The news of Izen's acceptance spread through the academy like a shockwave.
To the elite guilds, it was seen as an act of suicidal arrogance. They sneered in their exclusive dining halls, sipping on clarified consommés. The Garbage Chef, stripped of his gimmicks, was finally marching to his own execution. Reign Voltagrave's popularity among the upper echelons soared. He was seen as their champion, the one who would finally put this populist nonsense to rest and restore the proper order of the culinary world.
To Izen's followers, the reaction was a mixture of terror and blind faith.
"Are you insane?!" Grit Hark demanded, bursting into the Hearthline kitchen where Izen was calmly humming and polishing his new 'Faultline' knife. "Their judges are practically a cult! They once disqualified a chef because his pan was half a degree Celsius off the 'ideal searing temperature.' There's no way they'll judge you fairly!"
"Reign gets to choose the ingredient, too, I bet," Kael added nervously, wringing a dish towel. "He'll pick something incredibly delicate and difficult. Something with zero margin for error. Like an Albino Star-Truffle or a Ghost Orchid petal."
Izen just continued polishing his knife. "A perfect ingredient," he mused, as if pondering a pleasant riddle. "What does that even mean? Is a diamond less perfect if it has a small inclusion? Or is that inclusion what makes it unique?"
"This isn't a philosophy class, Izen!" Grit boomed. "This is a rigged fight!"
"Everything has a history," Izen continued, his voice calm. "Even something 'perfect.' A truffle remembers the earth it came from. An orchid petal remembers the air it grew in. My job isn't to change the ingredient. It's to tell its story. The story they don't see."
His serene confidence was both baffling and infectious. While his friends were panicking, he was approaching the duel with the same simple curiosity he applied to everything.
His acceptance, however, had created a rift elsewhere on campus.
In the academy's most advanced high-heat training kitchen, a chamber of reinforced obsidian and shimmering heat-shields, Nyelle Ardent slammed her blazing-hot wok down on its cradle with a deafening CLANG.
"He actually accepted?" she snarled to the empty room. "The fool!"
She was furious. Not at Reign, whose arrogance she expected, but at Izen. She had come to respect his strange, resourceful genius. She saw his "reclaimed cuisine" not as a gimmick, but as a valid and revolutionary new branch of the culinary arts. But this… this was walking willingly into the lion's den.
By accepting a duel on the Velvet Palate's terms, he was legitimizing their narrow-minded, tyrannical view of the world. He was giving them power over him.
"You show them a whole new universe," she muttered, pacing in front of the roaring fires, "and then you volunteer to be judged by flat-earthers."
A small part of her, the part that had been electrified by his duel against Grit, wanted him to fight back. To issue a counter-challenge. A duel where he and Reign each had to cook with the other's preferred ingredients. A battle of philosophies.
But he had simply bowed his head and agreed to their terms. To her, a creature of fire and defiance, it felt like an act of submission. An act of weakness.
It was a profound disappointment.
At the same time, Ciela Vantablue was having a very different reaction in her lavishly decorated dorm room, which doubled as a streaming studio.
"You guys, this is the ULTIMATE story arc!" she chirped to her live audience, her eyes shining with strategic brilliance. "The People's Champion versus the Aristocratic Tyrant! The Alchemist of the Common Man forced to walk in the gilded halls of the elite! Will his philosophy triumph, or will the system crush him? The views on this are going to be INSANE!"
She was already planning the rollout. Merch. Hashtags. #ClashOfCuisine. #PurityVsPhoenix.
But beneath the cynical opportunism, a genuine flicker of worry existed. She'd spent enough time with Izen on his nightly food runs to know that his calm demeanor wasn't an act. But she'd also seen the ruthlessness of the Velvet Palate up close. Her own application to the society had been rejected because they deemed her social media presence "too vulgar for a refined palate." They were cruel, petty, and powerful.
"Okay guys, I'm starting a new viewer poll," she announced. "Do you think Izen-sama's genius will shine through, or is this a trap he can't escape? Smash that 'GENIUS' button or hit that 'TRAP' emoji! Let's see what the Vantablue Crew thinks!"
As the poll numbers began to fly across her screen, she found herself anxiously hoping, for the first time in a long time, for a result that had nothing to do with analytics. She hoped the "GENIUS" votes would win.
Back in the Hearthline kitchen, Izen finished polishing his knife. It shone with a dark, dangerous light. He looked at the worried faces of his friends.
"There's nothing to worry about," he said, his smile genuine. "Cooking is cooking. Ingredients are ingredients. But before the duel, there is something I want to try."
He walked over to a shelf where he kept jars of his most interesting salvaged materials. He ignored the complex flavor dusts and rendered fats. He reached to the very back and pulled down a small, simple jar.
Inside was a cup of plain, white, iodized table salt. Salvaged from a hundred half-empty shakers in the dorm cafeterias. The cheapest, most common, most overlooked ingredient in the entire world.
"They want me to find the soul of a flawless ingredient," he said, pouring a small mound of the cheap salt onto his cutting board. "To practice… I will start by finding the soul of a worthless one."
He looked at the salt. He wasn't just seeing a cheap commodity. He was seeing the memory of ancient, evaporated oceans. The ghost of a mineral pulled from the heart of the earth.
To his friends, he looked like he was staring at a pile of salt. But in Izen's mind, he was already on his journey, looking for the flaw, not in an ingredient, but in the very definition of Purity itself.