the lord has been praising my cooking. And today’s soufflé omelet was called ‘a masterpiece of the century.’”
Nigel puffed out his chest proudly.
A greasy grin spread across his face.
“…The soufflé omelet?”
The potato knife slipped from Luciella’s hand.
“That was my dish.”
Her voice dropped low.
The knife clattered sharply against the floor.
Nigel didn’t even blink.
“I stayed up all night making it! You watched the whole thing!”
“Are you stupid? Any dish that leaves this kitchen belongs to me.”
Luciella clenched her fists.
The anger that had accumulated deep inside her surged upward.
“How many times has this been now?”
Her nails dug into her palms, but she couldn’t feel the pain.
“The castella cake before that, the meringue cookies before that, the fries and apple pie…! You lied and said you made all of them! You promised you’d tell them my name this time! You said that was the only way I’d start getting paid…!”
“Oh, right. Your promotion.”
Ignoring everything else she had said, Nigel snapped his fingers.
“That’s been postponed for another year.”
“…What? What are you talking about?”
Luciella blinked in disbelief.
“You’ve been getting lazy lately.”
Nigel chuckled.
“I think it’d be better for your future if you spent another three years receiving room and board while improving yourself.”
Rage boiled up from the pit of her stomach.
Three years.
Three more years of this unpaid hell.
That was practically the same as condemning her to lifelong slavery.
He had planned this from the beginning.
He had never intended to promote her.
Never intended to treat her fairly.
She was nothing but a machine for cooking and preparing ingredients.
Because he knew she had nowhere else to go.
Something snapped inside Luciella’s mind.
“…I quit.”
“What?”
She was done enduring.
“I said I quit.”
Luciella raised her head.
Her eyes shone fiercely, completely at odds with her cute face.
She pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from her pocket and dropped it at Nigel’s feet.
“I’m quitting. Right after I hand this to the head butler.”
“What’s this supposed to—”
Nigel bent down and picked it up.
His expression instantly froze.
“W-What is this…?”
“Isn’t it obvious? A list of every corrupt thing you’ve done over the past year.”
Nigel’s tiny eyes widened.
“Corruption? You wrote all that down?”
“Yep.”
Luciella smiled sweetly.
“My mom always said that important information should be written down whenever you think of it. That’s why people keep diaries.”
April 12 — Embezzled ten pounds of sirloin and falsified market records.
May 19 — Overcharged for sugar and spices, pocketing five gold from the difference.
June 3 — Stole wage subsidies intended for junior cooks.
“Y-You little—!”
Nigel’s eyes darted frantically across the densely written page.
“One hundred twenty-seven gold and forty silver in total. And just so you know, I made multiple copies. One of them is hidden somewhere in the castle where someone is bound to find it eventually. So tearing that up won’t help.”
Luciella continued calmly.
A year ago she had been innocent and trusting.
But she also had a personality that never failed to seek revenge once betrayed.
“You little brat!”
Nigel’s face turned bright red.
Then, after collecting himself, he sneered.
“Hah! Go ahead and try! Who do you think is going to believe you?”
He slammed a hand onto the counter.
“The lord can’t live without my cooking anymore!”
“What? Did his taste buds break?”
“Even aside from the recipes I got from you, I possess a magic powder! A divine ingredient that can turn even garbage into gourmet food!”
Mocking the suspicion on Luciella’s face, Nigel pulled out a small glass bottle and shook it.
“With this, I’m invincible. You’ll never get your hands on something like it.”
“…!”
“And the lord is already practically addicted to it. What’s a measly hundred-something gold compared to that?”
Luciella stared wide-eyed at the bottle.
Inside the pink-tinted glass sparkled a fine powder.
She knew exactly what it was.
It was her mother’s powder.
More precisely, it was powder Luciella herself had made according to her mother’s instructions.
The substance her transmigrator mother had called MSG.
A miraculous ingredient she described as the ultimate essence of umami, more powerful than any delicacy in the world.
A substance so addictive it was practically a drug.
And one of the clues Luciella had desperately been searching for.
