Bread May Be Bread, But...

Time went back a little.

It was when Leopin had made his first Western Pioneer Breakfast and had just finished eating it.

Leopin had been basking in a happy feeling of fullness, but he heard many footsteps approaching from outside the house.

“Who is it this early in the morning…? I’d be happy if they came to help with the farmwork, but this early…”

As he muttered to himself and went outside the gate, Kurumi and the other students of Class 1-16 were there.

“What’s wrong, Kurumi?” Leopin asked, and Kurumi fidgeted as she awkwardly began to speak.

“U-um, um, Ch-Chef Leopin… A-actually, I have a request… C-could you teach us how to make b-bread…?”

In a voice as faint as a mosquito’s buzz, Kurumi held out a flat piece of bread.

“Th-this is b-bread baked by the b-baker in my class, but… N-no, no matter what we do, it doesn’t rise nicely like your b-bread, Chef Leopin…”

Low-Quality Unleavened Bread
Quantity: 1
Quality Level: -6 | (Material Level 51 + Job Bonus 1 + Cooking Bonus 2 + Material-Killing Penalty 60)
Bread baked with a basic recipe.
The ingredients were of the highest quality, but the craftsperson’s skill was immature, and there were not enough ingredients, so the taste was bad.
system-end

Leopin had the Appraisal skill, so just by taking it in his hand, he immediately understood what kind of bread it was.

“Well, of course. This is unleavened bread.”

“U-unleavened bread…?”

“Yeah. It’s also called non-fermented bread. There’s no yeast in it, so that’s why it’s this flat.”

Then Kurumi tilted her head slightly, with question marks practically floating all over her head.

Not only her, but the boys and girls in cook outfits behind her also had similarly gloomy expressions.

“What, you guys don’t even know about yeast…? Is what I’d like to say, but I didn’t know about it until recently either. Here, take this.”

Leopin took a leather canteen out of his coat pocket.

Inside it was the Princess Apple Yeast he had made and stored in advance.

“Mix the liquid inside this into the bread dough, then leave it somewhere warm for a while. It’ll start to swell up, so try baking it after that.”

The apprentice cooks looked doubtful.

They peered into the canteen and looked suspicious, saying, “Will bread really rise just by adding this water…?”

“Then try using it here. I have all the equipment needed for breadmaking here.”

After that, a breadmaking class began under Leopin’s guidance.

That said, since there were twenty students, he could not give each of them proper individual guidance and only gave them a simple explanation.

Each of them made one small piece of bread, and when they tried baking them…

“U… uwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!?!?”

Just that alone made cries of joy rise up.

“Amazing! It rose properly!”

“The taste is way better than what we were making too!”

As the apprentice cooks tasted the bread with blooming smiles, Leopin said,

“After this, if you keep making bread over and over, you should eventually be able to bake bread about this good. I baked this one about a week ago, but want to compare the taste?”

What Leopin took out of his pocket was a single loaf of bread.

Among Class 1-16, only Kurumi had ever tasted this bread before.

The students who received the bread looked suspicious once again.

“This bread looks good too, but it was baked a week ago, right? Bread that’s a week old would be hard, nasty, and impossible to eat, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, this bread seems soft, but there’s no way it could be tastier than our freshly baked bread no matter what… It’s so goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooood!?!?”

After eating just one bite of the bread, they collapsed from how delicious it was.

With that same momentum, they rubbed their foreheads against the ground.

“Ugh… I finally understand why Kurumi-chan was calling Leopin-kun Chef!

Ch… Chef Leopin! Please take us as your disciples toooooooooooooooooooo!!”

The students of Class 1-16, having become humble, all achieved a level-up together.

As they prostrated themselves before him while shining with light, Leopin reluctantly agreed to take them as disciples.

Then, he was wrapped in even greater glory.

Around the time the lower-level cooks were steadily achieving level-ups,

Toinette, the upper-level cook who was a figure far above the clouds to them, was…

Toinette was making bread to serve to the reporters coming to cover the wheat field at Weiss’s request.

It was at the cafe Eternal Toinette, run by Class 1-12, for which she served as leader.

She had reserved its kitchen and was proceeding with the cooking elegantly.

The kitchen was lined with splendid silver cooking utensils she had bought from the School Store.

Moreover, the environment was not the only thing that was first-rate; she was using flour said to have been procured by Kakerukun through a secret route, the highest-grade flour in the kingdom.

With this many factors gathered, there was no doubt that the finest bread would be completed.

What was completed was a strange object, like a gigantic paramecium crushed under an elephant’s foot.

And this was not the first one, but the thirtieth.

“Wh… why is this happening!? Why does it become this flat bread no matter how many times I do it!? Even the flowers I put in to make it look better somehow look like pressed flowers from hell!”

Toinette was a Royal Pastry Chef, but because she was still level 1, her skill was no different from an amateur’s.

However, her pride alone was already fully developed, so she was greatly wounded.

Moreover, the bread placed beside her further increased her humiliation.

“Wh-why does the bread made by that jobless dropout rise, while Towa’s bread doesn’t!? Towa is a great Royal Pastry Chef, you know!? And yet, and yet…! Towaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!”

In the kitchen, there was also the Angel’s Fluffy Bread, which Kakerukun had once again secretly obtained as a research subject.

Toinette had looked down on it as not even worth eating and had not touched it, but in the first place, her bread did not even come close in appearance, let alone taste.

On the contrary, she even took out her anger on it and crushed it underfoot.

And this was precisely the difference between her and Kurumi, the girl who was a lower-level Pastry Chef.

Kurumi sincerely respected Leopin and asked him to teach her breadmaking.

As a result, she was able to climb one step on the staircase as a Pastry Chef.

But Toinette was the exact opposite.

She looked down on Leopin and assumed that she could easily surpass bread baked by a dropout.

The result was the mass production of tragic paramecia.

Toinette continued making bread her own way all night long, but in the end, she never completed anything that could be called bread.

On the night before the reporters were to visit, Toinette heard the devil’s voice after going without sleep or rest.

It was the moment when the worst scheme in history bloomed…!

“Th… that’s right…! If it won’t rise, I can just stuff the dough with something and make it look like it rose…!”

Having thought of that, she tried stuffing various things into the dough.

At first, she used things that could be eaten, but none of them produced a satisfactory result.

Having no choice, she tried using cotton, cloth, and the like, but those were not quite good enough either.

Then, when she happened to glance toward the corner of the kitchen, she found a wooden barrel piled high with dusty food waste.

To an aristocratic young lady like her, it was normally something filthy she would not even want in the corner of her vision…

But now, for some reason, it looked like the finest down feathers.

“No matter how far I go, I cannot possibly stuff it with trash, can I…?”

However, the utterly exhausted girl began walking unsteadily, contrary to her words.

Like a moth drawn to a light, she took the food waste in her hand.

“Ahh… it’s soft… Well… perhaps it might be fine to at least try it…”

Inside Toinette’s head, a path lined with flowers in full bloom had already spread out.

The young lady still did not know.

That those very flowers were sterile blossoms for her.

That they were a one-way road to hell, plunging straight toward a rank-down.

Lower-level and upper-level, humility and arrogance, glory and frustration.

It was the moment when the light and darkness of the two sides were clearly divided.