Chương 139: A Moment of Quiet

Walking into a small, unassuming little noodle shop, Lloyd sat down at an equally modest, well-worn table marked with faint scratches and the occasional stain of spilled sauce, and settled in to wait patiently, glancing around the place with genuine curiosity.

There weren't many people inside — in fact, there were hardly any, maybe three at most, if they could even be called that, given that one of the patrons had a pair of small horns peeking out from under his hood, while another let out a faint, steady crackling sound now and then, as if some tiny mechanism were ticking away inside him.

The wooden walls of the shop were hung with old paper lanterns, yellowed with age, casting a soft, muted light over the low tables scattered here and there, while from the kitchen came the quiet, rhythmic tap of a knife against a cutting board, mixed with the faint hiss of hot oil and the occasional brief exchange between the cooks.

An old wooden-bladed fan turned lazily overhead, stirring the warm, rich aroma of spices and frying meat through the room, and in the corner, beside a small figurine of some local deity, a single candle burned low, casting a flickering, elongated shadow across the wall. Before Lloyd had even finished looking around, a pleasant waitress approached him — surprisingly, someone of East Asian appearance, a rarity among the kaleidoscope of creatures filling the streets outside.

With a light, polite smile, she handed him a menu, tucking back a stray strand of hair as she did, then quietly went about her business, leaving behind the faintest trace of jasmine tea that dissolved almost instantly into the thick medley of kitchen smells. Before opening the menu, Lloyd noticed Japanese characters on the cover, forming the words:"Japanese Cuisine."

It wasn't his native language, but ever since the Catastrophe, strange as it sounded, the language barrier had all but vanished, as though someone had wiped away every border between the world's tongues in a single stroke, leaving people with nothing but the raw essence of communication, stripped of every formality.

No matter what language a text was written in, no matter how a person or a member of some entirely different race spoke, everyone understood each other as though it were their own native tongue, the one they'd learned since early childhood, absorbed along with lullabies and bedtime stories.

Everyone could clearly see and recognize that a given text wasn't written in their own letters, symbols, or characters — the foreignness of it was obvious at a glance, the unfamiliar, angular strokes nothing like the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets they knew — and yet they could still read it with complete ease, without the slightest effort, as if the meaning simply flowed straight into their minds, bypassing the need to parse individual letters at all.

No one had ever quite figured out what kind of miracle this was, but among the countless theories and guesses circulating among Players, often debated over a mug of ale in some tavern, the general consensus was that it was the work of none other than the System of Ex itself, which had, for reasons unknown, decided to make life a little easier for the survivors of this new, reshaped world. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

The one exception were the ancient symbols of long-extinct civilizations, like the ones Lloyd had seen earlier that day in the hall with the black stone. For some inexplicable reason, no one could read those with any ease — they had to be painstakingly deciphered, puzzled out by hand, poring over dusty scrolls and crumbling tablets for weeks, sometimes months on end.

Which was exactly why paleographers, contrary to what any skeptic might have expected, hadn't been left without work even in this new, transformed world — their services were worth nearly their weight in gold. Lloyd opened the menu and began leisurely reading through each item, running a finger down the lines filled with mouthwatering dish names and their brief, saliva-inducing descriptions.

He lingered for a while on the soup section, then skimmed quickly through the fried dishes, chuckling once or twice at some especially exotic-sounding name, but in the end it didn't take him long to decide — within a couple of minutes he'd settled on one of the items, tapping the page with a touch of anticipation, already imagining the taste of what he'd chosen.

He set the menu aside and leaned back in his chair for a moment, taking in the other patrons of the shop — an elderly woman with long, ornately curved ears, absorbed in reading something on the glowing screen of a small device clutched in her hands, and that same horned figure in the far corner, quietly working through something in a deep bowl without once lifting his head.

A few minutes later, a server brought him a deep, heavy ceramic bowl, from which a thick cloud of fragrant steam rose at once, tickling his nose with the scent of ginger and toasted sesame, strong enough that Lloyd felt his stomach clench with anticipation before the bowl had even touched the table.

The broth — amber, rich, with tiny golden droplets of fat slowly swirling across its surface, forming strange, ever-shifting patterns — held within it an entire universe of flavor, seemingly built up over years of experience by someone extraordinarily skilled at their craft, someone who had devoted their whole life to perfecting dishes exactly like this one.

In the center lay perfectly even waves of silky wheat noodles, gleaming faintly under the dim light of the paper lanterns, and rising above them, like little islands in a hot, misty lake, sat the toppings: tender slices of pork with a caramelized, slightly charred crust, bright green scallions sliced neatly on the diagonal, and a glossy ribbon of nori seaweed, trembling faintly in the steam rising off the bowl as though it were alive.

The true centerpiece of the dish was a marinated egg, sliced in half — its creamy, slightly runny yolk slowly spilling into the broth in a thin, golden thread, promising absolute bliss with the very first bite. It was a standard bowl of ramen for his era, the kind Lloyd had once glimpsed in passing in Japanese cartoons that used to flicker across the screen back in his old, long-forgotten life.

But he himself had never actually tried it before — never had the chance, and honestly, back in his old life, before the Catastrophe, his head had been full of far simpler, more carefree things — hanging out with friends, playing games in the yard, and all the other little things that came with an ordinary childhood, rather than exotic food from cartoons.

"Smells incredible," he thought, feeling his stomach tighten on its own, his mouth already watering in anticipation. He leaned over the bowl for a moment, breathing in the rising steam deeply, letting the aroma of ginger, sesame, and rich broth fill his lungs completely, then took one more look over the whole bowl, as if trying to stretch out the moment of anticipation just a little longer before finally digging in.

Swallowing hard and picking up his utensils — wooden chopsticks, unfamiliarly light in his fingers, slightly rough to the touch — he fumbled with them a bit, trying to recall the proper way to hold them, then murmured quietly to himself before finally starting his long-awaited meal: — Well then, bon appétit to me.