Cooking with Wild Game: Volume 29 (eBook)

EDA (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
250 Seiten
J-Novel Club (Verlag)
978-1-7183-3456-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Asuta has experienced a great deal in the past year. He died, only to be spirited away to a brand new world, where he met Ai Fa, joined her clan, and became a person of the forest's edge. He made all sorts of allies and took down intimidating foes like the Suun clan and Cyclaeus. He did a whole lot of cooking (including preparing food for nobles!), started running several stalls, and did business with inns.
Soon, it will be the one year anniversary of his arrival, but before that big milestone arrives, there is still so much to do! First, there is a dessert-making lesson in the post town. Then, Asuta and company visit Varkas's castle town restaurant for dinner. The people of the forest's edge will start selling giba meat at the local market, and perhaps most importantly of all, Asuta and Ai Fa celebrate his birthday alone together.
See all this and more in the exciting twenty-ninth volume of Cooking with Wild Game!

Textauszug

Chapter 1: A Study Session in the Post Town

1

On the sixteenth of the yellow month, the leading clan heads of the forest’s edge and the nobles had a special meeting in the castle town.

Back when the Suun had still been the leading clan, such meetings had been held on a regular schedule. But really, they hadn’t been much more than Count Cyclaeus Turan and Zattsu Suun getting together to scheme in private and put into motion the plans that had caused harm to so many people over the years.

Nowadays, Melfried and Polarth served as the negotiators from the noble side, and they were attempting to form a more proper relationship with the people of the forest’s edge. They had decided that one regular meeting every three months wasn’t enough, so they had changed it to every other month instead. Furthermore, they would arrange for additional special meetings when urgent situations arose. Since this was one such case, the leading clan heads were having to make a sudden trip to the castle town.

There were going to be two main topics of discussion at the meeting: the fast approaching return of the Black Flight Feathers and the sale of giba meat in the post town.

The Black Flight Feathers were a merchant group from the Eastern Kingdom of Sym. With thirty-two members, they were the largest group from Sym that visited Genos. After entering into an agreement with Cyclaeus seven years ago, they had started bringing live gyama and all sorts of other goods to Genos. They were the ones who had gone to Duke Marstein Genos and proposed cutting a new path through the forest’s edge. It was a bold plan meant to make trade easier, as it normally required around two months to go between Genos and Sym in each direction. But though that path had been completed back in the rainy season, it had still never been used, except to test it for safety. There were also people in Genos planning to build a new post town on the other side of the forest of Morga where the path ended.

Of course, there was no getting around the fact that the path ran through the dangerous forest of Morga. And after you made it to the other end, you still had to go through the barren, uninhabited wastelands beyond. According to the head of the Black Flight Feathers, Kukuluel, you could reach the highway that led north to the town of Aboof after a few days of travel, but that still needed to be confirmed by someone actually following the route.

Who could tell what sort of harm might result from an ill-prepared traveler attempting the journey? If people used it without proper planning and the worst happened, then that could result in everyone choosing to avoid it and the whole thing becoming useless. In order to avoid that kind of screwup, Marstein had tasked the Black Flight Feathers, who had suggested the idea, with being the first to test the path.

Long journeys across the continent were considered incredibly dangerous in general. There were all sorts of risks, from bandits to wild beasts to even natural disasters. If you wanted to travel the roads between towns, common practice was to have a skilled bodyguard or guide accompany you. However, easterners would travel about the continent without any guards. That was because they were famous for their skills with both totos and dangerous poisons. They themselves were a bigger threat than any bandits or wild beasts they might come across.

And yet, the easterners who worked as merchants came from the grasslands and were pacifists. It was readily apparent how much Shumiral and Radajid from the Silver Vase, Kukuluel from the Black Flight Feathers, and even the star reader Arishuna—who was no merchant but who came from a related lineage—despised conflict and were gentle-natured. Though they possessed dangerous skills that could easily put any outlaw or beast to sleep, they would never use violence for any reason other than self defense.

This was something I had just heard from Shumiral recently, but apparently, Sym was roughly divided up into four regions: the mountains to the north, the grasslands in the center, the coast to the east, and the commercial cities to the south that included the capital, Rao.

The people were split into seven tribes that ruled over the land. The only ones who traveled the world as merchants came from the Zi and Gi tribes that lived in the grasslands. Though the cities to the south were places of trade, it was the people of the grasslands who left their home country in order to do business.

