Senzaemon Nakiri felt even more melancholy.
He'd never imagined that the red bean rice his good granddaughter made would be so dangerous. If there hadn't been so few people around, his lifelong reputation...
What did it mean to watch someone else's story while shedding your own tears? Senzaemon Nakiri understood it all too well now. That red bean rice was far more than a simple dish. It was a story in its own right, describing two people falling in love, longing for one another, and carrying feelings for each other they could never express. Even with regrets, they still yearned for one another, yet a happy ending remained out of reach...
A Heart of Knots? That red bean rice certainly lived up to its name.
Simply watching it would have been bad enough, but the feelings Erina had poured into that red bean rice were enough to resonate with anyone...
Under that resonance, unless a diner's life had been utterly free of regrets, tears were inevitable.
What Senzaemon hadn't expected was that Erina's cooking had become so... Wait!
Senzaemon was baffled. How had his good granddaughter's skills improved so rapidly? That red bean rice had clearly surpassed the Elite Ten's signature dishes. It was probably already at the level of an Elite Ten graduate...
Yet Erina was only in middle school!
A middle schooler was already on par with an Elite Ten graduate?
Senzaemon fell into a state of utter silence.
If Erina's cooking had reached this level already, what heights would she reach by the time she graduated from the Elite Ten? Could this be the opening of the Era of Gems? Hadn't a monster emerged from the Doma Family? Was the Nakiri Family producing one, too? But Erina had never...
Wait!
Could it be...
His good granddaughter had