Chapter 328: A Fox and a Fish?
"Ren... sweetie, it’s time to wake up."
The gentle, familiar voice echoed through a thick fog, pulling Ren upward through layers of dark unconsciousness. ’Mom?’ Ren muttered in her mind, her eyelashes fluttering rapidly as she fought between the blinding light and the lingering darkness.
She shot up with a desperate gasp for air, her hands instinctively flying to her throat as if expecting to cough up a gallon of water.
But there was no water.
Ren blinked, her wide, panicked green eyes swimming with confusion. She was sitting upright on the smooth stone table in the middle of the scullery. She wasn’t drowning. She wasn’t freezing. She was bone-dry, and she was dressed in her emerald silk dress.
Ren frantically patted her chest, her arms, and her thighs. She pinched her own cheek hard enough to leave a red mark.
"Ouch! What the..." she whispered, her voice echoing in the empty kitchen.
How in the world did she get back here?! She couldn’t have just imagined the whole nightmare. There was absolutely no way. She vividly remembered every single detail. She remembered the pepper bomb, the sex in the dark with the Fox Shaman, and the freefall down a pitch-black abyss. She even perfectly remembered the instructions Vex had whispered into her ear to find his secret cave!
’System!’ Ren hissed urgently in her mind. ’System, answer me! How did I get back to the kitchen? What happened after the waterfall?!’
Silence.
Just then, the soft sound of slithering scales and light chatter drifted into the room. Bia and Las came gliding through the stone archway, carrying fresh bundles of swamp-herbs.
Ren scrambled off the bench, sprinting up to them. She grabbed Bia by her shoulders, her eyes wide with frantic desperation. "Who brought me here?! How did I get back into the scullery?!"
Bia and Las froze, staring down at her with identical expressions of confusion.
"Brought you here, Mistress?" Las asked, her white tail curling nervously. "We have no idea what you are talking about. You never left."
"What do you mean I never left?!" Ren’s voice pitched up an octave. She felt like she was rapidly losing her grip on reality.
Bia looked at her with deep concern. "Are you feeling okay, Mistress? You look a bit shaken. When we left to gather information on the feast, you were standing right there by the prep tables. We were only gone for a short while."
Ren stared at them. It was impossible for her to have been standing in the kitchen the whole time, there was a glaring void in her timeline.
Realizing that sounding like a raving lunatic wouldn’t help her case, Ren forced a bright, fake smile onto her face.
"Right! Yes. I’m fine," Ren lied smoothly, waving a dismissive hand. "Just got a little lost in my own thoughts. Spaced out for a minute."
Bia and Las seemed to accept the flimsy excuse, though the concern didn’t entirely leave their eyes. They didn’t dwell on it.
"We got the information you requested, Mistress," Bia announced proudly. "There will be several packs of Timber-Wolves from the forest edge, a clan of Cave Bears, and dozens of other snake beastmen from the outer swamp territories."
Ren was barely listening. She nodded along automatically, but her brain was trying to piece together the shattered fragments of her memory. She couldn’t remember a single thing after hitting the water beneath that waterfall. She remembered a blinding flash of sunlight, a canopy of green forest trees, and vibrant blue skies.
Which was incredibly odd, considering that when she looked out the scullery windows right now, it was pitch black outside. It was nighttime.
It wasn’t just that her memories were blurry; they simply weren’t there at all! Completely blank. A massive chunk of time had been erased from her mind.
But Ren didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on her missing time or existential dread. She had a feast to cook, a pregnant tiger to save, and a trickster fox waiting on death row.
"Thank you, ladies," Ren said, cutting off Las’s description of a particularly hairy bear beastman. "You did brilliantly. I have a perfect idea of the guest list and the menu now."
Ren turned to face the mountain of raw ingredients piled across the stone tables, forcing her culinary brain to override her panic.
She began brainstorming the menu aloud. "Alright, we have two hundred carnivores arriving. We need proteins and bold flavors. We are doing whole-roasted swamp boars on the courtyard spits. I want the skin scored into diamonds, rubbed aggressively with coarse salt and crushed red peppercorns until it crackles like glass. We will stuff their bellies with wild garlic and rosemary-equivalents!"
"Next, the venison," Ren continued, her hands moving in animated gestures. "We will chop it into thick, hearty cubes, sear them in animal fat until they develop a gorgeous brown crust, and then slow-braise them in the giant iron cauldrons. We are adding the Sun-Burst Melons to the stew. The intense mango-vanilla sweetness will melt into the rich, savory meat gravy and blow their minds."
"Crispy, deep-fried lotus root chips dusted with smoked sea salt," Ren declared, almost salivating at her own menu. "And a spicy crawfish boil using the swamp crawlers, swimming in a thick garlic-butter sauce!"
It was going to be a masterpiece of a feast. But she was lacking quite a few necessities and would need the 50,000 XP from her Vara side quest.
