Tim's POV
The cook's name was Aldric, and he had the comfortable solidity of a man who had spent twenty years in proximity to good food and had, reasonably, absorbed some of it. He was eating his lunch with the unhurried satisfaction of someone on a well-earned break when I appeared in the kitchen doorway, and he received my request to be taught cooking with the mildly surprised goodwill of a person who had not expected his afternoon to become interesting.
His teaching methodology was direct and unadorned. He boiled water. He added vegetables, carrots, onion, a tough root I didn't recognise that softened considerably with heat, and a modest quantity of meat, the cheaper cuts that were entirely adequate for institutional cooking when handled correctly. He waited. Thirty minutes later he had soup, which was nutritious and filling and represented, I suspected, approximately eighty percent of what this kitchen produced on any given day.
"That's it?" I asked.
"For soup," he said, with the equanimity of a man who had made a great deal of soup and found no reason to be defensive about it.
I looked at the kitchen around me, the hearths, the preparation tables, the clay oven built into the far wall that I knew from observation was used primarily for the hard bread the church served at morning meal. The oven ran hot and even, designed for long bakes at consistent temperature. It was, I realised, very close to the right temperature for something else entirely.
"Can I try something?" I asked.
Aldric gestured expansively at the preparation table in the way of a man who was mildly curious about what a child considered worth trying.
I thought about what was available. The church kitchen was not a modern pantry, but it was well-stocked by this world's standards, there was flour for bread, oil for cooking, a wheel of hard cheese sitting under cloth in the cool storage, a rope of cured salame hanging near the hearth, and a bowl of tomatoes that had been sitting long enough to be past their best for fresh eating.
I started with the tomatoes. I crushed them with my palms against the preparation table, working out the seeds, reducing them to a rough paste and then cooking that paste briefly in a small pan over direct heat with a pinch of salt, letting the water cook off until the flavour concentrated. The smell that rose from the pan was immediately and powerfully familiar in a way that hit somewhere deeper than rational memory, the smell of a hundred weeknight dinners in a previous life, of cheap apartments and easy comfort food and the uncomplicated pleasure of feeding yourself something good.
The dough was simple. Flour, water, a small amount of oil, worked together until it came together into something smooth and elastic. I had never made bread dough in this body, but I had watched the church bakers work often enough to have the technique mapped, and it turned out that bread dough and pizza dough were cousins close enough that the skills transferred. I stretched it thin against the table, thin enough to cook fast and go crisp at the edges.
The tomato paste went on first. Then the cheese, cut fine from the wheel with a knife I borrowed from the rack, distributed evenly. Then the salame, sliced into thin rounds, laid across the surface in the slightly overlapping pattern I remembered from delivery boxes in another life.
I slid it into the clay oven on a flat bread paddle and turned to the next thing.
The oil went into a pot over the hottest part of the hearth. While it heated I cut potatoes, the kitchen had a large sack of them, a staple of institutional cooking here, into rough batons, not perfectly uniform but close enough. I tested the oil temperature the way I'd seen done, a small piece of potato dropped in to check the sizzle.
The sizzle was right.
I added the potato batons in batches, not crowding the pot, and watched them begin their transformation from raw starch to something golden and crisp and smelling of everything good about hot fat and simple ingredients.
The lemonade was the easiest part. This world had lemons, honey, and cold water from the kitchen's stone cistern. I combined them in proportions that I adjusted by taste until they were right.
By the time I pulled the pizza from the clay oven, the cheese browned at the edges, the base crisped, the salame slightly curled and rendered, Aldric had stopped pretending to do other things and was simply watching from across the kitchen.
I plated it, if plating was the word, set it on a board, added the fries alongside, poured the lemonade into a wooden cup, and pushed it across the table to him.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he picked up a piece of the pizza, tore a section from the edge where the base was crispest, and put it in his mouth.
His eyes did something that I had read described in fiction but had assumed was exaggeration. They genuinely changed quality, some internal light shifting behind them, the expression of a person whose sensory experience has just exceeded their expectations by a margin their face doesn't know how to express moderately.
He chewed slowly. Swallowed.
Looked at me.
Looked at the pizza.
I took a piece for myself and ate it standing at the preparation table. It was, acceptable. The base was slightly uneven. The tomato paste could have cooked down a little more. The cheese was not mozzarella, it was a harder, saltier variety that worked differently under heat. But the fundamental logic of the thing was intact, and the fundamental logic of pizza was there.
I ate what I wanted, which was a modest amount because I had never had a large appetite, and left the rest with Aldric, who was still working through his portion with the focused appreciation of a man taking something very seriously.
I went back to my room.
