TPCFE 01

Chapter 1

“One hundred and seventy-seven… one hundred and seventy-eight… one hundred and… seventy-nine!”

Luciela straightened her back after crouching on the kitchen floor.

Just ten seconds. I’ll rest for exactly ten seconds.

She panted for breath and gazed at the enormous pile of potatoes she had stacked up.

Every single potato had been peeled until its smooth surface gleamed, looking plump and delicious, but all that escaped Luciela’s lips was a sigh.

She had peeled a whopping 179 potatoes since morning.

Which meant she still had fifty more to go.

“Ugh… it hurts.”

She tried to force the stiff joints of her fingers to straighten, but it was no use.

Before starting on the potatoes, she had remembered the chef’s furious shouting the previous day and removed the scales from a venomous thornfish first.

As a result, her left hand was now half numb.

It would have been nice if someone in the kitchen had lent her a pair of protective gloves, but no such miracle occurred.

Most of the kitchen staff were relatives of the head chef.

And every last one of them was rotten to the core.

From the very first day he had seen Luciela a year ago, the head chef had intended to dump the most dangerous and labor-intensive tasks in the kitchen on her.

To be precise, it was from the moment he discovered just how quickly and accurately she could prepare ingredients.

“Oh, you butchered red bison meat? At only thirteen?”

At the time, she had thought he was a good person.

She had clearly been so hungry that her brain had stopped functioning.

“Let’s start you as an apprentice for now. We normally don’t take children as young as you, but I’m making you a very special offer. Do you have any idea how competitive this position is?”

“Okay!”

He had smiled at her so kindly that she had readily believed everything he said.

Not that she had had any other choice.

It took less than three days for the head chef to dump every dangerous and difficult task that needed to be handled in the lord’s castle kitchen onto Luciela.

“Peel ten sacks of red-blood onions. They’re ten times hotter than ordinary onions, so remember to stay away from everyone else.”

“Hey, you’re finished cleaning the underground ice cellar, right? If anything’s missing, you’ll have to pay for it.”

“You little brat! You still haven’t finished removing the mucus from the rainbow octopus? What, it’s hot enough to burn you? Shut up and hurry up, unless you want me to make you regret it!”

His friendly tone from the first day gradually became harsher, and sometimes he even resorted to hitting her.

But Luciela endured it.

As an unpaid apprentice, she couldn’t even afford the fare to travel somewhere else.

And more importantly, she still hadn’t found any trace of her mother.

A year ago, the last place her mother had worked before disappearing was right here—the Lord of Nor’s castle.

Her mother disappearing and then turning up somewhere completely different was nothing unusual.

The problem was that several of her belongings had disappeared from the lord’s castle.

“My daughter, Mommy wrote down all the settings from the original novel in her diary. If I ever don’t come back, make sure you hold on to that, okay?”

And so thirteen-year-old Luciela had decided to get a job somewhere the diary was likely to be found.

It was only later that she realized she should have carefully read her employment contract before taking the job.

“Ten seconds. Done…!”

Giving up on trying to straighten her fingers, Luciela picked up the knife again.

Once she finished peeling the potatoes, she had to clean the shell of a steel turtle, but at least she could have a snack before then.

She glanced at the plate beside her, where a steaming potato coated in butter and roasted to perfection sat skewered on a stick.

And it wasn’t just an ordinary potato.

It was a tornado potato—one of Luciela’s favorite snacks, made exactly in the shape her mother had once described after eating it in their original world.

She had even gone to the trouble of casting a buff on it, so if she ate it, she would be able to finish today’s work early.

The fact that casting the buff had drained her mana to the point that she would eventually pass out was a problem for the afternoon, so it didn’t matter for now.

“Today is a really important day, so I have to work even harder.”

Her bright green eyes gleamed fiercely against her light blond hair.

Once her work was finished, Luciela would finally stop being an unpaid apprentice and become a full-time employee.

In other words, she would be able to earn a salary of two gold coins a month.

Furthermore, once she officially became part of the lord’s household, she would be able to move around places other than the kitchen and search for traces of her mother.

And once she did that, she could save up her wages and eventually leave this place.

“Let’s give it everything we’ve got!”

Resolving herself to keep going, Luciela clenched her fist with a hand covered in scars and calluses far beyond what one would expect from a child.

And just as she had finished peeling about half of her 180th potato—

BANG!

The kitchen’s back door flew open, and a man entered.

“Yo, kid.”

It was Nigel, the head chef of the lord’s castle.

Upon spotting Luciela, he greeted her while jiggling his enormous belly.

“What are you doing? Haven’t you cleaned the steel turtle shell yet?”

Nigel frowned at the steel turtle shell sitting in one corner of the kitchen.

“I’m pretty sure I told you it was urgent. You’re slower than molasses.”

“…I’ll do it soon.”

Luciela barely managed to suppress her surge of anger as she muttered.

Full-time employee. Just think about becoming a full-time employee.

“Yeah, hurry up.”

Nigel nudged her hunched-over back with the tip of his foot.

