Chương 110: Voices from Outside — Has the Champion Vanished?

Under Le Château's grinding kitchen hours, time flew. Before he knew it, Chris had been in New York almost a month. In that month he'd been all but cut off from the outside world. Two points on a line every day — kitchen to apartment and back — his phone silent most of the time. He hadn't updated any social media, hadn't given a single interview. To the outside world, he'd vanished into thin air. On his day off, his agent Dave's call finally got through.

"My champion, you're finally willing to pick up! Any longer and I was going to file a missing-persons report!" Dave's voice was thick with anxiety.

"I'm fine, Dave. Just focusing on work," Chris said.

"Work? Where are you working? Do you have any idea what people are saying out here?" Dave's voice climbed.

"The papers are writing 'Newly crowned Burning Kitchen champion Chris White mysteriously disappears'! And the tabloids are saying you couldn't handle the pressure, gave up cooking, and went home to be a programmer again!" Chris listened and found it a little funny.

"And another thing," Dave went on.

"Those brands that wanted you as their face — because they couldn't reach you, several have already pulled their offers. Chris, we're missing the best window to cash in!"

"The money stuff can wait." Chris's response was flat. What he thought about every day now was how to cut onions more quietly, how to make a sauce's seasoning more precise. Against that, those endorsement contracts felt distant and unreal. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Dave went quiet on the other end for a moment, seeming to gather his words.

"All right, Chris. I respect your decision. But there's something I have to tell you." His tone turned serious.

"Your rival, Ethan Cole — he's been making noise. A lot of it." Something stirred in Chris.

"After the finale, he took an offer from a new high-end restaurant in Los Angeles — straight into the executive chef's chair. His place opened last week, and the media reviews are glowing. The first menu he designed got called 'a precise, cool, and deeply ambitious work of art' by Los Angeles Gourmet."

"Right now the press is casting him as the 'elite who lost but rose above it,' a true professional chef. And you…" Dave didn't finish, but the meaning was clear. One of them was high-profile, wielding authority, holding court as executive chef in a shining new restaurant. The other had dropped off the map, an apprentice cutting onions in some no-name New York kitchen. From the outside, the paths the two of them had taken after the show could not have diverged more sharply.

The one who'd lost the competition looked, if anything, more like the winner.

"I understand," Chris said. He wasn't jealous of Ethan. He knew they had simply chosen different roads. But it was impossible to feel nothing at all. After hanging up, he sat by the apartment window, watching the streams of people move below. Right then, the system in his head suddenly pushed a prompt. It was the long-locked Arena Module. [Potential competitor 'Ethan Cole' detected. His Career Record Points are climbing rapidly.] [Qualification conditions for the "Global Culinary Champion League" have been updated:] [Condition One: Obtain a formal letter of recommendation from a Michelin three-star chef.] [Condition Two: Earn an overall evaluation of Grade A or above in at least one open international culinary competition.] Looking at those two lines on the panel, Chris's eyes slowly changed. At last he had a clear, quantifiable goal. Win Vincent's recommendation. Enter an open competition and post a strong result.

It wasn't only to unlock this "Global Culinary Champion League." It was to answer every doubt from the outside — and to catch the rival already running ahead of him. He looked down at his hands, gone a little rough from a month of grinding prep work. The road was hard. But he had no other choice.