Enhanced senses sounded amazing at first glance—but not every sensory enhancement was necessarily a blessing.
The best example of that came from the World of Food Wars: the God's Tongue.
In that world, the God's Tongue was considered a type of Special Ability, and among all such powers, it ranked among the very best.
But it also carried a fatal flaw—once its development reached a certain point, it could spiral completely out of control.
Normally, someone with the God's Tongue could effortlessly analyze any dish. A single bite was enough to pinpoint imperfections others couldn't even sense.
Recipes others treated as priceless treasures could be broken down and understood in seconds.
But once it lost control, that precision turned into a curse.
Even the smallest flaw in a dish would be magnified countless times over. A subtle imbalance in seasoning could taste like sewage. And when that happened, the side effects were so violent that the taster might immediately vomit up anything they tried to force down.
Mana Nakiri was the perfect example. She survived only because she lived in the modern era—nutrient IVs and medical tech kept her alive.
In an older age, anyone whose God's Tongue went berserk would've been doomed to die young.
Thankfully, Kael's Five Divine Senses didn't suffer from that kind of defect.
The Chuuka Ichiban! world, aside from being less advanced technologically, far outclassed the Food Wars world in every other way. His senses were stable and perfectly functional.
Of course, raw power wasn't enough. Kael still had to train and learn how to control it. The Five Divine Senses might have been complete, but using them effectively required knowledge and experience.
In that regard, the Food Wars world actually held the advantage. While Chuuka Ichiban! had its share of mythical ingredients, they were rare and hard to come by.
Back in that era, transportation was inconvenient, so obtaining a wide variety of global ingredients was nearly impossible.
In contrast, the Food Wars world made that easy—as long as you had money. Any ingredient from anywhere in the world could be bought and studied. When it came to ingredient diversity and exposure, this world had the clear edge.
Take Erina Nakiri, for example. She could distinguish between salts from different regions while blindfolded—but only because she had already tasted them before.
Once she experienced a flavor, her God's Tongue could analyze and catalog every difference in perfect detail.
So Kael would have to train his senses the same way. Still, once his four Divine Senses fused, the entire world seemed to transform before his eyes.
Every sound, every scent, every sight—everything felt completely different.
Now, when Kael looked at something, his mind instantly processed basic data—its size, its weight, even texture. Not because Divine Sight was limited, but because his current knowledge couldn't interpret more complex details yet.
The same went for smells. At first, the flood of overlapping scents nearly knocked him out. Thankfully, the ability was controllable, so he quickly filtered out unpleasant odors—like, say, the ones wafting from a nearby restroom.
His hearing had also sharpened dramatically. He wasn't exactly clairaudient, but it wasn't far off—a "lite" version, so to speak.
As for touch, even the texture and weave of his clothes registered in detail. It was no exaggeration—the power of these four senses was absolutely terrifying.
"Besides these four abilities, there should be more… Kaiyu's medical expertise, for example. Wait—where's the Qigong? Isn't that one of Kaiyu's innate skills?"
Kael suddenly realized something was missing. Kaiyu's Qigong wasn't just another trick—it was an utterly broken ability, allowing the user to forcibly alter the elemental properties of ingredients themselves.
Moldy rice? Kaiyu could turn it fresh again. Sure, he often amplified the toxicity in ingredients rather than removing it, but that was a choice—he could just as easily purify it.
Kaiyu specialized in Poison Cuisine, after all. His signature creation, the Pomo Bajin, required extraordinarily potent toxins to even exist.
Still, the fact remained: the ability to enhance ingredient quality at will was a god-tier gift for any chef.
Think about it—buy a cheap cut of beef from the market, use Qigong to refine it into A5-grade or even higher-quality meat. That was the sheer, domineering power of this ability.
"Hold on… come to think of it, in Kiwami, Kaiyu wasn't the only one who had Qigong!"
The memory hit him like lightning. In the original Chuuka Ichiban! series, sure, Qigong seemed exclusive to Kaiyu. But by the time Kiwami rolled around, plenty of top-tier chefs could use it too.
The most notable examples were members of The Big Four—Master Yuxian and Mr. Shuijing. One could fly through the air and boil an egg mid-flight; the other used Qigong to pinpoint the locations of the legendary cooking utensils.
Their control over Qigong far surpassed Kaiyu's. Compared to them, Kaiyu's mastery was like that of a toddler next to a grown man.
And then there were the Phoenix Eight Immortals from the Taiji Cuisine Realm—all absolute masters of Qigong.
That realization made it clear: Qigong wasn't an innate talent. It was something that could be learned.
Digging deeper into Kaiyu's Character Inheritance, Kael soon found detailed notes about it. To awaken Qigong, a chef's culinary skill had to reach a transcendent level—on par with the Supreme Dragon Chefs of the Chuuka Ichiban! world. Only then could one even begin to comprehend Qigong.
But even reaching that level was just the first requirement. Kaiyu had achieved it through a combination of intense martial training, deep medical knowledge, and countless ancient scrolls from the Taiji Cuisine Realm. Only by merging all of that had he birthed his version of Qigong.
The entry barrier was absurdly high—no wonder only a handful of chefs at the top of the world could wield it.
Still, Kael's eyes lit up when he found one particular note. There was a workaround—a simplified version.
It originated from the Churin Temple, where monks had developed a diluted form of Qigong for training purposes.
This weaker variant couldn't grant miracles like levitation or raw energy projection, but it could still enhance ingredients and cooking results in subtle yet tangible ways.
The trade-off was obvious—less power, less difficulty. Plenty of monks at Churin Temple could use this simplified Qigong. It wasn't flashy, but it was attainable.
Of course, advancing beyond that stage still required monstrous talent.
In the Chuuka Ichiban! storyline, Kaiyu had never needed to learn this version—his innate genius allowed him to master the real thing.
And sure, compared to The Big Four and the Phoenix Eight Immortals, Kaiyu might've seemed weaker...
But come on. Kaiyu wasn't some immortal monster. For a human, he was already terrifying enough.