Chapter 157: Who Will Be the Next Pope? (4) Veronica lightly dabbed the tip of her fork into the tteokbokki broth left on the plate and brought it to her tongue.
At once, the spicy-sweet flavor that had captivated her came through even more vividly.
"If this bunsik called tteokbokki is formally introduced into the Order, we'll be able to grant blessings to more believers more often."
"If my bunsik can help the Order in even that way, I couldn't be happier."
"But if the goal were simply to make it spicy and only inflict pain, there would be no need to put in this much care."
"If it's just spicy and tastes bad, then it isn't cooking."
When it came to how much spiciness each person could endure, everyone had clearly different limits.
From the standpoint of someone who made food, Jinseo didn't want to make dishes he found tasteless. If it was only spicy, it wasn't cooking—spicy had to be delicious for it to count.
That was how he thought, so the line that distinguished whether something was cooking or not was around the level of nuclear fire chicken sauce—the upper limit of "deliciously spicy."
"I'm a cook, after all, so I have to serve food people can eat and enjoy. And if you eat my bunsik and feel happy, that's enough for me."
Even if tteokbokki and various other bunsik and dishes had different effects beyond taste, Jinseo didn't forget that taste mattered most in the end.
"I think the same. In that sense, tteokbokki made me happy in more ways than one. But one serving doesn't seem like enough for me, so please give me one more serving. This time, something milder."
"Yes. Just a moment."
Jinseo brought out the "ordinary" tteokbokki he had been making for the soldiers.
Veronica cautiously took one bite to gauge the level of heat, then began eating at a much faster pace than before.
As someone strong enough with spice to finish the special tteokbokki she had tried for the first time without leaving a single bite, this time she emptied the plate cleanly without taking even one sip of CoolXse in the middle.
"Thank you for the meal again. The spiciness dropped drastically, but that made it good because I could focus more on the taste of the tteokbokki. But it still feels lacking…"
"Then how about this?"
Jinseo took out ramen noodles and shook them in front of Veronica.
A little later, after experiencing a new texture through rabokki—the harmony of rice cake and noodles—a broad smile spread across Veronica's face.
After continuing to eat various kinds of tteokbokki like that, Veronica only seemed satisfied once she finished the last thing she ordered—rose tteokbokki—and then rubbed her stomach.
"You're still young, yet it's astonishing that you can keep serving such excellent food. If you don't mind, I'm curious—how old are you?"
"My age? I'm the same age as the cardinal."
"What?"
Veronica sprang to her feet and stared hard at Jinseo's face.
"It's a bit awkward to say it myself, but people tell me I look much younger than my actual age."
"I see. Well, my older sister also looks much younger than her actual age…"
Veronica abruptly trailed off as she linked Fedora and Jinseo together.
"Lee Jinseo, since when have you known my older sister?"
"It was around last spring, so it hasn't even been two years. I met Her Eminence not long after I came to the Francia Continent. And…"
Jinseo stroked his right wrist with his left hand—the wrist that used to be plagued by tendonitis.
"Her Eminence is my benefactor. Thanks to her blessing, my chronic condition healed cleanly, letting me focus solely on cooking, and since she designated the food truck as a sacred relic, I've benefited a lot."
Jinseo recalled Fedora when she first came to the food truck.
At first, his eyes had gone to her beautiful appearance, but once he learned she held the high position of cardinal, he thought he couldn't approach her easily.
However, as they spent more time together, their relationship gradually began to change.
They fought a desperate battle with a monster they encountered by chance at Orte Harbor—the kraken—and they even visited the capitals of two countries after receiving an invitation from a king.
They crossed to another otherworlder continent, the Krudian Continent, and recently, he even left Selphier Castle and traveled with her alone for three days on the road to the Holy Land.
As a result, for Jinseo, Fedora had come to hold meaning beyond just a benefactor and a regular customer.
But Jinseo did not express those feelings. He only kept them in his heart.
"I'm jealous."
Veronica glanced pointedly at Jinseo's right hand, the one that had received Fedora's blessing.
"I, too, once stayed in the Holy Land with my older sister. Back then, I was probably…"
She trailed off and fell silent for a moment, then drank a cup of Fish Cake Soup and began talking about what had happened in the Holy Land.
Fedora, who joined the Order at the later age of twenty compared to other clergy, did not shy away from hard work, determined to blend into the Order as quickly as possible.
Drawn in by Fedora's attitude of always taking the lead in everything, Veronica became close friends with Fedora despite their six-year age gap.
Veronica, who revealed she was from an orphan background, confessed that she had regarded Fedora not merely as a "sister" by the Order's form of address, but as real family.
"There was a time when my older sister and I cooked inside the Holy Land, but unfortunately, she had no talent for cooking. I was the same."
Veronica lifted gimbap in her right hand and examined the neatly cut cross-section.
"Back then, I couldn't even imagine cutting food this smoothly. Still, after staying up all night in the kitchen and working at it, we managed to make it edible. Even after that, I still cook for myself sometimes."
"The inquisitor does it personally?"
"Because of my position, I often have to wander all over the continent, so it ended up that way."
Veronica dipped the gimbap into the tteokbokki broth and took a bite, then blinked her eyes wide.
"Lee Jinseo, with this dish called gimbap, if the ingredients are prepared, you don't need a separate cooking or grilling process, right?"
"Yes, that's right."
