Chapter 103.
Shijun slipped off his headphones and turned around. Erina Nakiri had actually fallen asleep on his bed.
Her long, honey-blonde hair spilled across the sheets like a silken cloud, framing a flawless, peaceful expression completely devoid of her usual aristocratic bite. Her long eyelashes fluttered softly with her steady breathing.
Shijun stared blankly for a moment.
Who would have thought this notoriously prickly heiress could look this cute when she's quiet?
Snapping out of his daze, he quietly gathered the scattered manga manuscripts and gently draped a quilt over her. He wasn't a saint—having a stunning beauty asleep in his bed was certainly a test of willpower—but taking advantage of an exhausted girl who had let her guard down was beneath him.
He slipped out of the room, closing the door silently behind him.
Erina slept soundly, only stirring at noon. What woke her wasn't the sunlight, but an incredibly rich, savory aroma wafting through the door. Blessed with the God Tongue, her senses were impossibly sharp; she subconsciously inhaled, a look of pure intoxication crossing her face. But a second later, her eyes snapped open.
This wasn't her pristine bedroom.
As the grogginess faded, reality crashed down: she was in Shijun's bed. A furious blush ignited across her cheeks. She was just sighing in relief that the room was empty when the door clicked open.
"Don't panic, Your Highness. I didn't touch you."
Shijun said innocently, leaning against the doorframe.
"Lunch is ready. Come grab a bite when you're hungry."
Erina's face turned completely scarlet. Stumbling out of bed, her mind hyper-fixated on the faint, undeniable scent of masculinity lingering on the quilt she had just been wrapped in. Deeply flustered, she aggressively rejected his offer for lunch, abandoned her desperate quest for the manga drafts, and practically fled down the hall.
Her staggering footsteps made it look like something scandalous had actually happened, leaving Shijun to laugh helplessly and eat his lunch alone.
—
Erina didn't show her face for three straight days.
Shijun knew the tsundere heiress needed time to cool off.
Instead, he headed down to the Chinese Cuisine Research Society early in the morning. With the Autumn Election preliminaries only three days away, Tadokoro Megumi, Hojo Miyoko, and Mito Ikumi had returned to the dorms to finalize their weapons.
"You've received the preliminary theme, right? Curry." Shijun addressed the three girls. "But what you might not know yet is the exact quota. Out of the sixty participants split between Blocks A and B, only eight people will advance to the main tournament. That means only the top four from each block survive."
"Only four per group?!"
The reality of the brutal cutoff set in.
"I'm really looking forward to this hot-blooded feast."
Hojo Miyoko cracked her knuckles, a fierce, competitive grin on her face.
"Since you all asked me to guide you—" Shijun's expression darkened, an unsettling, predatory shadow falling over his eyes. "You better prepare your minds. My training is absolute. If you fail to meet my standards, the punishment will be severe. So... let's begin our joyful practice!"
Megumi, Ikumi, and even the famously tough Miyoko felt an icy chill run down their spines. Their bodies trembled instinctively. The man standing before them was completely different from his usual laid-back self.
For Shijun, a twisted spark of excitement had ignited. He was finally in a position to inflict the exact same hellish, tyrannical training methods his grandfather, Old Master Xie, had used on him. As the President of the Research Society, he decided to stop holding back.
What followed was three days and three nights of absolute culinary purgatory. The three girls were dragged through an endless, cruel wasteland of relentless cooking drills. Shijun even weaponized aromatic spices, blasting their senses with pungent aromas while they tried to sleep to forcibly train their olfactory instincts.
Three days later, the trio finally escaped his clutches. Exhausted but fundamentally sharpened, they bathed, changed into their pristine chef uniforms, and marched to the arena.
The Autumn Election preliminaries were held under the expansive dome of the Totsuki venue. The massive auditorium, capable of holding thousands, was packed to the rafters. This wasn't just a school competition; the entire Japanese culinary world, alongside global gastronomic titans and corporate sponsors, was watching. Food industry giants stalked the stands, hunting for prodigies to invest in. For ordinary students, this was the ultimate stage to seize destiny by the throat.
Shijun understood their burning ambition, but standing amidst the roaring crowd, he couldn't help but feel profoundly detached. He had been born at the absolute apex of the culinary empire. His cooking skills were already monstrous enough to match his pedigree. Money was just a string of meaningless numbers in an account.
Romance? He already had the fierce, captivating Rindo Kobayashi.
Ah... life is truly as lonely as snow~
Shijun sighed inwardly, a sudden wave of aristocratic melancholy washing over him.
Megumi, Miyoko, and Ikumi noticed his sudden, depressing aura, but absolutely none of them dared to ask what was wrong. The trauma of the last three days had hardwired a deep, primal fear of this man into their brains.
His ruthless strictness had far surpassed the legendary "Chef Who Never Smiles." Roland Chapelle. But the most terrifying part was Shijun's casual remark that his training was less than one-tenth as strict as his grandfather's.
Looking at his melancholy profile, the three girls could only shudder, silently wondering what kind of inhuman brutality this man had survived to become the monster he was today.