“We have to close the kitchen early today because there’s going to be a celebration.”

“A… celebration?”

“Yeah. Your humble head chef here received a twenty-gold bonus from the lord.”

A heavy-looking pouch hung from his waist.

Luciela stared at him in confusion.

“Why did you get a bonus…?”

She desperately suppressed what she really wanted to say.

Your cooking sucks.

“Why? Because my cooking has been receiving rave reviews from the lord lately, and the soufflé omelet I made today was praised as a ‘masterpiece of the century.’”

Nigel boasted with a shrug.

A greasy smile spread across his chubby face.

“…Soufflé omelet?”

Luciela dropped the potato peeler she was holding.

“…I’m the one who made that.”

Luciela’s voice sank into a low tone.

The dropped peeler rolled across the floor with a sharp clang, but Nigel didn’t even flinch.

“I’m the one who worked on it all night! You saw everything yourself!”

“You idiot. Any dish that crosses this kitchen’s threshold and leaves it is my cooking.”

Luciela clenched her fists.

The anger that had been piling up deep inside her surged violently.

“How many times… how many times are you going to do this?”

Her nails dug into her palms, but she couldn’t even feel the pain through her anger.

“The castella last time, the meringue cookies before that, the French fries and apple pie…! You lied and said you made every single one of them! You promised that this time, you would tell the lord my name! You said that was the only way I could get paid….”

“Oh, right. Your full-time position.”

Nigel ignored everything she had said before that, snapping his fingers as though he had just remembered something.

“I decided to postpone it for another year.”

“…What? What are you talking about?”

Luciela blinked at him with wide eyes.

“You’ve been pretty lazy lately.”

He chuckled.

“It would be better for your future if you spent another three years honing your skills while receiving room and board.”

Anger surged up from the pit of her stomach.

Three years.

He was telling her to spend another three years doing this hellish unpaid labor.

It was practically the same as telling her to live as a slave for the rest of her life.

He had intended to do this from the beginning.

He had never planned to let her go or treat her properly.

He had simply intended to use her as a cooking and ingredient-preparation machine.

Because he knew that she had nowhere else to go.

Luciela felt the last thread of reason inside her head snap.

“…Screw this.”

“What?”

She was done putting up with it.

“I quit.”

Luciela raised her head.

Her eyes gleamed fiercely, completely at odds with her adorable face.

She pulled a crumpled piece of paper from inside her clothes and casually dropped it at Nigel’s feet.

“I’m quitting. After I submit this to the head butler.”

“What is this supposed to be…?”

Nigel bent down and picked up the paper.

A moment later, his expression hardened.

“What… what is this…?”

“You can see what it is, can’t you? A list of all the corruption you’ve committed over the past year.”

Nigel’s tiny, rice-grain-like eyes widened as he blinked repeatedly.

“Cor… corruption? You wrote all that down?”

“Yep.”

Luciela smiled sweetly at him as his body trembled with betrayal.

“Mom told me to write down important information whenever I remembered it. She said that’s what diaries are for.”

• April 12: Embezzled ten geun of sirloin and falsified the market ledger.
• May 19: Overcharged for sugar and spices and pocketed the five-gold difference.
• June 3: Embezzled the salary subsidies for the junior chefs…

Nigel’s eyes darted frantically as he read through the densely written page.

“A total of 127 gold and 40 silver. And, just so you know, I wrote several copies. One of them is hidden somewhere inside the lord’s castle where it will be found at an appropriate time, so tearing this one up won’t accomplish anything.”

Luciela continued speaking without the slightest concern.

A year ago, she had still been naïve and trusted people easily.

But she was also the kind of person who, once betrayed, always sought revenge.

“You little brat…!”

Nigel’s face turned bright red as he panted heavily.

Then, as if he had collected his thoughts, he let out a contemptuous snort.

“Hmph! Go ahead and try! Do you really think anyone is going to believe you?”

He slammed his hand down on the counter.

“The lord can’t live without my cooking anymore, you hear me?!”

“What? Is his tongue broken?”

“Even aside from the recipes I got from you, I have the ‘magic powder’ in my possession! A divine ingredient that can turn even the most garbage cooking into a gourmet masterpiece!”

As though mocking Luciela’s face, which was filled with genuine suspicion, Nigel pulled a small glass vial from inside his clothes and shook it.

“As long as I have this, I’m invincible. Even if you were to die and come back to life, you’d never get your hands on something like this.”

“…!”

“The lord is practically addicted to it already. What could someone do with a measly hundred-something gold…?”

Luciela stared wide-eyed at the vial he was shaking.

Inside the small glass bottle was a fine, glittering powder with a faint pink tint.

She knew exactly what it was.

It was her mother’s powder.

More precisely, it was a powder that Luciela herself had made according to her mother’s instructions.

Her mother, who had been transmigrated into this world, had called it “MSG,” describing it as an addictive ingredient containing the essence of umami more powerful than any delicacy in the world.

And it was also one of the things Luciela had desperately been searching for.