For the next while, Mayuna sat at the dining table and watched Ruben work alone. He took out a bag of flour, added water, mixed it, and kneaded the dough. The process went on for quite some time before he finally began rolling out the wrappers. He took a brown rolling pin from the cabinet and slowly rolled the dough flat.
"That thing..."
Who was Mayuna? She was the greatest Archmage on the Holy Continent, incomparably sensitive to fluctuations of magical power. That was precisely why she was even more confused. Why did that wooden stick radiate such intense magic?
"A rolling pin."
"But..."
"It's just a rolling pin."
"Oh, ohhh, right there! My body is rubbing against dough as soft as a girl's breasts. This feels incredible!"
A young man's voice came from the rolling pin, startling Mayuna. She put aside the question of why it could speak for now. Judging from what it said, this guy was definitely a pervert.
"Can a rolling pin make that kind of sound?"
"You can hear my voice? Your power is quite extraordinary, little girl."
The rolling pin seemed to hear Mayuna's words. A purple eye opened in the middle of the wooden rod, and it spoke to her.
"You called me little girl? What are you?"
"Me? You can call me Dragon... Ah! My eye!"
The purple eye on the rolling pin blinked at Mayuna, only for her finger to ruthlessly jab into it.
"Because it was disgusting."
Only after seeing Ruben's dissatisfied expression did Mayuna withdraw her finger. She even cast a purification spell on it, as though she had poked something filthy.
"He's important to me, even if he's a little disgusting."
"Is that so? Dragon, Dragon... I feel like I've heard that name somewhere. Wait, aren't you one of the Seven Deadly Sins that Demon King Satan used to tempt angels into falling?"
Mayuna neither confirmed nor denied Ruben's complaint. She repeated the rolling pin's name several times, her expression growing increasingly solemn. A nonliving object capable of speaking was already worthy of being called sacred, and not every holy relic could awaken its own soul.
She had heard the name Dragon from her companions many times before. She quickly connected him to the ancient War of the Gods. According to the legends left behind by the Church, Demon King Satan had been unable to defeat the angel army of the God of Light, so he had resorted to crooked means to tempt one-third of the angels into falling. Those crooked means were the renowned Seven Deadly Sins.
"If you can learn my true identity from my alias, then you must be an acquaintance of Satan's, right? Or perhaps you know one of the other six?"
Amusement flashed in Dragon's purple eye as he turned the tables on her. In Holy Continent legends, Demon King Satan was hardly a good person. No matter how Mayuna had learned his identity, she had already stepped into muddy waters.
"I don't know him."
Mayuna immediately put on a stern face and denied it.
"That's right. I am the Sin of Lust, known as the Invisible Blade. For the crime of angering me, you shall use your flat chest to—ah!"
Dragon openly admitted his identity. His exceptionally blatant gaze seemed as though it wanted to see through Mayuna's clothes, and then his single eye was poked blind again.
"Can I kill him?"
Mayuna's expression could only be described as pitch-black. Her chest might not have been spectacular, but compared to an ordinary twenty-year-old woman, it was perfectly average. Of course she was furious at Dragon calling it flat.
"No."
"Why is Lust in your hands? And your relationship is that of master and servant? So you really did have wicked intentions when you tried to take off my clothes yesterday!"
Mayuna was enraged to see Ruben protecting that damned rolling pin. Then she remembered certain details from yesterday and hurriedly stepped back, keeping a safe distance from him.
"This guy pretended to be a tree outside my house for five whole years."
Seeing that Mayuna had misunderstood him as some kind of degenerate, Ruben did not rush to explain. He picked up Dragon and continued rolling the dough.
"?"
Mayuna could not connect her question to Ruben's answer at all. Only after she pressed him for details did Ruben tell her that when he had first arrived here, there had been a bare tree in front of the cabin. With his vast knowledge, Ruben had seen at a glance that the tree was fake, but he had not bothered with it. Five years passed like that before the tree finally could not endure any longer and spoke to him first, forming an inseparable, cursed bond with him.
"Yes. I observed him in secret for a long time, then ultimately decided to follow him for the rest of my life."
"That's not right. If you really are Lust, then you should be able to destroy a nation with a casual wave even without a master. What do you want from following an ordinary person with no magic?"
Mayuna still doubted Dragon's motives. As Demon King Satan's right-hand man, someone capable of contending with the God of Light, there was no way he could be content staying in an ordinary person's hands.
"How shallow. All you humans want is my power. After so many years of people fighting over me, I've had enough! But my partner is different. He has no magic and cannot make me do anything. Ours is the purest friendship."