The scan I ran on myself was a private ritual I performed every few months, using the tier zero spell I had quietly kept to myself since Lype had first demonstrated it. I had developed a notation system for recording the results, a small notebook I kept inside the lining of my coat.
I cast the spell. The paper formed. I looked at the number.
Thirty-six [level 12].
I sat with that for a moment.
Twenty-one [level 7] to thirty-six [level 12]. Fifteen danger levels in a single afternoon. Five levels, one level equalled three danger levels, and I had just jumped from level seven to level twelve in the space of a few hours of cooking.
I set the paper down on my desk and breathed slowly and thought about what had just happened.
The cook. Of course. Aldric was a medieval institutional cook, producing nutritionally adequate food with the techniques available to him in this world and this century. He was good at what he did within that framework. But the framework itself was limited, not by his skill but by his knowledge, by what this world had collectively figured out about food over its particular history.
I had walked in with ten thousand years of accumulated human culinary development from a completely different world. Pizza alone represented the distilled experimentation of Italian cooking culture across centuries. Fries represented the independent discovery and refinement of a technique across multiple cultures and hundreds of years. I hadn't invented anything. I had simply imported food I liked.
No wonder the class had levelled. No wonder it had levelled dramatically. The system, whatever mechanism translated experience and mastery into levels, had apparently recognised that I hadn't learned to cook in an afternoon, I had applied a depth of culinary knowledge that this world's cook class hadn't encountered before. The levels reflected the genuine gap between what this world knew and what I had arrived carrying.
Which raised a thought I needed to sit with carefully.
How many other domains existed where I carried knowledge from my previous world that this world hadn't developed? Where the gap between what I knew and what was locally available was large enough to generate the same kind of accelerated progression?
The cooking jump suggested the answer was: more than I had been treating seriously.
I was not just a person with a forty-year-old's old man in a young body. I was a person with a forty-year-old's access to the accumulated knowledge of a technological civilisation that this world had never had. In specific domains, that knowledge was a resource as real and as substantial as any gold coin in my hidden cache.
I needed to think more carefully about which domains and how to access them.
But that line of thinking arrived, as it always eventually did, at the wall.
Level one hundred.
Even with the shotgun approach, even with the unexpected acceleration that knowledge gaps could apparently produce, level one hundred was a ceiling. A real one, structural, built into the mechanics of this world, under the New World's levelling system, maxed out at one hundred levels. Full stop.
And one hundred levels, distributed across enough classes that I remained genuinely functional in all of them, would make me the weakest level one hundred person in existence. Better than ninety-nine point nine percent of the New World's population. Completely irrelevant in a confrontation with anything from Nazarick.
I had known this since I developed the shotgun strategy. It was the problem the strategy didn't solve, just deferred. The question of what came after one hundred.
The answer this world had already generated, in at least one documented case, was *items.*
Rigrit's Ring.
I turned it over in my mind the way I turned over all confirmed intelligence carefully, accounting for what I knew with certainty versus what I was inferring. Rigrit Barlette Caurau [level 50~, the legendary adventurer, one of the Thirteen Heroes, wore a ring that operated on wild magic and allowed her to continue accumulating power beyond the level cap [she isn't level 100, so she not know about this]. The Platinum Dragon Lord had made it, crafted specifically as a level-breaking mechanism, wild magic specifically chosen because it bypassed the normal constraints.
The irony being that the Platinum Dragon Lord, and all Dragon Lords were immune to wild magic, including beneficial wild magic, which meant the ring he designed was useless to its creator and had to be given away. The perfect tool, made by someone who could never use it.
The ring existed. I knew it existed. Rigrit was alive, was somewhere in this world right now, already carrying it. Getting access to it was a problem I couldn't solve today, or this year, or possibly this decade. Rigrit was a legendary hero operating at a level of power and social capital I wouldn't approach for a long time.
But the ring was not unique in principle. If one item existed that could break the level cap using wild magic, others could exist [And they do]. Wild magic was unpredictable by definition, its outputs were not fully controllable even by its users, which meant the space of things wild magic had accidentally or deliberately produced over this world's history was broader than any catalogue could capture.
I needed to find all of them. Every level-breaking item, every wild magic artifact that contributed to pushing past the ceiling, every mechanism this world had developed or stumbled into that allowed growth beyond one hundred.
I had time. The rest I was working on.
I closed my notebook, tucked it back into my coat lining, and lay back on my bed looking at the stone ceiling of the church.
Tim's stats (he can't see his true stats)
Level: [12]
Vermin killer: [2/10]
Assassin: [2/10]
Priest: [1/10]
Gardener: [1/15]
Cheif: [5/15]