There was no need for any high-end spiritual ingredients. Just by tossing a handful of Spirit Rice into boiling water, its naturally sweet, mellow fragrance earned the pot of rice soup a "Delicious" rating.
At this point, Jiang Xuan had completed three of the Kitchen Apprentice's four job requirements.
As for the last one—cooking thirty complete meals—Jiang Xuan directly chose... boiled eggs.
"Eggs should count as a proper meal. If not, I'll just put a few more on the plate."
The facts proved that boiled eggs counted as a proper meal in this world. However, while carrying it out, Jiang Xuan discovered that he needed one extra step—peeling the shells.
Only peeled eggs, with at least four placed on a single plate, counted as a proper meal.
"...Fine. If the system says so, then so be it."
When the final plate of peeled eggs was placed on the wooden table, Jiang Xuan had fulfilled all four prerequisite conditions for becoming a Kitchen Apprentice.
Without the slightest hesitation, Jiang Xuan immediately chose to take the job.
"Buzz..."
Just as when he had taken on new professions before, a special energy suddenly surged from the depths of his true spirit, instantly flowing through every limb and bone as it gave his fleshly body an entirely new cleansing.
This cleansing barely improved Jiang Xuan's physical condition, yet it brought an exceptionally strange change to his senses. A sour, spicy, crisp, numbing sensation suddenly struck the tip of his nose and tongue, as though tiny electric currents were racing through them, or as if his five senses had undergone an entirely new evolution. The bizarre feeling made Jiang Xuan shudder faintly.
The nose and tongue were already the areas with the densest nerves. This abrupt upheaval in his senses naturally caused an unusual numbness to spread through his entire body.
Before Jiang Xuan could recover from the strange sensation, a series of system notifications rang out in his sea of consciousness.
[You successfully became a Kitchen Apprentice. Your physical condition has been slightly improved.] [You unlocked profession passives: Taste a Hundred Flavors, Smell a Thousand Fragrances.] [You unlocked profession ability: Cooking: Beginner.]
With that, Jiang Xuan's advancement was complete, and he began examining the various abilities he had gained after taking the job.
There was nothing much to say about Cooking: Beginner. It simply allowed Jiang Xuan to grasp the basic methods for preparing common dishes.
What Jiang Xuan truly valued from this job change were the two profession passives.
[Taste a Hundred Flavors: Anything that enters your mouth, whether the basic five flavors of sweet, salty, fresh, sour, and bitter, the original flavor of ingredients, or subtle differences in flavor caused by seasoning ratios, can all be precisely distinguished by you. You may also use your tongue to accurately assess an ingredient's freshness, ripeness, whether it has spoiled or deteriorated, and identify toxins or abnormalities mixed within it.] [Smell a Thousand Fragrances: You can precisely capture the scents of ingredients and spices. Even if hundreds of aromas are mixed together, you can clearly distinguish the source, characteristics, concentration, and direction of each scent.]
The culinary path emphasized color, fragrance, and flavor in equal measure, with fragrance and flavor at its core. These two passives, Taste a Hundred Flavors and Smell a Thousand Fragrances, were like two innate cheating tools. With only a light sniff of an ingredient's natural aroma or a small taste, Jiang Xuan could accurately predict how ingredients would pair and what the final flavor would be after cooking.
With these two abilities, he could even avoid risks such as conflicting ingredients, unbalanced seasoning, and discordant textures in advance, directly reducing a culinary novice's trial-and-error cost to nearly zero.
"With this ability, if I wanted to, I could become a renowned master chef at any time." Jiang Xuan chuckled inwardly.
Unfortunately, he had never become a Kitchen Apprentice in order to be a chef, but in order to "eat."
Thus, the moment his job change was complete, Jiang Xuan opened the Career Panel and looked toward the Kitchen Apprentice's advancement branches, immediately locking onto the requirements for becoming a Gourmet.
At a glance, Jiang Xuan discovered that, much like the Wandering Daoist among the Daoist Acolyte advancement paths, the Gourmet was also an absolute oddity among culinary advancement paths.
For orthodox culinary advancement, he needed to hone the three fundamentals of knife skills, heat control, and seasoning one by one, raise his cooking realm to the third stage—Minor Mastery of Proficiency—and master the cooking methods for a hundred ingredients. Moreover, all one hundred dishes had to be cultivated to the Proficiency realm before he could unlock the Kitchen Apprentice's second-stage advancement—Master Chef.
