"Hello, everyone. I'm Fuyumi Mizuhara, the examiner for this assessment. My test is simple: basic skills."
The class erupted when Fuyumi Mizuhara announced herself. Even Kael looked surprised, after all, the original story hadn't gone into detail about Mizuhara's assessment.
In the original, only a few examiners' tests were described: Hinako Inui's assessed thought processes—she deliberately led students, and if someone saw through her guidance the exam became easier. If they didn't, passing was still possible but much harder.
Yutaka Sekimori's test measured stamina and efficiency, without enough endurance, a busy service would crush a chef and the restaurant would fall apart.
And Kojiro Shinomiya's exam was basically unsuitable for ordinary students, since it included a certain-death element: if you hit a bad ingredient, you were done for.
Mizuhara then explained her assessment in detail. After hearing it, Kael's surprise grew—by difficulty, Mizuhara's test was far tougher than Hinako's or the others'. Hinako and the others had students make a single dish, testing overall competence. If one area lagged, you could cover it with strengths elsewhere.
Mizuhara's was different—pure, uncompromising basic skills. As Mizuhara put it: if any single basic skill failed, you'd be expelled immediately.
The point of her exam was clear: you could have weaknesses, but they couldn't be severe. Otherwise, you'd be expelled.
"Start the first test: knife work. From the ingredient station, take cucumbers and slice them, julienne them, and make cucumber "sugata" (decorative cloak-style cucumber). Ten minutes. Begin!"
At Mizuhara's cue, students surged to the ingredient area. Ten minutes seemed generous and the tasks looked easy, but a single mistake meant restarting, failure could be costly.
Kael and Alice didn't rush like the others. Simple reasons: they were confident in their basics, and someone had already cleared the way. Several members of the Chinese Cuisine Research Society were in the class; without Kael saying a word they opened a path.
With those people helping, Kael and Alice easily grabbed their ingredients.
Both took only three cucumbers each, unlike some students who grabbed a dozen at once.
Mizuhara's eyes stayed on Kael and Alice; they were clearly the two strongest in the class—both Four-Star Chefs.
"That's a strange knife. Why is it made like that?" Mizuhara blinked when Kael took out his Hundred-Hole Knife. She'd never seen a blade shaped like that,so many holes and a laughably thin profile.
It looked razor-sharp but might be useless on very hard ingredients.
Then Kael started cutting. Mizuhara's eyes widened—his knife visibly bent, curling like a dragon around the cucumber. In the blink of an eye, the cucumber's peel disappeared. The blade snapped back to normal. The students around them were stunned.
Only Alice and the Chinese Cuisine Research Society members showed only mild surprise; they'd seen Kael's impossible knife skills before.
Mizuhara quickly noticed something stranger: every thin cucumber slice Kael cut flew a short distance and landed precisely on a plate beside him. One after another, the slices stacked as if meticulously plated.
Thin cucumber slices usually cling to the blade, and Kael's Hundred-Hole Knife should help prevent sticking. But Mizuhara couldn't understand why the slices flew out with such precision.
While she was puzzling it out, Kael had already finished slicing.
Julienning was even simpler, and the cucumber Strips also flew away with the same phenomenon. Mizuhara's curiosity peaked; she couldn't figure out how he did it.
The final cloak-style cucumber was astonishing—while others had barely peeled their cucumbers, Kael had finished everything in under thirty seconds.
"What a monster." Alice shook her head. If this had been anyone else she might have tried to compete, but against Kael she'd long since given up. Having witnessed Kael's skills, she felt no drive to beat him.
Kael finished the knife test and carried his cucumbers over to Mizuhara.
"Good—passed. Your speed is remarkable. But I have one question: how did you make the slices and Strips fly off like that? If it's a secret, you don't have to answer."
Mizuhara asked the question she couldn't solve.
"It's not a secret. It's because of my knife," Kael said. "This is my Hundred-Hole Knife. It's extremely thin, so the blade can bend. When I finish a slice I use a subtle wrist technique to bend the blade.
The bend and the blade's snap-back launch the cucumber slice or Strip. The flex is too slight to see clearly, but the blade's recoil propels the pieces precisely."
Kael gave a concise explanation.
"So you spring them off with the knife. The principle sounds simple, but actually doing it isn't easy, at least, I can't do it," Mizuhara said, sucking in a breath.