People from the grasslands weren’t fond of conflict. Since they were born and raised in the peaceful center of the nation, they didn’t get involved in the war with Jagar, and they lived more or less nomadic lives. And some portion of them traveled to Selva and Mahyudra as merchants.

As one would expect, the Black Flight Feathers also came from the grasslands, and if I remembered correctly, their leader Kukuluel’s full name contained Gi. Currently, they were on a trip that had them traveling to the capital of Selva, Algrad, and when they returned to Genos, they intended to use the new path through the forest’s edge to prove its safety. They were a fair bit behind schedule, but they would be coming back soon. Since the path would start seeing use in less than a month after they returned, the special meeting today was intended to clear up a variety of issues beforehand.

And then there was the second topic of discussion: the sale of giba meat. Naturally, the Fa clan was far more involved in that than the other matter. There had been plenty of problems there too, but ultimately, we were granted permission to take part in the meat market.

We were also given a new condition, however: to sell the same amount of giba meat to the castle town as we did to the post town. That command was handed down in order to preempt a situation where the nobles would try to buy up all of the giba meat. At present, we were permitted to sell sausages and smoked meat in Genos, and going forward, we would be selling fresh meat too. But there was a concern that the nobles would try to take it all for themselves, leaving none for the post town.

Since the people’s trust in him had already been damaged because of Cyclaeus’s actions, Marstein feared that outcome and had come up with a simple solution. He seemed to be approaching things even more cautiously than we were out of fear that a noble like Cyclaeus might appear again and start hoarding ingredients, ruining all of his efforts up to this point. That was why he was imposing his new rule on us. If we sold the same amount of giba meat in both the post town and the castle town, neither side would be able to reasonably complain about it.

Of course, there was no particular reason for us to complain either way. The only concern we had was how much we should be selling. Any other problems past that point were all internal ones, the biggest of which was securing a stable supply. That was something we had discussed a great deal at the forest’s edge, with the Fa and Ruu at the center of it all. We had been getting ready for this throughout the first third of the yellow month, and had finished settling all the issues that we could at almost the exact same time that we got permission from the castle town to proceed. The final conclusion was that the Fou and Dai would be the ones in charge, while the Fa and Ruu would offer support.

The Fou and Dai had been the ones chosen because they were located close to the Fa and Ruu clans. The Gaaz and Ratsu were larger, but we prioritized the convenience offered by their proximity in this case.

Additionally, it wasn’t simply a matter of selling meat at the market in the post town. Securing the meat to be sold in advance was also a crucial task in order to keep doing business. On top of that, given how much demand there would likely be for giba meat, it would be very difficult for the Fou and Dai to provide it all on their own. They would need to make arrangements to purchase giba meat from other clans. Then they would have to store it, and transport it as well before it could be sold. That was pretty much all that their job amounted to, but the only business they had done prior to this had been selling giba pelts, horns, and tusks, so managing all that would be somewhat difficult for them.

One particularly important issue was the processing of the meat. At the settlement at the forest’s edge, clans would sell dressed carcasses of giba—either whole ones or half ones—to one another, but smaller portions would need to be prepared for the townsfolk.

Presently, the Fa and Ruu were selling fresh meat to four inns. We used known portion sizes used in town to estimate the amount we needed to provide in those cases. The Fou and Dai would need to figure out something similar.

Of course, quantities of meat weren’t measured very precisely in either the forest or the town. You only got vague guidelines like “How much for a single meal’s worth?” But if the amount you sold for a price changed too much, it would be difficult to build up trust. It was necessary to carefully measure the weight of each block you cut before loading a specified amount into a box. That was the first step toward selling meat at the market.

The payment for all that work was no small issue either. At present, it wasn’t clear to us how much profit there would be after the costs were subtracted from the sale price. After all, the price of giba meat sold between clans was simply divided into three vague levels based solely on the size of the animal.

Naturally, our rough...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.8.2025
• Reihe/Serie: Cooking with Wild Game
• Illustrationen: EDA
• Übersetzer: EDA
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• Schlagworte: business • cooking • Hunting • Isekai • Light Novel • Romance • Slice of Life
• ISBN-10: 1-7183-3456-7 / 1718334567
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7183-3456-4 / 9781718334564