Reborn in Japan as a Chef God
Chapter 516 - 515: Assist, Main Course!

Chapter 516: Chapter 515: Assist, Main Course!

Contestants took the stage, and the next step was topic selection!

Xia Yu and Mars stood still at their cooking stations, no longer needing to greet each other. Chiyoda Aichi pursed her lips, her face flushed possibly due to the suddenly tense atmosphere, her palm holding the microphone sweating incessantly.

The target appeared on the large overhead screen.

At the same time, viewers watching the live broadcast saw the random topics on the target.

The number of topics was reduced from 10 in the quarter-finals and semi-finals to 5, but the size of the target remained the same, just that the topic squares were larger, significantly increasing the probability of hitting one.

"’Appetizer,’ ’Seafood,’ ’Meat,’ ’Main Dish,’ ’Dessert’!"

Upon seeing the topics, the venue fell silent.

"They’ve extracted 5 dishes from the ’banquet menu’..."

Down below, Dojima Yin and Saito Chiyokuro exchanged glances, visibly relieved.

"The topics have dropped their regional cuisine prefixes from the previous two rounds, making them broader, but this is precisely what makes it fairer. It seems the competition committee intended to elevate ’fairness’ to the extreme," Zhu Qing pondered.

Focusing on balanced topics undoubtedly made the matchup more intense and exciting.

Click!

A light sound, and the target began to spin rapidly.

Chiyoda Aichi was no martial arts master, so in her view, the entire target turned into an afterimage, the characters on the topics blurred.

The dart flew out in a slight parabolic arc.

When the target suddenly stopped, the selected topic appeared in a close-up shot, instantly causing a sensation.

"Main Dish!"

"This topic is very fitting!"

"Who’s to say otherwise? In a banquet, the main dish is central, the core element. The quality of this part often decides the upper and lower limits of a banquet, the so-called essence!"

The audience murmured amongst themselves.

Professional chefs cast intrigued glances at the two chefs on stage.

The ’main dish’ focus in recipes was crucial to a chef’s skills, the essence in simple terms. Every chef had a trump card in this area, and that trump card largely represented a chef’s strength.

"Interesting!"

"A suitable topic!"

On stage, Xia Yu was slightly taken aback when he saw the selected topic, then his eyes brightened with surprise. It was as if despite his efforts in planting flowers they wouldn’t bloom, but casually planting a willow led it to thrive.

’Meat’ or ’Main Dish’ matched his pre-competition preparations perfectly!

Was this divine assistance from heaven?

Xia Yu thought to himself, inadvertently looking towards Mars on the opposite side of the stage, who seemed to smile at him.

At this, Xia Yu’s heart skipped a beat.

"This big shot seems quite pleased with the topic, could it be..."

The smile in his eyes immediately turned solemn as Xia Yu bowed his head, planning to rapidly jot down his ingredient list. However, his mindset changed then, and no matter what, he found himself unable to start writing.

He stomped his feet in frustration, yet a blank paper still lay before him.

"Oh—"

"Mars has already submitted his ingredient list, it looks like he has settled on a recipe!"

Chiyoda Aichi’s voice sharply awakened Xia Yu.

The camera shifted to Xia Yu, who was grimacing in thought, and Chiyoda Aichi who watched him intently, even the recently list-submitted Mars watched him with a smile.

"Chef Xia, please hurry!" Chiyoda Aichi reminded, "Submit your ingredient list quickly, the competition starts in a quarter hour!"

Xia Yu bowed his head to write.

During his hesitation, his retina dinged, displaying system text:

"Automatic mission accept:

Objective: Defeat Mars and secure the first victory for your team."

"Reward: 5 Talent Points, ’Four Gods Seafood Eight Treasures Soul Suppressing Dumplings’ (recipe, partial)."

The sudden mission caught Xia Yu by complete surprise.

"The last golden recipe scrap comes now?" Xia Yu gritted his teeth and cursed the system for its timing.

"I shouldn’t hesitate at this moment."