Kael made it sound trivial, but the control required for such variable force was staggering. The launched slices didn't scatter randomly, they landed in ordered arrangement. That meant every cut's force had to vary in tiny, deliberate increments. Just imagining the control blew Mizuhara away.
"You mean even Senpai Mizuhara can't do it? That's insane—she's a Six-Star Chef!" someone whispered, and the class buzzed again. Their hands paused as they stared at Kael like he was a monster.
"You're daydreaming, time won't wait." Mizuhara snapped at the students and they snapped back to work. No matter how extraordinary Kael was, only he had passed so far; the others still had to clear the tests themselves.
"Since you've completed the first test, move on to the second: basic seasoning—measuring and combining ingredients." Mizuhara stuck a formula sheet on the blackboard with precise recipes: which seasonings and ingredients to use and, crucially, exact weights.
This tested a chef's measurement accuracy.
Each seasoning jar had a fixed weight. When the test ended, the leftover seasonings would be weighed, and each finished recipe would be weighed. Scores would be calculated from those numbers. This was a test of hand precision and weight judgment.
For Kael it was easy, he had Divine Sight and Divine Touch. A glance or a quick grab told him weight. Other students had to think it through, but Kael could grab blindly and still be perfectly accurate.
Before the others finished their knife tests, Kael had already finished the seasoning test and placed his leftover seasonings and his best formula in front of Mizuhara. Several small electronic scales sat on her table, clearly for weighing.
"This…how is this possible? Zero error?" Mizuhara stammered. The second test didn't require perfection, small deviations were acceptable, but Kael's weights matched the board exactly down to the gram.
Her scale measured grams, yet she couldn't detect any error. The precision and speed shocked her.
No doubt, Kael passed the second test. Next came wok-tossing and then fire control.
As the basic tests continued one by one, Mizuhara's astonishment never faded. She'd thought Kael's earlier feats were the limit, but each new action reset her sense of what was possible.
In basic skills, Kael was terrifyingly strong. Purely in fundamentals, she couldn't compete. But culinary rank isn't built solely on basics.
From One-Star to Three-Star, you climb by polishing fundamentals. From Four-Star to Six-Star you begin to inject emotion into dishes—once you master that, Seven-Star follows.
Kael had inherited Kaiyu's legacy, and this process was called realizing the chef's heart. Once a chef grasps their chef's heart, they entered the special-grade realm.
In the world of Chuuka Ichiban, lower-level chefs trained purely in technique, mid-level chefs practice while cultivating spirit, and top chefs fuse technique and spirit to birth the chef's heart.
After that emergence, a chef becomes Special-Grade. In that universe, Special-Grade is only the beginning; in the World of Food Wars, Special-Grade is already the pinnacle.
Soon Kael finished his assessment. Even Alice had only reached the third test. Although not a master of traditional cooking, Alice's fundamentals were still exceptional.
"Kael, have you found the direction for developing your chef's heart?" Mizuhara asked him—once you became a Four-Star Chef you began to cultivate the heart; the first step was choosing a direction.
Chefs' hearts between people might be similar, but never identical, the birth of a chef's heart is a process of self-realization. Only by truly understanding yourself can you decide the direction and start forming the chef's heart.
"I have an idea, but I need more time," Kael began. With Kaiyu's inherited experience lighting the path, he'd started to find his direction.
"You already have a clue? You haven't been a Four-Star Chef for long—remarkable!" Mizuhara couldn't help praising. According to the dossiers, Kael had only recently become Four-Star, yet he'd found a direction quickly. Many chefs get stuck here for a long time.
She herself had spent over a year finding her path after reaching Four Stars. She couldn't help thinking Kael was a monster; his talent was the only fitting word.
Mizuhara wanted to recruit Kael to her restaurant, but he was still a student—she couldn't wait for him to graduate, and with his current pace he'd surpass her by then.
"Pass. Move to the next test!" she announced.
"Fail—try again if you have time!" she called to those who hadn't met the standard.
By the end of the lesson, Mizuhara had eliminated fifteen of the fifty students in the class—almost a third. That elimination rate rivaled the dorm training's overall cuts.
The high rate was mainly due to Mizuhara's brutal standards; if other graduates had run the test, fewer would have been eliminated. And the first day always cut the most students; after surviving one graduate's exam the overall elimination rate dropped dramatically.
The workshop's highest dropout day was the first, followed by breakfast tests—later days' failure rates fell by several factors.
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