"Then would it be all right if I tried making it once?"
After a brief moment of consideration, Jinseo nodded and let her into the kitchen.
After washing her hands neatly and putting on sanitary gloves and a mask, Veronica took the kitchen knife resting beside the cutting board in her hand.
Jinseo handed her a sheet of paper with drawings on it.
"Use this as a reference. It's a gimbap recipe Her Eminence personally wrote."
"My older sister wrote it?"
"I can't write the Francia Continent language."
When Veronica looked at the recipe Fedora translated and wrote in the Francia Continent language, her pupils trembled.
The handwriting, familiar from having seen it many times, was unmistakably Fedora's.
After silently staring at the recipe for a while, Veronica closed her eyes tightly, then opened them and began chopping.
Tap tap tap tap.
The ingredients that would go inside the gimbap were cut to the exact same length and thickness, as if measured with a ruler.
"Next, spread the rice over the seaweed… and then…"
Tap tap tap tap.
After rolling one line of gimbap according to the recipe, Veronica began chopping again.
Seeing the gimbap slices cut to the same width, just like when she cut the ingredients, Jinseo couldn't hide his admiration.
For someone who judged her own skill as "only to the point of being edible," Veronica handled the knife far too deftly.
"This should be enough."
Veronica placed ten rolls of gimbap, completed in an instant, on the counter seats, then came out of the kitchen and beckoned the soldiers over with a gesture.
"I tried making it once for the brothers."
She set the plate of gimbap down on the soldiers' table.
The soldiers took a bite while harboring doubts about whether gimbap made by her rather than Jinseo would really taste good.
At that moment, the soldiers all looked at Veronica at the same time with astonished eyes.
"How is it?"
"I-it's delicious!"
"To personally make bunsik for us… thank you so much!"
It wasn't because she was someone high-ranking. It was because it truly tasted good.
The soldiers began wolfing down the gimbap, and Jinseo placed the udon broth he had separately put into a plastic bottle on their table and returned to the kitchen.
"It reminds me of the time my older sister and I used to laugh and chatter while eating our failed dishes."
Veronica smiled with satisfaction as she watched the soldiers eagerly eat the gimbap.
"I… wanted my older sister to continue staying in the Holy Land with me. Me as the captain of the church knight order, my older sister as a cardinal… no, she didn't even need to be in such a high position. It would've been enough just to be with her."
Holding up a leftover gimbap end, Veronica resumed the story she had paused earlier.
"But my older sister applied to be dispatched to Kaysus Cathedral of the Doren Kingdom. Even though I repeatedly tried to persuade her not to. As it turned out, the time she applied for dispatch was right after her grandfather took up a post as headmaster of a nearby mage tower."
"Ah, so that's what was going on."
"I wasn't unaware that my older sister had a grandfather. But she said she had no family left, and I wanted to remain her only family. She was the only person I had ever felt that kind of 'family' feeling with."
Veronica closed her eyes tightly as she recalled the painful memory.
"After my older sister was dispatched to Kaysus Cathedral, I left the church knight order that protects the Holy Land and chose the path of an inquisitor. It wasn't because I felt a mission to punish those who defile the Order's name… no. I only wanted to escape the Holy Land filled with memories of my older sister."
Come to think of it, the church knights said they couldn't leave the Holy Land in principle.
Recalling what he talked about with the church knights who escorted the food truck to the Holy Land, Jinseo could understand why she had become an inquisitor.
But at the same time, Veronica's feelings toward Fedora felt extreme, and that was harder to understand.
"Only after I saw the outside world—so different from the Holy Land—and met far more people than I ever did there, did I realize it. I did see my older sister as family, but I was also treating her as my family alone, binding her down."
"Even now, what about properly telling Her Eminence how you feel and talking it out?"
At Jinseo's cautious suggestion, Veronica shook her head.
"It's far too late. The relationship between my older sister and me isn't something that can be solved by simply untangling old feelings. Too many circumstances piled up and made it complicated."
Veronica finally put the gimbap end she had only been holding into her mouth and chewed.
"Thank you for the meal."
With a lonely-looking smile, she slung her hammer onto her back, closed the thick book at her waist again, and left.
In the meantime, after finishing the gimbap, the soldiers cautiously took positions on either side of the food truck.
Perhaps because they saw Veronica leave with a lonely face, the soldiers stayed quiet, keeping their mouths shut and focusing only on their duty of guarding the food truck.
A little later, Fedora came to visit the food truck alone.
"Jinseo, the sister who was here before I came… could it have been…"
"Are you referring to Inquisitor Veronica?"
"So it was…."
Seated at the counter, Fedora lowered her head deeply.
"All I ever feel toward that child is guilt."
With a deep sigh, she began to speak of the seven years she spent in the Holy Land.
Just as Veronica described the time she spent in the Holy Land with Fedora as happy, Fedora also said that thanks to Veronica, she was able to overcome the sorrow of losing her parents.
Having unintentionally listened to both of their stories back and forth, Jinseo realized that much of what Fedora recalled and spoke about overlapped with what Veronica said earlier.
It wasn't precious memories for only one side—both sides kept them as happy memories… then what's the problem? Why do they avoid even talking to each other?
"Veronica said it would be difficult to return your relationship to how it used to be."
At Jinseo's words, Fedora let out a long sigh.
"She's right. Things have gotten very complicated. The truth is…"
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