"Bia, Las, listen carefully," Ren instructed, dividing the massive piles of vegetables. "I need you to peel every tuber and begin scoring the boar skin exactly like I showed you. I have to run a very quick errand, but I will be right back to start the cooking fires."
Leaving the girls to their prep work, Ren slipped out of the scullery.
She marched down the dark corridors, mentally repeating the instructions Vex had told her. Suddenly, as she rounded a sharp corner, she slammed face-first into a solid, muscular wall of pale flesh.
"Oof!" Ren grunted, bouncing backward.
Large, cool hands instantly shot out, catching her gently by the waist to steady her. Ren looked up and met the striking amethyst eyes of the Snake King.
Syris looked down at her, his initial expression of surprise quickly melting into one of concern as he took in her appearance. The dark circles under her eyes and the frantic, slightly anxious flush on her cheeks betrayed her exhaustion.
He gently cupped her face with one hand, his thumb softly brushing her cheekbone. "Are you okay, Ren? You look unwell."
"I’m fine, Syris," Ren smiled, leaning into his touch. "Just a little stressed about the menu."
Syris frowned, guilt flashing across his features. "It was wrong of me to have you prepare food for a feast of this magnitude without first asking if you could manage it on such short notice. You are so fragile. Unfortunately, it is too late to cancel the invitations, but if you are not feeling well, do not push yourself. They are beasts. They can eat raw meat."
"Cooking makes me very happy, Syris," Ren reassured him, patting his chest. "I promise, it’s okay. I have it completely under control."
Syris nodded slowly, though he still looked unconvinced. "Where are you going, then? The scullery is in the other direction."
Ren’s brain buffered for a bit. "Uhhh." She scrambled for an excuse. "I was just... walking around to clear my head! Yes. It has been a very long time since I cooked such diverse foods for a large group. I just need some fresh air to plan my timing."
"I shall accompany you," Syris offered immediately, stepping to her side.
"No!" Ren blurted out, perhaps a little too loudly. She quickly softened her tone. "I mean, no thank you. If you come with me, I won’t be able to think straight at all."
Syris paused, furrowing his dark brows in confusion. "What do you mean? I will remain silent while you walk."
Ren giggled mischievously. She grabbed the lapels of his snakeskin robe and gestured for him to lean down. Curious, he lowered his ear to her lips.
"If you walk with me," Ren whispered, her voice dropping into a sultry purr, "all I will be able to think about is how good it felt when you bent me over that scullery table this morning, and how desperately I want you buried deep inside me again. I wouldn’t be able to chop a single vegetable."
Syris froze. A bright, visible pink flush rapidly crawled up his neck and flooded his cheeks. His amethyst eyes dilated.
Taking full advantage of his stunned silence, Ren planted a quick, teasing kiss directly on his flushed cheek.
"See you at the feast, your majesty!" she chirped brightly, sauntering away down the corridor with an extra sway in her hips.
The teasing smile instantly vanished from her lips the second she turned the next corner, safely out of his sight.
She followed Vex’s instructions perfectly, until she reached a desolate, unused entrance at the far edge of the castle wall. According to the trickster fox, there was a hole in the stone that looked exactly like the rest of the wall.
Ren let out a sigh, looking at the smooth expanse of black obsidian on both sides of the wooden entrance doors.
"A hole that looks like a wall," Ren muttered sarcastically. "Very helpful, Vex."
She began running her hands flat along the freezing stones, stepping methodically down the corridor, alternating between the left and right walls.
Just as she was pressing her weight against a suspicious-looking crack, the wooden entrance doors at the end of the hall suddenly groaned open.
Ren paused, stepping back into the shadows to avoid detection.
A small army of strange beastmen marched through the doors. They possessed iridescent scales across their cheekbones and gills along their jawlines. Fish beastmen.
But it was the spectacle in the very center of the group that made Ren’s jaw drop.
Being carried effortlessly in the strong, muscular arms of an incredibly handsome, blue-haired fish beastman was a female fox. The female possessed cascading pink hair and a fluffy pink tail that draped elegantly over the fish beastman’s arm. Both of them were breathtakingly, ethereally beautiful. They were scantily dressed in a bizarre, flowing fabric that looked like liquid pearls and woven sea-foam, shimmering with every step they took.
Ren stared in awe. They looked like high-fantasy royalty stepping straight out of a mythological painting.
Just as the handsome blue-haired beastman carried the pink fox directly past Ren’s hiding spot, the female fox suddenly turned her head.
She looked directly into Ren’s eyes, her lips curving into a small, knowing smile, and offered her a wink.
Instantly, the blue-haired fish beastman carrying her snapped his head toward the shadows. He locked eyes with Ren, his striking aquatic features twisting into a harsh, protective glare that screamed ’look away, peasant.’
Ren blinked, utterly bewildered, and watched the ethereal entourage march down the corridor until they disappeared around the bend.
"Well, that was rude," Ren whispered to the empty air, wondering what the grumpy fish guy’s deal was. Shaking her head to clear the bizarre encounter, she turned right back to the obsidian stones and resumed feeling up the wall.