Chương 190: The System's Last Reward

The interview ended. Sarah left. Chris went back to an empty hotel room. Beyond the tall windows, Paris ran out to the horizon. The last of the sun had turned the sky a soft gold and put a dreamlike halo over the whole city. Chris didn't turn on a light. He sat on the sofa and watched it without moving. Ethan had been summoned home to the States by a phone call from his father.

Apparently the family rotisserie was about to be crushed by enthusiastic customers on the strength of the championship, and they urgently needed a world champion to come home and hold the room. Kira had gone too. Not back to San Francisco — she'd bought a train ticket to Normandy and gone alone with her knife roll on her back to find a field full of apple trees. The noise and the celebration had left with his friends. What was left was Chris, and a city he had just conquered and did not know at all.

An enormous emptiness that comes after a victory rose slowly and covered him. Where was he supposed to go now? What was he supposed to do? He'd won a world championship. He'd finished a dream that had looked impossible from where he started. And now that it was actually done he found that he was standing on a summit with no idea which way to walk. He'd got used to the tempo of competition, to having a clear objective and a clear challenge every day. All of that had ended. He had never felt this lost.

And then a half-transparent blue panel — familiar and suddenly strange — opened in front of him on its own. The system. Since the final began he had rarely called it up. He'd been relying more and more on his own judgment and his own senses, and it had become something like a background process, running quietly. Now it had come forward by itself. Lines of gold text appeared, slowly. [Main Quest Chain: The Making of a Champion — complete.] [Final achievement unlocked: Champion, Global Culinary Champion League.] [Final settlement in progress…] [Settlement complete.] [Issuing final reward…] Something tightened in Chris's chest. The final reward. What would it be? Some enormous new capability? The power to create ingredients that didn't exist? Perfect prediction of any dish's final score? If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Or money — enough that he'd never have to worry again? A lifetime contract with one of the great restaurant groups?

He was curious. He was also, faintly, hoping. The gold letters moved again. [Final reward: Integration.]"Integration?" Chris stopped. What did that mean? Before he could work it out, the panel in front of him began to lose stability. The data, the charts, the quest list — all of it started coming apart like a sand painting in a wind, dissolving into countless tiny particles of blue light. The particles didn't disappear. Like fireflies following something, they drifted toward him and gathered.

They passed through his skin, into his blood, and finally toward his brain and his heart. There was no discomfort in it. There was only warmth, and a fullness he had never felt. He seemed to see his own life — beginning with a man chosen at random by a system — and every experience and every lesson and every fight in it running like streams of data down into the floor of his soul. That cold external thing was becoming one substance with him, by a process he couldn't follow.

The text on the panel got shorter and fainter. At the end, one line was left. [From today, you are the System.] When the last character turned into light and went into him, the blue panel that had walked his whole road with him and changed his entire life was gone. Gone completely. As though it had never been there. The room went quiet. Chris sat on the sofa for a long time without moving. He shut his eyes and tried to feel what had changed in him. He thought about Father's Soup.

And there was no flickering data in his head, and no complicated flavor chart. There was a feeling. He could feel how the sweetness of the fish, the roundness of the butter and the clean edge of the herb opened in layers across a tongue — and how they reached the softest string in a person, the one marked father. He thought about Kira's apple pie. He could feel the crispness of the pastry, the sweet acid of the apple, the warmth of the cinnamon, and the faint green poetry that one wildflower had put into it.

He could even feel a girl under an apple tree, hopeful and terrified at once. He would never need the Data Eye to see into an ingredient again. Because if he touched it and smelled it and paid attention, he would know how long that tomato had been in the sun today, and whether it was in a good mood. He would never need the Flavor Atlas to calculate balance again. Because when he picked up two ingredients, his instinct would tell him whether they were made for each other or whether they were a disaster.

He would never need Foresight to predict an error again. Because his body and his muscle memory had turned ten thousand repetitions into instinct. The system hadn't disappeared. It had simply changed form, and stayed in his life permanently. It was no longer a cheat that handed over correct answers. It had become part of Chris himself. His instinct. His perception. His philosophy of cooking. From today he didn't need any external advantage. He was the strongest one he had. Chris opened his eyes slowly.

The blankness and the emptiness had gone out of them, and what stood there instead was calm, and certainty. He knew what to do. He got up, went to the phone, and dialed Le Château. It rang for a long time before somebody picked up.

"Hello, Le Château, who are you calling for?" A young voice, tired.

"Vincent."

"Chef? He's busy right now, you—""Tell him it's Chris." Silence for a few seconds. Then the sound of several pans hitting a floor, and a young cook's voice going up an octave." Chef! It's Chris! It's Chris, the one who won the world championship!" Vincent's familiar, steady voice arrived a moment later.

"Chris?"

"It's me, Vincent."

"Are you… are you all right, kid?" There was something under it he couldn't fully suppress.

"I'm fine." Chris was smiling.

"I called to ask you something."

"Go ahead."

"Do you still need somebody down there to peel potatoes?" There was a pause on the other end. And then Vincent laughed — a huge, unguarded laugh out of the bottom of him.

"Need one? Of course we need one." He was still laughing.

"We will always need a world champion who's willing to peel potatoes."

"Good," Chris said.

"I'll fly back tomorrow." He put the phone down and looked out at a sun that had gone entirely below the horizon, and there was an easy smile on his face. A champion being made isn't the end of a story. It's the actual beginning of a cook who is willing to bend over a plate of potatoes.