Min-joon said, “Before your mission begins, I’ll give you some time to take the live mackerel out. Just ten minutes. Take the mackerel out within ten minutes.”
As soon as he said that, the participants flocked to the kitchen and competitively held out their hands to scoop the mackerel with landing nets. Kaya giggled, watching their funny but cute struggle to catch the mackerel. She turned and smiled at Min-joon.
“Hey, you’ve got a lot of gravitas today. Are you nervous?”
Of course, he was not here to put on condescending air. And she knew he was not that kind of person.
He calmly shook his head and said, “Well, I don’t want to look shallow to them.”
“Oh, really?’
She looked at him as if he was a little suspicious, but she didn’t bother to ask anymore.
He looked at the participants quietly. Some were just relaxed, while others were walking nervously as if they were afraid of carrying the flapping mackerel.
“Well, I think I can already size them up.”
“You bet.”
Based on his experience, he could easily figure out how competent they were by looking at their trivial actions here. Probably, any judge of this competition would feel the same as him.
‘Come to think of it, I think it’s the first time I’m formally evaluating amateur chefs as a judge.’
The chefs he evaluated until now were those who were as competent as a demi-chef. As a result, the chefs here who seemed less competent than demi-chefs were quite different.
Min-joon looked at Gwen among them. She also didn’t seem to have much experience in cooking fish, but she was staring fiercely at the flapping mackerel perhaps because she didn’t want to be taken aback. Perhaps as soon as the bell rang, she would kill the mackerel right away.
‘I wonder what kind of dish she would make with mackerel.’
He could not remember. He saw a cooking show where she appeared a long time ago, but he didn’t pay much attention to what kind of dishes she made at that time. And she didn’t look much talented at that time. Of course, her dishes always looked good, but that was it. As far as he remembered, she didn’t make any dishes great enough to draw his admiration.
“Start cooking!” Kaya shouted.
Even though she pretended to be calm, she was pretty excited right now because she announced it as a judge, which she had always heard as one of the participants. So she couldn’t help but be excited.
The participants started trimming the mackerel, cutting off the heads of the mackerel, or making cuts on the back of the mackerel as they wanted to.
There were two ways for them to remove the intestines of the mackerel, namely making cuts on their back or belly. Gwen made the cut in the back of the mackerel. After removing the intestines and scraping the scales of the mackerel, she immediately started preparing some sauce.
So Min-joon slowly approached her and asked, “What are you making?”
“Ah… pardon? Oh, I see what you mean.”
“I asked you what you’re making now?”
“Sauce.”
“What is the sauce for?”
“I’m trying to marinate the mackerel,” she answered in a diffident voice.
She seemed restless as if she thought she cooked something wrong because she kept checking his expression sneakily. At that moment, he glanced at the sauce she used. Among pineapple, soy sauce, and vinegar, the one that caught his eyes the most was the A1 sauce. As if she noticed his expression, she hurriedly said, “I’m going to use a very small amount of A1 sauce. I’m using it to take advantage of its unique tangy sour taste…”
“I look forward to it.”
He replied quickly and moved on to another chef. The next chef he visited was Hugo. Was it because he had experience working as a professional chef? His stats were pretty high overall.
‘He has reached cooking level 7.’
Compared to Min-joon or Kaya, his growth was probably slow, but it was not. Rather, the two chefs’ growth was unusual, compared to his.
To be honest, Min-joon was also surprised to know Peter also reached cooking level 7. Although Min-joon didn’t express his feelings openly, he actually ignored Peter. So Min-joon didn’t believe he would make some remarkable dishes, nor did he expect Peter to do so.
“Oh, it’s nice to see you guys cooking side by side like this,” said Min-joon with a smile.
He wasn’t sure whether the coordinator of this competition deliberately put them together like this, but the tables assigned to Peter and Hugo were right next to each other.
Hugo smiled bitterly and nodded.
“I’m sure you have been waiting for this competition earnestly, right?”
“Are you confident today?”
“I also survived well in Season 3. So I think I will have no problem today.”
“Peter, how about you?”
Min-joon looked at him nonchalantly. Even though Min-joon pretended to be calm, he wasn’t that comfortable with Peter. Even if it was Peter’s fault in the first place, it was true that Min-joon was also responsible for people’s criticism of Peter since Min-joon had some influence on the cause of Peter’s international slander…
How mature had Peter become? When Min-joon saw him at the preliminary rounds, he saw Peter briefly, so the two could not have much time to talk to each other.
Peter answered quietly, “I’m here to win.”
“I guess so. Good luck!”
“No, you shouldn’t cheer for me.”
Min-joon looked at him with a puzzled expression.
Peter said firmly, “It’s you, rather than this contest, that I want to win.”
“Me? Why?”
“I’ve been living like an asshole for the past two years. During that time, I also watched how you lived. At first, I didn’t like you. Honestly, I envied you.”
“That’s why you want to beat me?”
Peter nodded at his question.
At that moment, Min-joon burst out laughing and said, “Well, I understand your feelings. A soccer player wants to play soccer with Lionel Messi, and a musician wants to see Bruno Mars.”
Min-joon shrugged then said, “When it comes to cooking, it’s me you want to resemble.”
When he said that, Peter instantly became silent, looking around. Some of the kitchen staff and the participants giggled at him. Obviously, Peter was different from before.
Min-joon thought to himself, ‘Hey, it’s not you alone who have changed!’
“Really? Wait and I’ll catch up to you,” Peter replied calmly.
He knew that somebody might take his words scornfully. People used to think Peter was a loser and an idiot. It would not be easy for them to change their perceptions of him quickly.
At first, Peter rebelled. He picked a fight with them, demanding they explain why he was a loser and an idiot. He argued with them, even shedding tears. But nobody was impressed by his appeal. No matter how strongly he appealed to them that he was not as bad and stupid as they thought, they were not persuaded at all. Peter was just the same old Peter in their eyes.
As always, the truth was more blurry than the illusion.
People began to isolate him. No one listened to him. It didn’t matter what Peter was thinking or what he lived for. They began to trust his fake images as reflected in the media and SNS.
So, he resented Min-joon, the Grand Chef, and himself who was responsible for the whole situation, after all.
At some point, people began to accept Peter as negatively mirrored in social media. He was an asshole and a loser among those who knew him. If he was a movie actor, his role would be that of someone who then died in a brutal defeat while foolishly challenging the main character.
But Peter didn’t die. Of course, he might have died. Even briefly, he was obviously dead. In other words, he was not alive even though he was breathing in reality. Every time he walked down the street, everyone passing by seemed to laugh at him. It wasn’t the first time he hung a belt on a doorknob to kill himself. He sometimes shut his nose and mouth, wondering if he could die when he held his breath for long. But he didn’t die.
Actually, his extreme actions like that were more terrible than death. In a world where everyone hated him, Peter didn’t even have the courage to choose his own death. As an asshole and a villain, he simply had to live as if he were dead, faced with their hate and ridicule.
Even the few acquaintances of his left him. Of course, he didn’t have many friends from the start. Instead of encouraging him, his family angered him by saying that he disgraced his family.
He was completely alone, deserted by everybody. How long did he live like somebody completely dejected? He had no luck or change in his life. His heart was filled with the mist of anger. He wanted to argue with them on why they defined him as a loser and ostracized him from society. He strongly appealed to them that he could not die yet and that he needed to survive by all means.
Sadness, happiness, pain, and dreams. Those half-baked and romantic words slowly began to disappear from Peter’s mind. He didn’t see success as beautiful because it was clear that they would regard his success as ugly.