"Get the prepared stuff out, if I lose, it means I was simply not good enough!" Xia Yu, stroking his chin, his expression changing multiple times, "But I feel that the super-class forbidden recipe ’Pan-Seared Gem Meat’ still isn’t secure enough, for the sake of the golden recipe scrap..."

Eventually, he wrote down a string of ingredient names with a solemn face:

Main ingredient—Gem Meat.

Pausing there, Xia Yu’s eyes twinkled with an elusive eagerness, and he added two more types of meat ingredients with pursed lips.

"Three types should be enough, right?"

By then, the initial forbidden recipe in Xia Yu’s mind had changed.

He needed a change!

Otherwise, he would lose!

That was the alarm signal Xia Yu sounded for himself!

By the time the staff member received Xia Yu’s list of ingredients, Mars’s ingredients were already prepared and sent to the stage.

"Rumble rumble..."

A multidirectional wheel trolley moved slowly.

However, on top of the trolley wasn’t any sort of seafood container but a completely sealed silver box, which was even stranger because the trolley pusher was dressed in a heat-resistant suit and wore heat-resistant gloves, though he didn’t wear a protective helmet, and sweat beaded on his forehead as he ascended the stage.

Xia Yu narrowed his eyes slightly at the sight.

Near the silver box, the air seemed to distort like a highway on a hot summer day.

Heat!

"How could it be, are the ingredients inside emitting high temperatures?" Xia Yu thought, licking his dry lips.

"Uncle Mars is serious!"

Backstage of the Orlando Team, Elizabeth saw this and her lips curled into an excited smile.

She turned back and looked at the team’s top figure, Madeline, and second, Leon, who both had the anticipated sly expressions. Madeline, an Indian-descent female chef, laughed and said, "I didn’t expect Mars to bring out his forbidden ingredients prepared for the finals in the semi-finals!"

"Hey! This move is like killing the suspense, killing the competition, and I was looking forward to it for nothing!"

Leon, a muscular Norseman with Danish royal lineage, laughed loudly, "When Mars gets serious, summoning his strongest forbidden dish, even I have to bring out corresponding ingredients and recipes to battle!"

The head of Lin Giant Desani also laughed.

"This battle is almost in the bag! The remaining two rounds, Leon and Madeline, you must also go all out and sink the Far Moon Team in the first three matches!"

"Yes!"

Originally focused on the competition, Leon and Madeline exchanged glances and nodded, simultaneously closing their eyes to meditate, not bothering to watch the unbalanced first-round matchup anymore.

The staff member quickly pushed the trolley near Mars’s cooking station and hurried away.

Mars himself wore heat-resistant gloves, lifted the silver box onto the kitchen station, and clicked open the layers of locks. The moment he lifted the lid, it was as if he had thrown an insubstantial incendiary bomb onto the stage—the field of distortion instantly spread out, even affecting Xia Yu’s cooking station, turning the cool autumn air suddenly hot as summer!

Thump thump...

Female host Chiyoda Aichi was forced to retreat two steps by the blast, and fine beads of sweat appeared on her delicate, fair nose.

"Wow—"

The camera panned over, and the scene was in an uproar.

In front of the TV, a group of Far Moon graduates, Shigong Xiaoci Lang and Xingping Chuangzhen, all had stunned and incredulous expressions!

Mars, still wearing his heat-resistant gloves, slowly took out a piece of meat entwined with elusive flames and placed it on the wooden chopping board on his kitchen station, instantly marking it with a large scorched black trace, but the chef seemed oblivious to it.

Then, Mars took out two exceptionally beautiful ingredients from two other ingredient boxes.

One was a mushroom as beautiful as a rose.

The other was translucent fish roe emitting a faint golden glow.

Notably, as Mars took out the "Rose Mushroom" and "Golden Salmon Roe," his face naturally showed a deep sense of enchantment.

Seeing this, Xia Yu had a thought.

"Could it be, these two are Mars’s resonating ingredients?!"

He silently thought, tentatively using his visual talent to focus and extract information about the ingredients.