studiobondurri Chapter 126: Unclean foods
Chapter 126: Unclean foods
"Unclean food like snake," Kael continued, his tone carrying the composed certainty of someone reading from a list they had already finalized, "pigs, wolves — these are things I’ll never eat."
Noah chuckled.
It came out fuller than his usual quiet sounds, genuine enough to push past the brief containment he normally applied to reactions.
The word unclean sitting next to pig and wolf and snake, delivered with that particular Kael gravity, was more than his composure wanted to manage silently.
"Unclean food?" he said, the laughter still present at the edges of his voice. "Haha."
The pig was the detail that made it specific.
The beast before the snake had been exactly that — a mana beast in the rough shape of a pig, massively proportioned, its hide thick and its charge genuinely dangerous, earth element with the dense body that element tended to produce in its hosts.
Advanced grade, a solid encounter, and Kael had ended it with the same casual efficiency he brought to everything. Noah had noted the core, noted the lack of interest in the flesh, and moved on without pressing the question.
Now he had his answer.
The pig had made it onto Kael’s list. Not a general category like predators or fanged things — pig specifically, named individually, placed alongside snake and wolf in a taxonomy of things that the ancient dragon had apparently assessed and found wanting.
The fact that it had been the most recent encounter meant the classification was fresh, and fresh enough that it had come out in the same breath as the older entries without any self-consciousness about the specificity.
Noah let the laughter settle and looked at Kael, who was still flying his circles with the composed energy of someone who had made a reasonable statement and was waiting for the conversation to catch up to its obvious correctness.
He had genuinely wondered about it.
Not in a pressing, urgent way — it hadn’t been the most important question generated by his time in this forest — but the pattern had been there to observe from the first encounter.
Every beast, every corpse, Kael had moved directly to the core and ignored everything else.
No interest in the flesh, no engagement with the most obvious and available nutrition source lying directly in front of him.
Noah had noticed and had been turning it over in the background, his mind cycling through possible explanations without landing on any of them with confidence.
Instinct, perhaps. Or something about how dragon physiology processed different kinds of input. Or a quality of the mana in the flesh being insufficient to register compared to the compressed concentration of a core.
He hadn’t landed on this.
He hadn’t come close to this, actually.
The reason Kael declined to eat raw beast flesh was that he considered it beneath him.
Not nutritionally inadequate — beneath him. Categorically unacceptable in the same way that certain things were unacceptable to people who had decided they had standards and intended to maintain them.
The flesh was unclean. The beasts were the wrong kind of beasts. And the preparation — the raw, immediate, available-right-now quality of it — violated something in Kael’s assessment of what his meals were supposed to be.
His food needed to be cooked.
Noah held that for a moment.
Cooked. The way human food was cooked. Prepared, processed, transformed from its raw state into something that had been deliberately altered before being consumed.
It was so entirely a human preference — or more broadly, a civilization preference, the mark of a species that had decided at some point that raw was the starting condition and done was the destination — that its presence in Kael produced a specific kind of surprise.
Mana beasts ate raw. Everything at the animal level of the world’s hierarchy ate what it encountered in the state it encountered it.
The concept of preparation, of altering food before consumption as a standard practice rather than an occasional accident, was something that belonged to the part of the world that built fires and had opinions about them.
Kael had that preference.
’Is this because of me?’ Noah thought. ’Because I’m his master?’
The connection between them was deep and continuous and ran in both directions — Noah had already observed that Kael absorbed more than explicit communication through the link.
Attitudes, preferences, the texture of how Noah engaged with the world. The dragon had come into existence with intelligence but without experience, and the experience he had been accumulating since hatching had been filtered almost entirely through proximity to one person.
A person who cooked his food.
A person who had never, in Kael’s entire short existence, eaten anything raw or expressed any interest in doing so.
A person whose relationship to food included preparation as a standard, assumed, non-negotiable step between ingredient and consumption.
If Kael had absorbed enough of Noah’s orientation toward things to develop opinions about food quality and preparation standards, it wouldn’t be the most surprising form of influence the link had produced.
