Zadie Nightwell's brain grinds to a halt. Her rapid-fire commentary stutters into stunned silence. She is a journalist of culinary combat, a documentarian of beautiful food. She does not have the vocabulary for what she is seeing.
"It's… a carrot?" she manages, the words fumbling out into her live broadcast. "But it's… angry at the world?"
The crowd of students gathered outside Emberwood Hall murmurs, a mix of disgust and a strange, thrilling fascination. Caelan stands there, holding the gnarled, twisted carrot like a royal scepter, his declaration still hanging in the twilight air.
From the window of his opulent office overlooking the main quad, Provost Vesper Holt watches Zadie's live feed on his oversized monitor. A thin, cruel smile plays on his lips.
"Let them have their mutants," he says to the empty room. He takes a sip of his perfectly brewed, single-origin coffee. "Let them posture and preach their philosophy of ugliness. The scales do not care about poetry. The scales only care about numbers."
He believed Caelan Veston's power came from trash. And by denying him trash, he had neutered him. This pathetic display with the deformed vegetables was nothing more than the last, desperate gasp of a fool. The first weigh-in tomorrow morning would be a public execution.
Back in the Emberwood Hall kitchen, reality hits like a blast of cold air. A mountain of gloriously imperfect produce is piled on every available surface. It's a vibrant, chaotic, and utterly intimidating sight.
Nyra stares at a carrot that has forked into three distinct, spiraling prongs. She picks up a peeler, her brow furrowed in concentration. She tries to find a flat surface to begin peeling. She can't. The tool, a basic extension of her hand for years, is useless against this organic geometry.
"This is impossible," she growls, her frustration a palpable force in the small kitchen. "To prep this one carrot to a classic standard, I'd have to waste seventy percent of it just to get a usable core!"
Lucien faces a similar problem. He is trying to create uniform cubes from a lumpy Stargazer potato, but its knobs and dimples defy the neat grid of his knife work. He produces a small pile of perfect dice and a much larger pile of awkward, ugly offcuts. He looks at the pile of "waste" he's created, his face a mask of shame. "I'm failing."
This is Holt's true trap. It isn't just about the type of ingredient; it's about the methodology. Aurum's entire curriculum is built on forcing ingredients into uniform shapes. Dicing, turning, tournéing. It's a system that creates waste by design, casting aside anything that doesn't fit the perfect mold.
Caelan steps between them. He doesn't look angry or frustrated. He looks inspired.
He takes Nyra's impossible carrot. He doesn't reach for a peeler. He grabs a stiff-bristled scrub brush.
"You don't fight the shape," he says, his voice a calm anchor in their storm of doubt. "You listen to it. You don't peel it. You clean it. The most flavor in a carrot is right under the skin. Peeling it is an insult."
He scrubs the carrot clean under a thin stream of water. He then lays it on the board. He looks at its three weird prongs. He doesn't try to cut them off to make a straight line. Instead, he follows them. He makes three clean cuts, separating the forks. He leaves their twisted, natural shapes intact.
"And the tops," he continues, pointing to the feathery green foliage they'd all been taught to discard instantly. "That's not waste. It's an herb. Bitter, yes. But with some salt, some garlic, and some oil? It's a sauce."
This is his next lesson. His next Domain made manifest. He calls it Root-to-Leaf Composition.
"You use the whole story," he says. "The root that dug deep into the earth. The skin that protected it. The leaves that reached for the sun. Nothing is waste if you know what it's for."
The revelation clicks into place for Nyra and Lucien with the force of an earthquake. They have been trained to be culinary sculptors, chipping away at a block to find the statue within. Caelan is a mosaic artist, seeing the beauty in every single broken shard and knowing exactly where it fits.
Their work begins again, but with a new philosophy. Lucien stops trying to dice his lumpy potatoes. Instead, he simply washes them and cuts them into rustic, skin-on wedges that follow their natural contours. Nyra abandons her peeler and starts creatively sectioning the mutant carrots.
The menu for the first day of the Audit—a simple lunch for their floor—is born from this new ethos. They will serve "Misfit Garden Roast," a medley of the gnarled vegetables, roasted hot and fast to caramelize their high sugar content. The sauce will be a vibrant, emerald-green "Carrot-Top Gremolata." And the garnish? Caelan takes all the hard-to-use nubs and peelings Lucien had created earlier, slices them paper-thin, and deep-fries them into crunchy, intensely flavorful "Earth-Kissed Crisps."
At noon, the first weigh-in begins. An official in a severe grey suit sets up a high-precision digital scale in the Emberwood common room. The tension is thick. Every other dorm floor proudly presents its waste for the morning—a tiny, sanitized plastic baggie containing a few grams of eggshells or coffee grounds. They earn nods of approval from the official.
Then, it is The Leftover League's turn.
Zadie's camera is live, broadcasting the moment to the entire academy. Milo stands beside her, whispering into his mic like a sportscaster at a high-stakes golf putt.
Caelan steps forward. He is holding a large, stainless-steel bowl, the official container for their collective waste.
The official peers into the bowl. His face registers confusion, then suspicion.
The bowl is completely, spotlessly empty.
"This is a joke," the official snaps. "Where is your waste?"
Caelan gestures to the dorm residents who are happily devouring the Misfit Garden Roast at the tables around them.
"Our waste?" Caelan says, his voice clear and steady. "The ugly bits are the star of the dish. The tops are the sauce. The peels are the garnish." He points to a student crunching loudly on a fried potato skin crisp. "You're looking at it."
A wave of stunned murmuring ripples through the live audience. Provost Holt, watching from his office, leaps to his feet, his face contorted in a mask of pure fury. It's a trick! A loophole!
But the rules are the rules. The official, his face a grim line, has no choice. He takes the empty bowl from Caelan's hands and places it on the polished surface of the digital scale.
The entire academy leans in, watching the number on the bright red LED display.
The scale calibrates.
It settles.
The camera zooms in tight.
0.00g