Under everyone's gaze, Qidunston stepped forward, climbed onto the rim of the pot using the same stool as yesterday, and looked inside. Only a foot of soup remained, its colors dazzling and its unusual fragrance reminiscent of flowers and tea.
He gestured, and Victor hurriedly handed him a meter-long ladle from below.
As soon as Qidunston lowered the ladle into the pot, he felt a thick resistance. Only then did his lingering anxiety finally ease completely.
"Bring a basin," he said.
Victor waved a hand, and several people swiftly carried out a wooden serving basin as large as a bathtub. It was the basin used for the village's annual sacrificial feast.
Once they set the basin on another wooden stool, Qidunston began ladling the medicinal soup into it.
As he worked, everyone could see how vividly colored and lustrous the medicinal soup was as it poured from the wooden ladle in his hand. The many precious and rare medicinal ingredients within that unusual fragrance left even the village's oldest hunter, an eighty-year-old man, marveling. An Elemental Beast he could never have encountered in his entire lifetime had been simmered into the most nourishing Elemental Medicinal Soup right before his eyes.
By the time Qidunston stopped, the wooden basin was eighty percent full. People did not even dare approach it, keeping two meters away for fear of knocking it over.
With everyone watching eagerly, Qidunston spoke from atop the stool. "Naturally, this medicinal soup could never have been completed without everyone's help. In return for providing the ingredients, please, all of you, have a taste."
When he finished speaking, Victor and the others began distributing small wooden spoons. More than three hundred people lined up from oldest to youngest, each taking a spoonful in orderly succession and savoring this precious, rarely