Chapter 79

Minhyuk ate the last egg roll after Ruth left the room.

"Are we not supposed to use the medicine in cooking?"

He was unaware of the importance of the item that was in his hands that was why Ruth lectured him on its importance and why it should never be used in cooking before he went out.

'The medicine is some sort of special food that can only be eaten by only a single person. To prevent the sharing and dividing of the essence of the medicine, it will become ineffective if it's cooked.'

Of course, even if he knew the importance of the medicine, he would still use it in cooking.

Right at that moment, a series of notifications popped up in front of him.

[You have eaten budaejjigae made with the Empire's Elixir.]

[The Food Fighter's Greatness.]

[The penalty for the medicine has been ignored. However, this does not work for many people.]

[A Medicine Dish. You have obtained additional stats.]

[You have gained +180 DEX and +20 Will.]

"Oh...!"

The delicious dishes and the medicine dish gave him an additional +20 in his stats due to the effects of Food Fighter's Greatness.

And the notifications did not even end there…

[You have achieved 400 Dexterity Points. All skills and abilities related to Dexterity will have a 10% improvement.]

[You have achieved 500 Dexterity Points. All skills and abilities related to Dexterity will have a 10% improvement.]

[You have achieved 50 Will Points. You have mastered the passive skill, Will.]

"Oho!"

All of his skills that were related to dexterity was improved by 10% due to achieving milestones in the points that he had invested on the stat. His skills improved by a total of 20%.

There was one reason why Minhyuk was so happy with this development…

My farming skills will definitely improve because of this.

Minhyuk might not realize this but he was already leagues beyond the other users in terms of special benefits.

One reason was him being able to acquire all skills related to DEX. It was the same with Len, who became a master-class chef through various jobs related with DEX. Because he learnt from Len, he was able to learn all skills related to dexterity. And all of those skills would have a 20% boost in improvement.

He quickly browsed through his intermediate farming skill. Last time, he invested one of the skill points he got through Ellie in here. He did not invest his skill points on the Food God's Cooking Skills because he couldn't use general skill points to increase the level of the skill. And once he invested the skill point in beginner's farming skill, it improved and became intermediate farming skill.

(Intermediate Farming)

Passive Skill

Level: 1

Effects:

━ Collecting materials and ingredients and digging will become 60+12% faster.

━ There will be a 30+6% chance of digging up good materials.

━ There will be a 2+0.4% chance of digging up special materials.

━ You can grow various things by planting a seed.

"Yeah!"

His skill had certainly improved by 20%, he did not know about these benefits before so he was feeling good just by looking at them.

Minhyuk then looked at his new skill, Will. In fact, this was the first time Minhyuk have heard that a stat could become a skill so he was quite curious about its effects.

(Will)

Passive Skill

Level: 1

Condition for Leveling Up: Increase the Will stat by 50 points.

Effects:

━ Whenever you exert your utmost efforts, passion, determination and indomitable will your fatigue will disappear and your mentality and consciousness will clear up. You will also experience a 10~30% improvement on your abilities related to Dexterity for 1 hour.

━ It will increase your Will acquisition rate.

It was literally the Will stat but it was in the form of a skill. The only difference between the two was that he could only vaguely feel the effects when it was still a stat, but right now the effects are quite clear to him. But with this skill, Minhyuk was sure that he would definitely be able to use Will whenever he tried hard and focused on something.

Minhyuk closed the skills window with a satisfied smile on his face. After he finished looking through all of his skills he went to the bed and furrowed himself in its confines.

"As expected! The best thing to do after eating and cleaning up is lying down in bed!"

I ate a delicious budaejjigae and received different things while I was staying in the palace!

As he continued to lie down on the bed, Minhyuk decided to open Athenae's official homepage and browse through and search for articles related to his quest for fish.

'Food found in the sea.'

When he searched for that, tons of related search words and articles popped up on his screen.

[Nims, I heard the sound of a Kraken yesterday. Here's a certification.]

"Oh?"

A Kraken is a Lv300 high-leveled boss monster and it was considered to be a fairly strong monster. It was also safe to say that it looked like a big, giant octopus.

When that thought crossed Minhyuk's mind, he couldn't stop himself from drooling.

"Slurp!"

After gulping down and wiping off his saliva, he clicked on the article to read more and check on its details.

It turned out that the thing that the user said in his certification was not a Kraken, however, it was still its distant relative. The thing that got caught in the user's fishing rod was a small webfoot octopus.

"Oh, webfoot octopus sounds delicious. Wow, I can't help but think of stir-fried webfoot octopus!"

However, contrary to Minhyuk's expectations, the comments under the article were all negative.

[SeafoodMarketUncle: Is your fishing level only at Lv1? Why learn fishing if it's only at that level? That's a waste of your skill slot.

SoccerKingKangTaegong: I agree. Fishing is one of the most trash skills in the production class that you can learn. Why would you even learn that?

ActionBall: Nims, wouldn't the quality of the materials and ingredients that you will be able to catch increase if your fishing level increases? They say that it would be good to sell it to the chefs.

SoccerKingKangTaegong: I used to really like fishing so I learned fishing here to make it my job. I really liked it to the point that I even called myself 'FishingKingKangTaegong' but it's really different here. In real life, you can catch a lot of fish, right? But here, we can't even catch 20% of what we can in real life... And the material grade? You need to catch at least 20 materials before even getting one C rank material. Fishing is a pit, it's really bad.]

There were a lot of negative comments about fishing however, Minhyuk only saw the things that could be caught in the sea.

It wasn't only the webfoot octopus, one could even catch blue crabs using a fishing rod(?). He could catch a variety of seafood once he arrived at the sea. Minhyuk decided that he has to learn how to fish amidst all of the negative comments plaguing the said skill.