The preference for cooked food, the specific categories of unclean — these sat alongside the dragon’s love of books and his tendency toward elaborate self-presentation as things that were distinctly not what an isolated animal would have developed on its own.
They were things that lived in proximity to a human and had picked up the habits.
Noah extended his hand toward the snake’s corpse.
A thin gray tear opened on his palm — clean-edged and precise, the same spatial opening that he used to bring out his mask and other things.
It appeared without sound and without the kind of visual distortion that dramatic mana use typically produced, simply there and ready.
The snake’s corpse moved toward it.
The pull wasn’t violent — more like a steady, deliberate suction, the body sliding across the forest floor and into the tear.
Even with the size of the snake, it was still easily absorbed into Noah’s storage space, leaving no trace except for the blood splattered on the ground.
After storing away the mana beast, the tear finally closed.
Noah lowered his hand and let it fall back to his side.
’Since you won’t eat it,’ he thought, his eyes moving briefly to the spot where the corpse had been, now just scattered bushes and a faint trace of blood on the roots, ’I’ll store them away.’
He had been doing this consistently since the first encounter — the dog, the wolves, the pig, each body collected and stored once Kael had extracted whatever he was interested in from them.
Mana beast flesh had value. The materials varied by species and element and grade, but the market for them was real and the guild’s merchants knew what to do with them.
None of it was worth leaving on the forest floor simply because Kael had decided the creatures didn’t meet his culinary standards.
He glanced at the system tab.
[Weekly Quest Completed!]
[Rewards Granted: 50 EXP, 5 Supreme Points]
’Right,’ he thought. ’Quest completed.’
’Status,’ he thought.
The screen assembled itself with its usual clarity.
[Supreme Magus System$&@?!]
[Host: Noah Whiteheart]
[Level: 23]
[EXP: 100/100$&@?]
[Rank: Arch Magus (low)]
[Elements: Ice, Lightning]
[Mana: 7000/7000]
[Health: 1500/1500]
[Strength: 33]
[Agility: 34]
[Stamina: 33]
[Endurance: 32]
[Sense: 37]
[Supreme Points: 30]
He read through it at the pace of someone reviewing something familiar rather than encountering it fresh, his eyes moving across each line to know exactly where the relevant information sat.
The combat stats hadn’t shifted significantly from the last time he had checked — strength, agility, stamina, endurance, sense all sitting in the low thirties with sense maintaining its slight lead over the others, which had been consistent since early on and reflected something about how his development had been weighted.
The mana pool held at seven thousand, the health at fifteen hundred, both numbers representing the current ceiling of his arch magus low rank.
But two things stood out.
The EXP had reached its cap — one hundred out of one hundred, the bar full and waiting.
And the Supreme Points.
Thirty.
He had been accumulating them steadily — the weekly quest rewards delivering five at a time, the completion bonuses adding to the total — and they had gathered to a number that represented meaningful purchasing power within the system.
It was enough to make decisions with, enough that sitting on them without a plan felt like leaving something on the table.
However, he didn’t want to spend them now, and still planned on stacking them for a little while more.
He closed the status screen.
"That’s enough for today," he said, turning to Kael. "Let’s go home."
Kael descended from his position immediately, the drop carrying the ease of a creature that had been ready for this conclusion before it was announced.
He came down in a smooth arc and landed on Noah’s shoulder, his claws finding their grip with the light precision that had become familiar, his tail curling once before settling.
The shadow beneath Noah’s feet stirred.
A black smoky circle opened in the ground — wider than the compact portals Kael had used during the fights, sized for a person, its edges carrying the same dark shimmer that all of the dragon’s shadow constructs shared. It expanded to its full diameter and held there, steady and patient.
Noah stepped into it.
The descent wasn’t falling — it was something more deliberate than that, a smooth transition from standing on solid ground to moving through the shadow space that existed between marked points.
The forest floor gave way to something that wasn’t darkness exactly but wasn’t light either, the brief in-between that shadow travel occupied, and then —
His room.