Some special advancement directions, such as the Heart-Healing Food Physician, even required one to comprehend thoughts such as happiness and protection, infuse one's heartfelt intentions into the food during cooking, and create spiritual dishes that could soothe the soul and heal wounds of the heart.
"The steps are cumbersome, but they're reasonable enough. Without that kind of tempering, one truly can't become a qualified Master Chef." Jiang Xuan understood inwardly, then smiled. "Fortunately, I don't need to take this path."
Among the Kitchen Apprentice's many advancement directions, there were two branches that completely defied convention.
The first was the Gourmet Hunter. The core principle of this path was that the upper limit of cuisine never depended on skill, but entirely on how rare the ingredients were. "Top-tier ingredients require no cooking to become the finest flavors in the world." This saying was the Gourmet Hunter's central creed.
Yet most rare ingredients in the Celestial Immortal Realm were guarded by powerful exotic beasts, and many top-tier ingredients were themselves the flesh and blood of powerful exotic beasts. In order to improve along the culinary path, chefs who took this route would madly temper their bodies and martial skills. Once they were strong enough, they would venture deep into dangerous lands to hunt exotic beasts and seize top-tier ingredients.
"...This path is rather wild."
If he could only take one or two professions, Jiang Xuan would definitely have chosen this path. Unfortunately, he could take many professions, and that meant that when advancing professions, he did not seek to be well-rounded, only to specialize.
"If I combine hundreds of professions specialized to the extreme, I'll naturally become an all-rounder."
And this time, he intended to take the matter of "eating" to the extreme.
It was precisely because the Gourmet's core principle was "tasting," rather than "making," that this path did not require him to improve his knife skills or heat control at all. He could even completely ignore his cooking realm.
[Gourmet Advancement Requirements ①: Taste all Eight Mountain Treasures and Eight Sea Treasures. Every category consumed must reach Rare Grade, allowing you to understand the supreme flavors of mountain and sea. ②: Taste Rare Grade dishes centered around seasonal grains of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, allowing you to understand the principles of nourishing the body in accordance with the seasons. ③: Taste Rare Grade dishes embodying the origins of the five flavors—sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, and salty—allowing you to understand the way of harmonizing the five flavors. ④: Taste dishes prepared using every technique—boiling, stewing, steaming, pan-frying, stir-frying, deep-frying, roasting, braising, baking, simmering, red-braising, and smoking. At least three must reach Rare Grade, allowing you to understand the ever-changing methods of cooking. ⑤: Appraise nine famous waters under heaven. At least three must reach Rare Grade, allowing you to understand that water comes before food. ⑥: Identify thirteen cooking spices. At least three must reach Rare Grade, allowing you to understand the marvel of fragrance drawing forth a hundred flavors. ⑦: Taste eighteen fine brews of the world. At least three must reach Rare Grade, allowing you to understand the delight of wine complementing food. ⑧: Seek out five rare and extraordinary grain seeds of the world, taste their original flavors, and understand that the five grains are the root of nourishment. ⑨: Taste one Delicacy Grade dish.]
"..."
After reading through that long string of requirements, Jiang Xuan fell completely silent. Only after a long while did he say, "Worthy of a Gourmet. You really have to eat every delicacy under heaven before you can successfully take the job."
The only thing that relieved Jiang Xuan was that he was becoming a Gourmet, not a big eater. He only needed to take a small taste of each dish and understand its flavor; he did not need to eat every last bit.
And that gave Jiang Xuan the possibility of completing it quickly.
In Jiang Xuan's view, he would soon be able to complete the Gourmet's job requirements—of course, the reason he had such confidence was because he was in the cultivation world.
If this task were placed in the mortal world, even if he did not have to finish every food he sampled, it would still be as difficult as ascending to the heavens.
Leaving aside how difficult it would be to gather every dazzling variety of dish, just one hard requirement was enough to leave the mortal world's greatest chefs in utter despair—more than half of the Gourmet's job requirements demanded Rare Grade dishes, while the final grand requirement was to personally taste a Delicacy Grade meal.
In the mundane world, every delicacy of that grade was an heirloom treasure that could only be encountered by chance, never sought after.
"But I'm not in the mortal world. This is the cultivation world, and I have a friend to help me... To me, Dong Hao is practically a power-leveling service."
