Nyelle stared at Izen, her spoon frozen halfway to her mouth. "Stolen? What are you talking about? How do you 'steal' a flavor?"
"It's not just a flavor," Izen said, his voice low and urgent as he pushed the plate with the carrot orb away from him. "It's a palate code."
The term was obscure, almost mythical, something from the fringe theoretical texts Kael sometimes read. The palate code was the unique, neurological blueprint of a chef's sense of taste and memory. It was the intangible essence of their talent—how they perceived flavors, how they constructed memories of tastes, how they conceived of new combinations. It was, in essence, their culinary soul.
"Izen, that's just a theoretical concept," Nyelle whispered, glancing around the silent, sterile restaurant.
"It's real," he insisted. "When I perform Residual Alchemy, I'm tapping into the memory lattice of the ingredients. But this… this is different. This dish has no ingredient memory. It's just a blank medium—a gel, a consommé—that's been imprinted with a flavor from somewhere else. It's a copy. An echo."
He leaned in, his expression more serious than she had ever seen it. "Think about the description. 'Tastes more like a carrot than an actual carrot.' It tastes like someone's idea of a perfect carrot. An idea that's been extracted, codified, and then projected onto a neutral base. This isn't cooking. This is plagiarism, but the source isn't a recipe book; it's a person's mind."
The implications were horrifying. To steal a palate code would be the ultimate act of culinary violation. It would be like stealing a great painter's ability to see color or a master musician's sense of harmony, leaving them a hollow, empty shell.
"But who…?" Nyelle started, and then the name came to her, a chilling whisper. Not the obvious suspect, but the hidden player from the academy's shadows. "Belphar Nochelli. The Shadow Market. 'The collector of stolen tongues.'"
It all clicked into place. The mysterious, untraceable funding. The high-tech, almost alien methodology. The sudden appearance of a revolutionary culinary style out of thin air. This wasn't Reign Voltagrave's comeback. This was the Shadow Market making its first bold, public move.
"But who's the chef?" Nyelle pressed. "'The Purist.' You still need a hand to make the food, even if the flavor is copied."
Izen closed his eyes, concentrating, pushing past the beautiful lie of the flavor and trying to hear a fainter, more tragic whisper underneath. He tasted the carrot again, but this time, he wasn't listening for the carrot. He was listening for the ghost of the palate that had conceived it.
He tasted perfection. He tasted discipline. He tasted an obsessive, relentless pursuit of a single, pure note. He tasted an artist who had dedicated their life to the refinement of one specific, ideal flavor.
And he tasted immense, soul-crushing despair. A profound, hollow sadness.
He opened his eyes, and his expression was one of pity.
"It's Reign," he said softly. "The flavor concept… it is Reign's palate. Or at least, it used to be."
The truth that dawned on them was far more sinister than a simple comeback story. Reign wasn't hiding behind a pseudonym as a power play. He was a puppet. The Shadow Market hadn't just partnered with him; they had likely approached him at his lowest point after his humiliating defeat, offered him a way to achieve the perfection he'd always craved, and then… they had taken it from him. They had vivisected his culinary soul, stolen his idealized flavors, and were now using him as a figurehead, a broken chef forced to serve hollow copies of his own former genius.
The restaurant 'Essence' wasn't a challenge. It was a showroom. A horrifying proof-of-concept for the Shadow Market's new, terrible technology.
"We have to do something," Nyelle said, her hands clenching into fists under the table. The thought of what had been done to her former rival, a boy she had once despised but still respected as a formidable chef, made her stomach turn. "We have to expose them."
"How?" Izen asked, his mind already working past the horror and onto the practicalities. "What's our proof? All we have is a taste that 'feels' wrong to me. We have no evidence. We can't just accuse them of a crime that most people don't even believe exists."
They were trapped. To the entire world, Essence was a revolutionary culinary success. Its dishes were beautiful, flawless, and delicious. To fight it would be to fight perfection itself.
They left the restaurant, the perfect, soulless flavors lingering on their palates like a beautiful poison. The campus seemed different now, the cheers for the Hearthline revolution seeming naive in the face of this silent, insidious threat.
As they walked back toward the comforting lights of their guild hall, Izen gently touched the small, hidden pocket where he kept the clay bottle from Shiosai. The Kura-no-tama. A 500-year-old living culture, a symbol of authentic, evolved, and living flavor.
The contrast was a lightning bolt of clarity in his mind. The Shadow Market's weapon was a stolen, static echo of the past. A dead copy. The bottle in his pocket was the complete opposite. It was a living, breathing history, ready to learn and create a new future.
"They're selling a perfect lie," Izen said to Nyelle, his voice quiet but now filled with a new, cold resolve. "The only way to fight a perfect lie isn't to expose it."
He stopped walking and looked at her, his gaze clear and steady under the starlight.
"It's to tell a more beautiful, more compelling truth."