"What am I doing? Well... I was just out for a stroll because I had nothing better to do. Come to think of it, I hadn't eaten anything for tens of thousands of years. Now that I finally had a chance to visit the Kalamus Empire and sample its local specialties, there was nothing inappropriate about that, was there?"
Silently staring at the stiff-faced fat noble before him, the cautious Punk remained silent for several seconds before calmly explaining his so-called "reason for coming out" while casually controlling a piece of black bread to leap from the quartermaster's crate beside him into his hand.
Crunch!
He bit off a corner of the bread, gently chewing the cold, coarse flour and feeling the fresh scent of wheat bloom across his lips and teeth, savoring the release of vitamins and minerals...
It had to be admitted that, in terms of texture, these mass-produced loaves personally made by Ibefil were hard and bitter. To Punk, they were less pleasant to chew than a piece of metal. But upon closer tasting, it was not difficult to discover that it was precisely this crude processing method that had perfectly preserved all of the malt's sweet fragrance in ordinary hard bread. As malt sugar gradually transformed and continued to form, that natural aroma was actually rather rich and fragrant.
Of course, starving refugees had no chance to savor the fragrance hidden beneath the black bread's exterior. To keep their food from being snatched away, they had to stuff anything edible into their stomachs as quickly as possible. There was little point in two Legendary professionals standing on a noisy street discussing the taste of disaster-relief rations. Neither of them was interested in a piece of black bread...
In fact, even after the expressionless Morningstar Mage slowly