Thinking this, Jiang Xuan did not immediately go looking for Dong Hao. Instead, he first returned to the general goods shop beside the Daoist Academy and used the Spirit Stones he had earned from his previous Excellent rating to purchase all kinds of ingredients needed to become a Gourmet.
"Grains... Spirit Rice, Blood Rice, and Bamboo Rice should count too. This is Fragrant Rice, hmm, and there's Pearl Rice..."
"For alcohol, there's Monkey Wine, Hundred-Blossom Brew, Bamboo Wine, Tiger Bone Wine, Snake Blood Wine..."
Star General Goods Shop truly had a complete selection of goods. Jiang Xuan spent only thirty-three Spirit Stones to gather more than half of the items needed for the Gourmet's job requirements—it could only be said that the gap between the secular world and the cultivation world was enormous. Rare things seldom seen in the mortal world were merely common goods found everywhere on the shelves here.
At the same time, Jiang Xuan's mind was quick. Take Tiger Bone Wine, for instance—he merely dripped two drops onto a boiled egg, and that simple snack directly met the requirement for one of the Eight Mountain Treasures. Ordinary methods naturally could not achieve this, but who could blame the cultivation world's Tiger Bone Wine for being of such high quality?
Likewise, the Eight Sea Treasures could also be completed with a Snake Blood Wine egg dish.
With these little tricks, coupled with Spirit Stones clearing the way, Jiang Xuan soon completed eighty to ninety percent of the various dishes required for the Gourmet's job advancement.
However, this was ultimately only a general goods shop beside a Daoist Academy. Quite a few Rare Grade ingredients, as well as that final Delicacy Grade dish, could not be found here at all.
Fortunately, none of that was a problem.
"It's time for Dong Hao to make his move." Putting away the Career Panel, Jiang Xuan's lips curled into a smile. "Since you want me to cover for you during the Dharma Vein assessment, there's naturally no need for me to be polite about taking a few things from you."
"Besides, you said it yourself. The stronger I am, the better I'll be able to help you pass."
"Delicacy Grade food, and some wines?" Dong Hao wore an astonished expression at Jiang Xuan's request. It was not that the request was difficult, but that he was surprised and puzzled. "Brother Jiang, what do you need these things for?"
"For the assessment." Jiang Xuan shrugged and calmly gave his reason. "Star Sword Peak only gave me a chance to participate. I may not necessarily pass successfully, so I plan to try my luck at Four Seasons Valley later. Didn't you say that Four Seasons Valley's assessment requires one to sense the Four Seasons Dao Resonance by tasting the corresponding grains? I thought I'd try it in advance and build up some experience."
"So that's how it is."
Dong Hao did not find anything inappropriate about Jiang Xuan's explanation.
He had never believed that Jiang Xuan could steadily pass Star Sword Peak's assessment—Spirit Root talent had a deep-rooted influence. Jiang Xuan would have to put in ten times the effort of an ordinary person before he might gain Star Sword Peak's recognition.
Though he had confidence in Jiang Xuan, he did not believe Jiang Xuan's talent in the sword path could be ten times that of an ordinary person.
Even for Four Seasons Valley, he did not think Jiang Xuan could enter it.
Though it had flaws, it was still a genuine mid-grade Dharma Vein, not somewhere one could enter easily.
However, although that was what he thought, Dong Hao understood worldly matters well enough not to say it aloud. He readily agreed to all of Jiang Xuan's requests.
"Delicacy Grade food and some Rare Grade spirit wine are all you need? You don't need anything else?"
"No. This is enough."
"Alright, I'll have Nan Zhi fetch them right away." As soon as the words left his mouth, he immediately instructed Nan Zhi beside him, "Use the Wind-Riding Divine Movement Talisman on the way back. Go quickly and return quickly. Don't delay Brother Jiang's important business."
"Yes, Young Master."
Whoosh—
Just like that, as a gust of clear wind swept up, Nan Zhi's figure shot out from the mountainside like a swiftly flying swallow, racing straight toward the Dong Household estate.
While Nan Zhi was away, Jiang Xuan and the others took out some food to simply fill their stomachs. Seeing that Jiang Xuan did not need anyone to attend to him, Cheng Xiu prepared to step aside and seize the time to cultivate.
Yet just before he was about to enter meditation, Jiang Xuan called him over.
"My family has passed down a calming mantra that can help one cast aside distracting thoughts. Feel it out for yourself."