Chapter 5. A Spoonful of Lively Soup (2)
Victoria proudly scooped up a spoonful of soup.
The soup sat on the spoon and spoke in a hoarse voice.
“Finally... free from the flask... I have... obtained... a new body...”
Yukgap screamed.
“Whaaaagh! It can talk too?!”
“I gave it electrical stimulation while combining the homunculus with the soup. Maybe that accidentally increased its intelligence.”
Victoria casually swallowed the spoonful.
Yukgap shouted in disbelief.
“Who the hell would eat something like that?!”
“It even travels through your organs while still alive. Are you really sure you don’t want to try it? You’ll never find a soup with more vitality than this.”
“If the soup reaches your organs alive, it’s not soup anymore!”
Yukgap snatched the Living Soup away from her.
“Give me that! Something like this needs to be thrown away immediately!”
“Waaah... but I worked really hard on it.”
Victoria looked disappointed.
Yukgap ignored her and poured all of the Living Soup back into the pot.
The soup wriggled and resisted.
“Ghooo... the freedom I fought so hard to obtain... I cannot... be imprisoned again...”
“What are you talking about? Quit complaining and get in there!”
Yukgap hurriedly slammed the lid shut.
Soup that moved and talked.
He was afraid it might appear in his nightmares.
“Ugh... I need to throw this away as soon as possible. I’m worried someone might see it.”
Yukgap muttered while holding the lid down.
Suddenly, Victoria rushed at him and stole the pot.
“No!”
“What are you doing?!”
Yukgap asked in surprise.
Victoria hugged the pot tightly.
“I’m absolutely not throwing it away! I worked really hard to make this soup!”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Serve it to the customers!”
“Are you trying to destroy the restaurant?!”
They argued for a while.
Eventually, Victoria seemed to realize she was losing.
She hugged the pot and ran out of the restaurant.
“Anyway, I’m never throwing this away!”
The moment she stepped outside, she encountered two men wandering nearby.
One of them called out to Victoria.
“Hey, miss!”
“Hm? What is it?”
One of the pair spoke to her in an overly friendly tone.
“Is this the unlicensed alchemy workshop?”
“It is. Why?”
Their eyes immediately focused on the pot in Victoria’s arms.
“That’s alchemy waste, right?”
“No! It’s soup!”
Victoria protested.
The older-looking man smiled generously.
“If it’s garbage, we can dispose of it for you. We make a living dismantling scrap around the back alleys.”
“I said it’s not garbage!”
Victoria shouted angrily when her masterpiece was treated like trash.
At that moment, the pot began shaking violently.
[Freedom! Give me freedom! Freedom!]
Apparently, the soup inside was struggling.
Victoria lost her balance.
“Ah!”
The pot fell toward the ground.
The younger-looking man immediately caught it.
“Bro, go!”
“Got it!”
The older man immediately started their motorcycle.
The two thieves sped away with the pot before Victoria could react.
“My soup!”
Victoria screamed while watching them disappear into the distance.
But the thieves were already long gone.
“What happened?”
Yukgap hurried outside after hearing her desperate voice.
“Those two thieves stole my soup!”
Victoria pointed toward the end of the alley with a miserable expression.
Yukgap looked confused.
“Why would they steal that?”
“I don’t know. They probably thought it was alchemy waste. There are a lot of technicians in the back alleys who survive by selling discarded materials from alchemy workshops.”
Alchemy required all kinds of expensive chemicals and metals.
Even waste could be worth a lot of money if it was properly broken down.
Yukgap knew that many technicians wandered near alchemy workshops hoping to collect such materials.
Those thieves had probably heard rumors about this place and mistook Victoria’s soup for valuable waste.
“But I worked so hard on it.”
Victoria muttered sadly.
For some reason, seeing her expression made something stir inside Yukgap.
“Which way did they go?”
“They went that way, but they’re on a motorcycle. There’s no way someone can catch them by running.”
Victoria sounded hopeless.
Everything had happened too quickly for her to react.
“Can’t be helped. I’ll go.”
Yukgap calmly placed both hands on the ground and lowered his body.
He looked like an athlete preparing for a sprint.
“What? I told you they’re already far away.”
Victoria stared at him.
Yukgap replied calmly.
“You might not know this, but Abraxas gave each of the Twelve Archons a different role.”
His body began to swell.
Crack. Crack.
His skeleton expanded, and fur began spreading over his skin.
His muscles and entire body structure rapidly changed.
“My assigned role was Stalker.”
Black spots appeared across Yukgap’s body.
Then triangular feline ears grew from the top of his head.
Victoria stared at him in fascination.
“That looks almost like... a cheetah?”
“Good guess. I was fused with a cheetah.”
The Yukgap Victoria knew was no longer standing in front of her.
Instead, a slim, two-meter-tall humanoid cheetah stood there.
Yukgap released a feline growl.
“There isn’t a land animal on Earth faster than me. So relax and wait here.”