However, a post soon caught his eyes.

[You need to be at Lv200 to hunt in the lowest level hunting ground, Barmil Sea.]

"Eok?!"

He was now faced with a great hurdle in his quest for seafood.

I can only go there if I'm at Lv200? What the hell does that mean?

When he searched for more information, he finally realized the reason why.

The sea was filled with strong monsters that were totally different compared to those on land and hunting could only be enjoyed by high-leveled players who were well-versed in the deep sea.

In other words, Minhyuk was someone who was severely restricted both in his level and strength.

Minhyuk was a bit disappointed that he could not get directly to the sea but he still shook his head and thought positively.

'I'm heading to the Kingdom of Barras anyway.'

When he was on his way to the Emperor's City, Prasell, he received a quest from the coachman Baran to meet with the 'Blacksmith Ron'. According to Baran, Ron had specially hard to come by ingredients on his hands.

He was curious about those cooking ingredients so he decided to go and visit him, besides he also would be going to the Chef's tower to sell his miscellaneous items and buy other ingredients.

Minhyuk also knew that the kingdom has a lot of quests available for different production classes like quests for blacksmiths, quests for chefs and even quests for seamstresses.

And he was able to confirm one fact when he searched through the official homepage…

'There's a lot of cooking quests available in the Kingdom of Barras!'

A lot of cooking ingredients seemed to run out so there were a lot of quests that asked users to hunt the monsters in the vicinity of the kingdom to replenish their ingredients. Of course, the ingredients were mostly ordinary and simple ones but for Minhyuk having a delicious meal was much more important compared to those worries.

"Great! I'll have a good rest today and leave tomorrow!"

Also, the Kingdom of Barras had a good relationship with Eivelis Empire. And its location was also extremely close to the Empire. Due to its close proximity, Ruth had explained before that anyone could take the warp gate in the palace to get to the Kingdom of Barras.

It was a special warp gate that was not open to ordinary users! But Minhyuk was given special permission to use it.

Not long after, Minhyuk fell sound asleep on the comfortable bed.

A scene from 'One Lucky Day [1]' appeared in his dreams. It was the scene where Kim Cheom-ji's wife couldn't eat ox bone soup.

Minhyuk quietly murmured in his sleep…

"Dirty old hag... You should just give me the ox bone soup... Nyam..."

Minhyuk was definitely doing bad things in his dreams.

Brony was laughing wildly.

"Keuhahahahaha! I really caught one hell of a catch today!"

"Wow, isn't that amazing? I didn't expect that for these low-leveled users and NPC merchants."

Ilten, who was standing next to him, responded to his words.

They just finished killing off and looting the NPCs and users they came across on the top of the mountain. Even though the scale was small, there was a large difference between novice merchants and their small gang. Since the amount of things that low-leveled merchants could carry were small they did not expect much profits when they attacked. However, there were a lot of good things that dropped from these novices.

"Come to think of it, that user from earlier had a good name. He was a novice but how can he drop so much good stuff?"

"Keuhuhu. What does it matter? But what was he saying earlier?"

"My right hand is going crazy...? Or something like that."

"Crazy bastard."

"Yes, I think so too."

Brony twirled his finger on the side of his head as if to motion his craziness.

"It's time to leave this place and go to Amenta."

Brony and his colleagues were part of the Horden Guild.

Horden Guild.

It was a guild filled with players with bad etiquettes and manners. It was a normal occurrence for them to kill NPCs and loot them. There was also no hesitation for their members to steal a dungeon or the field as long as they got paid for it. Aside from these looting activities, they would also gladly accept requests that other large-scale guilds wouldn't normally take.

After laughing wildly for quite some time, Brony's forehead suddenly crumpled in annoyance.

"Shit, that 'Right Hand' bastard seems strangely familiar to me."

"Yes?"

"I think I've seen him from somewhere before?"

Brony tried hard to recall where he had seen that strangely familiar face from.

"Ah, he looks like that damn bastard!"

When Brony exclaimed and clapped his hands together, Ilten looked at him strangely.

'It was my dark history.'

Brony did not say much about what he remembered but the memories of that time still resurfaced in his head.

'Was it around that time during middle school?'

He was no different from what he was right now back when he was in middle school. He was your common typical bad guy who bullies others and pocketed their schoolmates' money.

It happened when he was extorting money with his friends.

'Are you Kang Minhyuk from Class 3? I heard that you suddenly went on a rampage and called us up on the rooftop.'

He recalled that Minhyuk was the president of the student council. He was handsome and had good grades so he thought that he was just your usual run of the mill eomchinah [2]. So twenty people went up together with Brony to step down and tried to intimidate him. However, at that time, something surprising happened to them.

'Was it around 15? I think he knocked out 15 people all by himself at that time.'

He thought that everything was over after that, but starting the next day he would attack him with around 2~3 people every day. It lasted for a whole 3 months. They would launch a surprise attack and hide behind the crowds after. But Minhyuk would just call out to them and the outcome would always be the same.

It was at that time that he realized it painfully.

'If you touch that bastard then he would X you over so I begged my friends to stop...'

Brony turned dizzy when he recalled that painful memory.

'That damn bastard. He was really a freak.'

After that incident, the tables had turned and Minhyuk started to extort money from them. Other people did not know what they went through and thought that it was just a funny anecdote.

In fact, Brony and his friends thought that he was just like them. They thought that he was also trying to fill his stomach by extorting money but after quite some time they found out…

'He said that he used the money he extorted from us to support starving children, I think?'

Footnotes

[1] One Lucky Day is a novel written by Hyun Jin-Geon in 1924. It's a realistic novel and was adapted into a feature film by EBS in 2014 (A Luck Day and Spring).

[2] Eomchinah: Mom's friend's son, a term used when moms often compared their sons to other moms sons.