Chapter 273: Heavenly Grade Cooking
Xiang Yu felt thousands upon thousands of cooking insights flood his mind in an endless torrent.
He found himself standing in a simple kitchen. The surroundings were plain and unremarkable - rough wooden counters, basic stone surfaces, and ordinary cooking tools hanging from iron hooks. On the table before him lay nothing more than regular ingredients that any common person might find lying around in their house. Simple vegetables, basic cuts of meat, everyday spices, and humble grains.
Yet as he reached for the knife, something extraordinary happened. His hands, or rather, his entire body started moving by itself. Slicing the meat, cutting the vegetables, preparing the other ingredients...
In just a few seconds, all the vegetables were diced uniformly, the meat was portioned perfectly, and the spices measurements were on point. His hands blurred once again as he began combining ingredients, applying heat, seasoning...the whole kit and caboodle.
When he was done, he rested the completed dish on a simple ceramic plate.
The ingredients and tools might’ve been ordinary, but this was no ordinary meal. Wisps of condensed qi rose from the food instead of steam, stirring the qi around. The spiritual energy radiating from the dish was so dense it was visible to the naked eye, creating a crystal like coating of pure qi over the meal.
This was the true peak of cooking.
First grade chefs relied heavily on the natural qi content and spiritual grade of their ingredients to create high level meals. Making them limited by the quality of what they had to work with. But a heavenly level chef was the true master of the craft, he could transform even the most mundane ingredients into meals worthy of immortals.
He was now at the top of the mortal world in terms of cooking.
His eyes slowly fluttered open as he began processing the massive influx of knowledge he had just received. The insights were so vast and comprehensive it felt as though all cooking knowledge that has ever existed was being directly downloaded into his brain.
Fortunately, with his level ten mind combined with his divine level enlightenment, he could handle it without being instantly overwhelmed. The ten brain partitions he had also allowed him to process multiple streams of information simultaneously, preventing him from becoming stuck in a trance for a long time trying to process the information.
When the torrent of insights finally settled and his consciousness stabilized, he could now check out his other stats.
His appraisal had progressed impressively and was just a step away from entering the heavenly grade. Even though he still hadn’t fully explored the limits of the previous three advancements, he was still excited for what the heavenly grade would bring.
He thought to himself that this was probably why his appraisal experience wasn’t accumulating as rapidly as his other skills. Since he was in the first grade, there simply weren’t any high level items available for him to test his abilities against. Even when he constantly used the skill throughout the day, it wasn’t being pushed to its limits, which was necessary for significant advancement.
While the experience gain had been impressive initially, it seemed destined to slow down considerably as time went on. Looking at his other professions, it was becoming quite hard for appraisal to compete, especially now that he had multiple clones working simultaneously on different professions throughout the day.
Look at something like runesmith and formation master which had each gained five hundred points in a single day and entered the second rank after doubling.
He had just finished creating the rest of the formations and inscribing runes onto them, he hadn’t even put them up yet and he could already get started with building the next generation.
Second grade formations combined with second grade runes should be capable of protecting against cultivators from the realm above Soul and Body Integration - which was the Tribulation Transcendence realm.
Although the Empress had said that after successfully surviving the heavenly tribulation, cultivators would directly ascend to higher realms, Xiang Yu didn’t believe in a world that always followed the rules perfectly. He wouldn’t even be surprised if there were immortals secretly hiding somewhere in this "mortal" world.
The only way he could feel even remotely safe was if he managed to establish an immortal-grade formation around the sect. Maybe then - and only then - would he allow himself to feel just a little bit safer.
...
Those two professions weren’t the only ones that had entered the second grade, alchemy and blacksmithing had as well, though he wasn’t nearly as excited about them.
The disappointment with alchemy mainly came from his lack of resources to make proper use of it. He felt especially frustrated now that his spirit root was advancing toward the sacred grade, yet he didn’t have any way to gain even a single experience point for it to start doubling once again.
After his alchemy entered the second grade, he had gained the recipe for the rebirth pill, among others. But he didn’t have any of the required high-level herbs, so he could only wait for another method to increase his spirit root experience. As for blacksmithing, he didn’t have any high-level materials to build low-level divine weapons, let alone the mid-level ones he could now craft.
Well, he supposed it wasn’t all bad. The breakthrough in alchemy would allow him to refine pills more efficiently, and for blacksmithing, he could at least make low-level divine treasures like he had done for his alchemy furnace and the other tools. The key was in creating alloys that reached the fourth level, then using them to make pseudo-divine weapons. Once he had those, he could fill these pseudo-divine weapons with runes to upgrade them to low-level divine status.
Though he had to admit, this method was quite inefficient, and he was running low on materials to make the alloy as well. He wondered when the materials sent by the sect masters would arrive, and if they’d even be useful for his current needs.
His medicine profession wasn’t improving as much compared to the others, but it was still progressing nonetheless. Another that seemed slow was the teacher profession. At first, Xiang Yu had considered this profession quite useless, but he’d come to love it quite a bit. It was now up there with his most important professions, like formation making and runesmith.
This was the reason he could come up with so many theories and practical solutions for his problems during his research sessions. The teacher profession had a way of connecting different concepts and helping him see patterns that would otherwise remain hidden. And now it had just advanced from seventh to sixth grade, entering the mid stages.
This breakthrough brought with it benefits of its own. It allowed him to teach concepts more easily to others, and also improved his ability to understand complex ideas himself.
In the secondary professions pavilion, the only students that had made real, genuine progress were the medicine students and cooking students. The others were still moving slowly. With the boosted abilities of the teacher profession, and as it continued to advance more and more, he expected the secondary professions pavilion to genuinely become a secondary professions pavilion. Right now, it was honestly just a school with some dreams.
Aside from his professions, he had also improved in other aspects as well. His remaining two techniques had reached the great completion stage, and he hoped to perfect them within the next reset or two.
His divine abilities were also finally gaining experience points. He couldn’t wait to see what new powers they would bring upon leveling up.
As he continued going through his stats, he suddenly noticed something that he had almost missed:
[Palm Intent: Level 1 (10/1000) (+10/1000)]