Anger appeared in Dragon's single eye. During the thousands of years since Demon King Satan disappeared, these scattered powers had been exploited throughout the Demon Realm by all kinds of ambitious people. Dragon had long grown tired of that nonsense, which was why he had turned into an inconspicuous fake tree to live out the rest of his days. As for why he followed Ruben, it was because he wanted to learn about the strange tools in this strange human's hands.
"Then what are you doing now?"
"Being a rolling pin."
"Haaah..."
Mayuna sighed speechlessly. Ruben truly could not use him to do anything magical, but he was clearly using him to do something physical. Did that not count as using him?
"Finished. You can rest now."
While they had been chatting, Ruben had already rolled out the wrappers. After thanking Dragon, the rolling pin changed. Its body became a little slimmer, like an ordinary branch, then it stuck straight into Ruben's head. From Mayuna's perspective, it looked as though a branch had grown out of Ruben's head.
"What are you doing?"
"Resting."
Dragon answered simply. Of course, it was not merely rest. What Dragon liked most was the knowledge stored inside Ruben's mind. The knowledge from another world fascinated him endlessly, and there was so much of it that even he would need thousands of years to go through it all. At that moment, however, his attention was naturally focused on the erotic literature.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. Humans from that world even have such methods? Compared to them, I'm as innocent as a virgin."
Hearing drooling sounds from above his head, Ruben felt rather helpless. Who knew what that man calling himself a god had been thinking? This so-called "all knowledge" included all sorts of things he did not need, such as countless games and novels, as well as Dragon's beloved erotic books. Could these things really count as the crystallization of human civilization?
Mayuna ignored Dragon and continued watching Ruben cook. He wrapped the filling he had prepared in one dough wrapper after another. With his unusual technique, crescent-shaped dumplings quickly took form. After wrapping dozens of them, he tossed them into a pot of boiling water to cook.
"Eat."
Before long, Ruben set a plate of dumplings on the table. Their translucent skins clearly revealed the filling inside. They were beautiful, but Mayuna had never seen this kind of food before.
"Can this thing be eaten...?!"
Mayuna picked up a dumpling with chopsticks and sniffed it. Naturally, she had only just learned how to use chopsticks. Unlike the fragrant noodles she had smelled yesterday, the dumplings gave off no scent on the outside. So, with the intention of trying one, she opened her mouth and bit off half a dumpling.
Mayuna's mind went completely blank. Her taste buds cheered with joy as the rich broth sealed within the dumpling flowed completely into her mouth. She swore she had never eaten anything so delicious. Never doubt Ruben's cooking skills—having obtained all of humanity's wisdom from Earth, even the simplest dish he made was world-class. Even the Archmage lost herself in that flavor.
"Ugh, I can't eat any more..."
No matter how strong she was, Mayuna was still only a normally sized young woman, so naturally she could not eat much. After eating more than ten dumplings, she reluctantly set down her chopsticks and watched helplessly as Ruben finished every remaining dumpling.
"If you eat like that, you'll suffer later."
"Huh?"
One hour later
"Ugh, ughh, my stomach..."
Mayuna lay on the sofa and moaned miserably. The dignity of an Archmage and her cold beauty image, which she had desperately maintained, were utterly destroyed. She could not understand why food that had been so delicious now made her feel as if she had been poisoned.
"Now you know why I gave you porridge. That's what happens when you binge eat with a bleeding stomach."
Ruben looked at Mayuna coldly. No matter the world, experiencing something with one's own body was always more effective than listening to someone else's words.
"You bastard! You knew this would happen, and you still gave it to me on purpose!"
Mayuna could hardly believe Ruben was so sinister. All she could do was grit her teeth and glare fiercely at him.
"Yep."
"Just you wait!"
Mayuna puffed up her cheeks and buried her face against the edge of the sofa, refusing to look at that hateful face. She began plotting how to get revenge once she recovered. Perhaps throwing him onto the Ten Thousand Year Snow Mountain to freeze for a few minutes would be nice.
"Ruben, I want dumplings again."
When dinner time came, Mayuna appeared beside Ruben right on schedule and made her request.
"Why haven't you learned your lesson?"
Ruben stopped what he was doing as he prepared to cook porridge and looked at Mayuna in confusion.
"Although I felt terrible after eating them, the process of eating them was incomparably joyful. I can endure it completely."
"...What a strange person."
Ruben was silent for a while before speaking. No matter the world, there really were people who would never learn their lesson, even if it killed them.
"You're one to talk."
P.S. Please bookmark and recommend.
P.S. Can something scholars do really be called lewd?
Before you continue