The most important part of making hot pot was often the soup base. After all, there was little to fuss over when it came to the ingredients themselves, and some ingredients only had modest quality requirements.
Of course, even so, some unscrupulous vendors would cut corners through underhanded methods, lowering their costs, as they called it, to increase their profit margins.
For example, they might pass off blood from other animals as a more expensive kind. Some went further and passed off rabbit meat as lamb, while some even more shameless vendors would consider passing off rat meat as lamb or beef.
Such things were common even in the world of Pokémon. After all, people's morals could easily sink below the lowest standards; it was impossible for that to become completely different simply because this was another world.
Fortunately, Heath held himself to very high standards of professional ethics as a chef. If he said the ingredients he prepared were beef, they were beef; if he said they were lamb, they were lamb. Although he had Dialga's Knife, Heath would not use rotten or spoiled meat and restore it to freshness with Dialga's Knife. While that would indeed let him earn more money, now that he was free of debt, Heath no longer had such a strong obsession with making money.
Heath went to the supermarket to buy the seasonings he needed, along with some supplies for making hot pot bases. For conveyor-belt individual hot pots, the bases could generally be divided into spicy and numbing broth, clear broth, tomato broth, pickled mustard greens broth, and so on.
Of course, people's tastes always varied somewhat from place to place. For example, in a city where people particularly enjoyed seafood, a seafood broth might be a good choice.
However, Heath had