After Mosyul left, I immediately sent off a carrier pigeon.
The person I sent the letter to was an acquaintance I had known since my adventurer days.
He was a fisherman who sailed out into the open ocean to catch fish,
but since he was used to dealing with marine monsters, he was practically stronger than most adventurers.
If he could catch a Belkas himself,
or knew a route by which one could be caught, it would be faster to leave it to him.
I kept the letter simple.
I need a Belkas.
Send it to me with its innards intact and undamaged.
I’ll pay well.
As quickly as possible, if you can.
I also added that I was currently running a restaurant,
as well as the address here to send it to if he managed to obtain a Belkas.
After I sent it, Aris asked.
“Is Belkas a dangerous fish?”
“It’s basically a monster, so yes. Its whole body is poisonous.”
“Eh… If it’s that kind of fish, how much would it cost? It’s not as if they sell it at the market, right?”
“I’ll probably have to pay more than the most expensive edible fish. After all, they’d have to risk their lives catching a fish they’d normally avoid.”
“It’s going to be expensiveee……”
“Well, that gourmet is the one who’ll have to pay the price. I’m just making what he asked for.”
I answered honestly and headed for the kitchen.
For now, I decided to leave the matter of procuring the ingredient to him,
and in the meantime, I had to start with what I could do.
How was I going to deal with the Belkas poison?
I had to find a clue to that first.
* * *
I searched through the underground storage room.
It was a good thing I had organized the storage room back when I was looking for the Topliya recipe.
The storage room was packed full of books from all sorts of fields.
Monster encyclopedias, herb dictionaries, cooking-related books.
Among them, I pulled out every source related to poison and stacked them on the counter.
“Wow…… What is all this?”
“I’m going to read them starting now.”
“All of them?”
Aris said, looking up at the pile of books.
“The ingredient hasn’t even arrived yet……”
“That’s why I’m reading them in advance.”
I opened the monster encyclopedia at the very top of the pile first.
I searched through the section on marine monsters and found the entry on Belkas.
The information written there was all stuff I already knew.
Highly toxic throughout its entire body.
Attacks with sharp fins and teeth.
Absolutely never used as food.
Of course.
After all, it was strange to even think of eating such a fish.
I closed the encyclopedia and picked up the next book.
It was a book describing the history and characteristics of various deadly poisons.
It contained accounts of a royal poisoning incident that had occurred in the capital long ago,
as well as the lethal poisons mainly used by an assassin organization said to still operate in secret.
Poisons concocted through alchemy are useful when aiming for specific effects and purposes,
but if the goal is simply to take a human life out of hatred, biological poisons are more effective.
.
.
.
The poison of the monster fish Belkas is fast-acting,
can be absorbed through the skin, and when poisoned, the victim experiences paralysis along with excruciating pain.
No antidote is currently known,
and it can be considered a deadly poison requiring the utmost caution in its handling……
I closed the book and let out a small sigh.
No matter how I looked at it, using Belkas liver as food was an insane idea.
There were so many other safe things to eat in this world, so why?
What on earth had Mosyul been thinking when he placed such an order with me?
But I had already accepted the order.
I believed there had to be some method.
I picked up a new book from the pile,
and began reading intently again.
* * *
Several days passed.
I still had not come up with a clue for using Belkas liver as food.
Of course, it was not as if I expected to find such a method directly in a book.
Even if I searched every book in this world, no such method would be recorded.
What I wanted was inspiration.
I was randomly cramming countless pieces of knowledge related to Belkas into my head,
hoping that they might combine with the knowledge I had built up as a chef and produce some sudden flash of insight.
For the past few days, I had lived the life of a reader going through dozens of books,
but still, no good idea came to me.
“Manager~ Manager~ Someone’s coming in a carriage!”
Just as I sat back down in front of the counter and opened a book,
Aris clung to the window and called out to me.
“A customer at a time like this?”
“Uh…… It looks like a freight wagon?”
“A freight wagon?”
“Yes! Take a look!”
At Aris’s words, I rose from my seat as well,
and looked through the window at the road in front of the restaurant.
Sure enough, a freight wagon was slowly approaching from far away.
A short while later, the freight wagon stopped in front of the restaurant with the neighing of a horse.
I went outside and greeted the man who had brought the wagon.
“Hello. What brings you here?”
“Ah—delivery. I came from Waterhorn.”
“Aha.”
As soon as I heard his answer, I immediately realized what the freight wagon was.
Waterhorn was the town of the acquaintance to whom I had recently sent a carrier pigeon asking for a Belkas.
Then what was loaded on the wagon was……
“The sender was especially insistent that it be handled with care. The roads were rough, too, so it was no small trouble getting here.”
The deliveryman even waved his hands as he shook his head.
Then he took an envelope from his coat and handed it to me.
“And he asked me to deliver this to the owner of the restaurant.”
“I am the owner of the restaurant.”
I took the letter from the deliveryman and opened the envelope right there.
Then I read its contents.
---
To the owner of Gourmet Restaurant Slow,
and my old friend Klaus.
I was surprised to hear from you so suddenly.
I had heard before that you retired from adventuring.
A restaurant, huh—
Can I come visit someday and mooch a meal off you?
Anyway, for you to suddenly ask me to get you a Belkas.
You didn’t even say what you’re planning to use it for.
Since it’s your request, I did catch one and send it for now,
but that thing is incredibly dangerous, so don’t mishandle it and end up dead.
Oh, right. The freight wagon is special delivery, cash on delivery.
As for the price of the Belkas, figure out a fair amount yourself and send it enclosed.
Let’s have a drink sometime.
---
After reading my acquaintance’s letter, I asked the deliveryman.
“Um… the delivery fee?”
