The number 30 hangs on the holoscreen.
It isn't a score. It's an epitaph. The death of everything the arena thought it knew.
The silence that follows is heavier than the roar that came before. It's a thick, syrupy quiet, filled with the sound of a thousand mental gears grinding to a halt.
Caelan looks at his bowl, then at Nyra. Her face is a canvas of shock, disbelief, and a terrifying, dawning clarity. She's not looking at him like a rival anymore. She's looking at him like he's an alien who just landed in her kitchen.
The perfect score isn't a triumph. For Caelan, it's an indictment. A verdict. Guilty of being himself, again. He didn't want to win. He just wanted to give the ingredients a voice.
He turns to leave the station, his only desire to escape the suffocating weight of a thousand stares. He's halfway down the aisle before Milo barrels into his path, camera held low but still recording.
"Dude! A thirty! A perfect thirty!" Milo whisper-yells, his eyes wide with a manic, holy light. "Do you know what this means? You just broke the academy! The forums are on fire! Zadie's broadcast just… short-circuited! She's just making squeaking noises!"
"I want to go to my room," Caelan says, his voice flat with exhaustion. The miracle has a price. It always does. Using his Domains to that depth, to reach into the judges' souls and deliver an emotion… it leaves him feeling hollowed out, scraped clean.
He tries to sidestep Milo, but a hand clamps down on his arm. It's not rough, but it's unbreakable.
He turns. Nyra.
Her fiery eyes are no longer burning with anger. They are glowing embers of pure, desperate confusion. She doesn't let go. The entire arena watches, breathless.
"How?" she asks, her voice a low, ragged thing that only he can hear.
"I just cooked," he replies, trying to pull his arm away. Her grip is like steel.
"No," she insists, taking a step closer. The heat from her body feels like a furnace. "That is not cooking. I saw your heat signature on the station monitors. The thermal differential in that bowl was impossible. Your broth should have been a cloudy mess. Your tomato water should have cooked instantly. You broke the laws of physics."
He finally wrenches his arm free. "I'm tired. I'm going to my dorm."
He turns his back on her and walks. He doesn't run. He just walks, straight and steady, through the stunned crowd that parts for him. He can feel her gaze boring into his back.
He makes it to the exit, pushes through the heavy doors, and steps into the cool night air of the campus. He takes one deep, clean breath.
"I'm not done with you."
Her voice is right behind him. She followed him out. He stops but doesn't turn around.
"The smell," she says, her voice strained. "That aroma. It wasn't a cooking smell. It wasn't Maillard or caramelization. It was… clean. Too clean. Like a memory."
He remains silent.
"And the judges," she presses on, her footsteps soft on the pavement behind him. "I saw their faces. You didn't just feed them. You made them feel something. That's not a flavor profile. That's something else."
He finally turns to face her. In the dim light of the campus lampposts, her arrogance is gone, replaced by a raw, hungry vulnerability. The proudest prodigy at Aurum is asking for help.
"Why?" he asks, a genuine weariness in his tone. "Why does it matter so much to you?"
"Because my entire life is dedicated to this craft!" she bursts out, her control finally shattering. "I practice sixteen hours a day. I know every classical technique, every molecular bond. My world is built on a foundation of rules—of heat and time and precision. And you… you just walked in and proved that all of my rules are meaningless."
Her voice cracks. "So you have to tell me. How did you do it?"
He looks at her, at the genuine anguish in her eyes. It is the plea of a true believer who has just witnessed heresy that feels more divine than their own scripture.
He gives her the truth.
"I listened to them," he says softly.
She stares. "Listened? Listened to what?"
"The ingredients," he says, his gaze distant. "They're sad. The fish bones never got to be a broth. The tomatoes were thrown out because they weren't beautiful. The bread was left to die. All of that… sorrow… it leaves an echo. A taste. I just listened to what they wanted to be."
Nyra looks at him as if he has just started speaking in tongues. "You can… hear ingredients?"
"It's not a sound," he tries to explain. "It's a feeling. A pressure. A knowledge. When you hold an ingredient, you're holding its whole life. And its death. That cart wasn't a handicap. It was a chorus of ingredients all singing the same sad song. All I did was give them a final harmony."
The revelation sinks in, vast and terrifying. His strange calm, his gentle movements, his lack of panic. It wasn't an act. He was communing with his food.
And she finally understands the price of his miracle. The burden of it.
"You feel that… all the time?" she whispers, a note of horror in her voice. "All that… sadness?"
He nods. "That's why I came here. For the nutrient paste. For boring, manufactured food with no story and no soul. So I could finally have some peace and quiet."
A beat of silence hangs between them, charged and fragile.
She sees him then. Not as a rival. Not as a freak. But as someone carrying a gift so immense it is also a curse. The God of Leftover. A deity who bears the pain of every discarded thing.
Nyra Emberveil takes a deep, shuddering breath. Her path is now clear. Her pride is a foolish, useless thing in the face of this. She needs to know. She has to.
She meets his gaze, her ember eyes burning with a new, terrifying resolve.
"Teach me," she says. It is not a request. It is a demand.
"Teach me how to listen."