Chapter 48: Spirit Chef II
As Amrit finished looking at the information, the sun was already above his head. He had unknowingly spent a few hours looking at the inheritance. After he finished reading the process of infusing spirit energy in the food while cooking and locking the properties of herbs in food while burning the impurities they contained he heaved a long sigh. So that is how the spirit foods were prepared, he thought. The process of getting started with this profession was like any other, wasting a lot of resources and time, luckily he could use low-grade herbs and maybe even mortal foods to practice. There was an abundance of those contained in the clan and mortal food was way cheaper to buy.
To practice he didn't need grains, he could make do with anything edible. He would start with the low-grade ingredients first and then move his way upwards. Although his grandparents ate once or twice a month they had a lot of stock of food. Most of them were spirit grains but there were a few tons of mortal grains that looked like wheat, corn, and rice. It wasn't just for their consumption but to concoct fasting pills. The fasting pills needed a large amount of mortal grains or a little of spirit grains depending upon the grade of pill concocted. Although the fasting pills were only used when necessary, for those in the Bareback mountains it was better to use fasting pills than food as sometimes they would have to venture deep into the forest and return to the outpost once a month, so carrying food on these situations would be foolish.
So Kumari would concoct fasting pills a few times a year. Depending on their grades, the grains and other herbs required to concoct were mortal and spirit grades. Some of the second-grade fasting pills could increase spirit qi recovery and accelerate healing depending on the pill formula. But very few would be extravagant enough to incorporate those herbs in fasting pills. After pondering for a while, Amrit went inside the house and to the storage room. This room was full of food grains and herbs and looked like a mini treasure vault. This room was engraved with many arrays for protection and freshness. Although most of the contents of the room were mortal grains and herbs some of the precious herbs were also stored there in jade boxes.
These jade boxes were then engraved with arrays for better preservation. In other clans, there were only a few such boxes but in the Rijal clan due to the presence of an array master, they could indulge in such extravagance. Amrit looked around the room, the room was not much bigger but it contained shelves on two adjacent walls and a few wooden containers filled with different types of grains, some mortal and some containing spirit energy. The clan had other low-level alchemists so Kumari only refined high-grade fasting pills when she had time for foundation building realm cultivators. Amrit looked around confused because he didn't know what food to start with. There were spirit rice, wheat, and corn lookalike grains in the containers.
On the shelves there were herbs put out in the open, these were mostly lower grade herbs and some between mortal and spirit grade, this was caused by the limitation due to environment or species of herbs themselves. These type of herbs that contains a little bit of spirit energy but cannot be quite dubbed as spirit herbs are called pseudo-spirit herbs. They were more effective than the mortal herbs but not quite there in comparison to spirit herbs. From the legacy of the alchemist and spirit chef, Amrit identified those herbs and collected some of the pseudo-spirit grade herbs. He wanted to use rice grains for his first experiment but when he looked at the corner and saw the eggs lined up he gave up the idea for spirit rice. The eggs were also pseudo-spirit grade and first-grade eggs. He lifted one crate of eggs containing almost two dozen eggs and picked a few herbs that had the taste of chilly and oil extracted from spirit seeds. The salt was contained in minerals and some of these minerals were edible and used in alchemy. So he just picked eggs, some minerals containing salts, and herbs that had the taste of chilly called white-fire leaf.
This was one of the common herbs that had the taste of chilly because it was hot and the plant was green but the leaves as they grew older turned white and the contours of the leaf were wavy, so when there was a breeze, the leaf swayed and looked like white flames thus gaining the name white-fire leaf. The main function of this leaf was to eliminate cold qi from someone's body, the spiciness was just a bonus. He took dozens of white-fire herbs and left the storage room. He went to the kitchen and put all the ingredients on the rack. He took out the pan he had cleaned previously and put it over the stove like a block of metal that was engraved with a heat array, and with a signal of hand one could control the temperature precisely.
The spirit chef profession also uses spirit flame for cooking but only after breaking through the foundation building realm can one use qi flame efficiently as control becomes easy with divine sense. He first cracked an egg into the bowl and whisked it to make the texture even. The spirit chef profession requires precision to the extreme otherwise some of the unevenness may result in impurities in the food. After whisking carefully for a minute he looked at the bowl and saw some unevenness, there were some of the whites left on the side and there were few air bubbles inside. This whisking was a failure. Proper preparation of ingredients was a job already half done for the spirit chef, improper processing will result in subpar results. He threw the whisked egg into a garbage bin and waved his hand. This bin was engraved with second-grade incineration arrays and could destroy any low-grade materials without even leaving the ashes. He waved his hand and the array was activated. The flames produced in the bin destroyed the egg waste. He had failed on the first step.
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