“It is ten thousand lira. Since it is cash on delivery, you must pay immediately.”
I let out a small sigh at the tremendous delivery fee.
Since the restaurant was in a place like this, the lack of customers wasn’t the only problem.
I immediately went into the restaurant and brought out a letter to send to my acquaintance, the delivery fee,
and twenty thousand lira, the price of one Belkas, and handed them to the deliveryman.
“Now then……”
The deliveryman opened the rear compartment of the freight wagon,
and with Aris, I took out the large wooden crate placed in the spacious back.
The wooden crate was much heavier than I had expected.
Aris groaned beside me as she tried to carry it together,
but in truth, Aris’s strength was not much help.
“Aris, just hold the door.”
“Okaaay……”
I lifted the crate alone and carried it into the restaurant.
I could have made it lighter with magic,
but I did not think it would be wise to carelessly pour mana into a crate containing a Belkas.
I set the crate down on the floor across from the counter,
sent the deliveryman on his way, and returned to the restaurant.
I slowly examined the surface of the crate.
On the outside of the wooden crate, a warning was written in large red letters.
[Handle with Care - Contains Venomous Monster]
Under it, something was added in smaller letters.
[Do Not Touch with Bare Hands Under Any Circumstances]
I brought a pair of thick leather gloves from the storage room.
Belkas poison could also be absorbed through the skin.
Touching it barehanded was out of the question from the start.
“Manager, should I step back?”
“You’re a ghost. Do you really need to be afraid of poison?”
“S-still! I might not die, but I could get poisoned!”
Aris shouted as she retreated behind the counter.
As if a ghost could be poisoned……
I put on the leather gloves and slowly opened the lid of the crate.
The inside of the crate had been lined once more with thick iron plates.
It seemed my acquaintance had been quite careful.
There was a handle in the center of the iron plate.
I took hold of the handle and carefully lifted the iron plate.
Cold air rose from inside.
It seemed they had filled it with ice before sending it.
I could see something buried among the ice.
It was the Belkas.
Its body length was a little over two meters.
Its belly bulged, and its dorsal fin rose sharply.
Its scales were a dark gray.
Even though it was dead, I could see tiny beads of poison forming at the tips of its fins.
I checked its condition and covered it with the iron plate again.
Preserving it so it would not rot came first.
“Ice Sealing.”
I stretched my hand over the iron plate and let mana flow.
Cold elemental mana enveloped the entire crate.
The temperature inside the crate dropped sharply,
and a layer of ice blocking outside heat wrapped around it.
About minus twenty degrees.
At this level, long-term preservation should be possible.
I rose from my seat and took off the gloves.
“Manager, what are you going to do now?”
Aris asked, approaching cautiously.
“First, poison detection.”
Aris tilted her head.
“Poison detection?”
“After I deal with the poison later, I’ll need a way to confirm that the poison is properly gone.”
Mosyul had said I had to taste the finished dish first, without fail.
But Belkas poison was truly a deadly poison.
If I tried to confirm it by blindly eating it,
I would lose my life too if even a little poison remained.
I had to be able to check whether the poison had been properly removed before eating it.
A method of detecting toxic substances using mana.
Even now, I could do it if I tried.
But Belkas poison was a deadly toxin capable of killing dozens of adult men with even a small amount.
If I only detected the rough presence or absence of poison, I might miss an extremely minute amount remaining.
And even that tiny amount of poison I failed to detect
could, in reality, be fatal.
Beyond simply detecting poison with magic,
I had to be certain that its toxicity had reached perfectly zero.
I brought an empty bowl and set it down on the counter.
Then I put the gloves back on, opened the crate,
and picked out a small piece of ice from the edge.
It was ice that had touched the Belkas’s body.
Naturally, there was a possibility that poison had dissolved into it.
I placed the piece of ice in the bowl and closed the crate again,
then sat in front of the bowl and began gathering mana at my fingertips.
Meta Control.
I refined my mana to an extreme thinness,
and spread it over the surface of the ice in the bowl like a thin membrane.
Toxic substances possessed a distinctive molecular structure.
The key was to tune the sensitivity of my mana so that it reacted only to that structure.
If toxic substances were present, the mana membrane would vibrate,
and if not, it would remain still.
It was a use of mana similar to modern scanning technology.
“Manager~ What are you doing with the ice~?”
Aris asked cautiously from beside me.
“Be quiet.”
I focused for a while.
The membrane made of extremely thin mana
began to slowly pass through the ice and detect whether poison was present.
At first, there was no reaction.
When there was no reaction, I raised the sensitivity of the mana and tried again.
When I raised the sensitivity too much, the mana began trembling even outside the bowl where there was no poison.
I lowered it again, raised it again……
I finely adjusted the mana so that it would react precisely only to the Belkas poison dissolved in the ice.
“……!”
How long had I been adjusting the mana like that?
At last, I seemed to have found the proper sensitivity capable of accurately detecting only the minuscule amount of poison clinging to the ice.
I withdrew the mana and opened my eyes.
Done.
But it still needed further verification.
If, by any chance, there was some mistake,
this was not the sort of matter where “Oops, my mistake, I’ll do it again” would be forgiven.
I would have to repeat the experiment later and verify and adjust it even more precisely.
“For now, I suppose this is enough.”
It would take time to verify the poison detection magic perfectly enough that I could feel safe.
But at the same time, there was something else I had to seriously consider.
The method of dealing with the poison.
Nothing was certain yet.
I had obtained the ingredient.
I also had the outline of a method for detecting toxicity.
Next was how to eliminate the poison.
That was the fundamental problem of this dish.
I sat at the counter and picked up a book again.
There were still some I had not read.
* * *