"That was fast. You dealt with them already? That'll save us a lot of trouble. Let's keep moving. We still need to get to the kitchen. Once we're there, we'll have to look for ANOTHER's mature fish."
Don Slime spoke casually. Since he could freely enter and leave the Spirit World, he had seen ANOTHER being prepared more than once. That was also how he had been able to replicate ANOTHER in the first place.
"I don't think that'll be necessary, Don Slime. Look over there."
Asarudy pointed ahead.
Don Slime followed his gaze—and froze.
Dozens of mature ANOTHER fish were swimming nearby.
And they were drifting straight toward Kael.
"They're probably drawn by your Food Luck," Don Slime muttered. "It was the same outside. You attracted a whole swarm of ANOTHER fry back then. Drawing in mature fish now… doesn't seem that surprising."
"Well, that saves us the trouble of searching," he continued. "Let's lure them near the kitchen and wear them down first. Catching them as they are would normally be impossible—"
Don Slime trailed off.
Because the fish had already reached Kael.
Not only that—they stopped in front of him obediently.
Kael reached out and touched one.
None of them fled.
If anything, they pressed closer, almost competing to get near him.
"...Guess we can skip exhausting them too," Asarudy muttered blankly. "That alone just saved ten thousand years."
He wasn't new to this place. He knew exactly how ridiculous this scene was.
In the past, anyone who came here to cook ANOTHER—whether Nitro or anyone else—had to spend an enormous amount of time just preparing.
The first step alone, draining the fish's stamina, took ten thousand years.
Removing the scales required fifty thousand more.
From start to finish, cooking a single mature ANOTHER took a full six hundred thousand years.
And now?
That first ten thousand years was gone.
Both Asarudy and Don Slime stared at Kael, wondering just how much he could shorten the remaining process.
Soon, the two of them—along with Don Slime—brought dozens of mature ANOTHER into the kitchen of the Spirit World.
The entire kitchen was constructed from gold material.
Only gold could resist the erosion of time here. Nothing else endured—not even materials taken from the Eight Kings.
Even the hardest fang of the legendary Dragon King Derous had eventually fossilized after countless years. Still sturdy, yes—but nowhere near its peak.
Given enough time, even that fossil would grow brittle.
Gold, however, remained unchanged.
The kitchen itself looked bizarre. Probably because it had been built by the Nitro race. Compared to human aesthetics, it was downright strange.
Once inside, they set everything down.
Without hesitation, Kael used Knocking on all the ANOTHER fish, immobilizing them in an instant.
He knew what would happen once the cooking was complete—the gate to the Spirit World would be blown wide open from the strain.
Even if it could be repaired, it would take an immense amount of time.
And even with the voice of the ingredients guiding him, finishing the cooking would still require around sixty-five years.
So he might as well cook more at once.
That way, he wouldn't have to keep coming back.
"You captured them just like that," Don Slime said, staring at him. "Impressive. So—you've already heard the voice of the ingredients, right? How are you planning to cook them?"
He was genuinely curious. Kael was the first person in all these years to capture ANOTHER so effortlessly.
The problem was that ANOTHER constantly emitted light. Normally, when ingredients "spoke," a golden glow would reveal it.
But with ANOTHER shining all the time, that glow was impossible to distinguish.
"I've heard them," Kael replied calmly. "They'll guide me. Should take a little over sixty years."
Silence.
Asarudy and Don Slime both stared at him.
They had expected some reduction in time.
They had not expected this.
Six hundred thousand years… reduced to just over sixty.
That wasn't a simple improvement. That was an entirely different scale.
"No wonder you captured so many at once," Asarudy said slowly. "Without shortening the process, just removing the scales from one fish would take fifty thousand years. With dozens of them? That would've been tens of millions of years just for that step."
He had been baffled earlier. Why catch so many?
Now it made sense.
Even he wouldn't dare attempt something like this. But looking at it now, it seemed it would take at most a few thousand years to complete.
While that amount of time was an eternity for a normal human, to an entity like Asarudy, a few thousand years was nothing.
"In that case, you take the lead," Don Slime said. "Once the cooking's done, we'll leave the Spirit World."
He stepped outside to stand guard, preventing any Food Spirits from interfering.
Kael wasted no time.
He began immediately.
Asarudy followed his instructions from the side, though in truth, his role was limited. Kael outclassed him in every aspect.
The gap wasn't so overwhelming that Asarudy was useless—but it was close.
If the difference had been any greater, he might have just gotten in the way.
What normally required fifty thousand years to remove the scales was completed in less than five.
One by one, the scales of the mature ANOTHER were stripped away.
Then came the removal of the organs.
Step by step, steadily advancing.
Kael's ability surpassed even Komatsu's. He compressed the timeline further.
Originally, cooking one fish should have taken around sixty-five years.
Kael pushed it under sixty.
And he didn't cook them one at a time.
He worked on all of them simultaneously.
Because he knew—once this batch was complete, the Spirit World itself would be blown wide open from being overloaded.
When that happened, cooking here again wouldn't be possible anytime soon.