Chương 42: The Man Who Crawled Back From Hell

The night deepened. In the second-floor gallery, the Blue Team members gradually felt the fatigue too. Jessica and Mia had fallen asleep against the couch. Jack and Owen talked in low voices about something, but their voices carried a weariness too. Only Sarah still kept Chris company, watching the war without gunsmoke below.

"Chris, aren't you going to sleep a while?" Sarah rubbed her drowsy eyes.

"Tomorrow… no, later today, there might be another challenge."

"I'm not tired yet." Chris shook his head, his eyes still locked on the kitchen below. It wasn't that he wasn't tired. It was that the two reports he'd just redeemed made sleep impossible. Gareth Vane Taste-Preference Analysis Report. The report was far more detailed than he'd imagined. It didn't simply list what Vane liked and disliked.

Like an academic paper, it deconstructed Vane's entire culinary philosophy across many dimensions — dish structure, flavor layering, plating aesthetics, even the cultural background of ingredients. The report noted that Vane outwardly prized French classics, but at heart he was a "flavor-above-all" pragmatist. He hated anything flashy and hollow, anything that made a mystery of itself. The innovation he admired had to be built on a deep understanding of traditional technique, with the purpose of raising flavor.

The report even used charts to analyze the words that appeared most often in Vane's positive and negative comments as he tasted different dishes. Precise, balanced, layered, respect for the ingredient — his most-used words of praise. Chaotic, greasy, no soul, stupid — his go-to phrases of insult. Looking at the report, Chris felt as if he held a pair of eyes that could see into Vane's heart.

His earlier understanding of Vane had been largely intuition and guesswork; now the system had turned it all into quantifiable, analyzable data. And the other report — the Top-Contestant Ability Analysis — shocked him even more. The first page he opened was Ethan Cole's.

[Contestant: Ethan Cole] [Culinary Rating: B+ (79/100)] [Ability radar:] [Heat Control: A-] [Knife Work: B+] [Seasoning: B] [Creativity: A] [Stress Tolerance: A-] [Leadership: A] [Technical traits: academy-trained, with an extremely solid theoretical foundation in Western cuisine. Skilled in modern techniques — sous-vide, molecular gastronomy. Clean dish structure, strong logic, pursues perfect plating and presentation.] [Psychological assessment: extremely confident, even somewhat conceited. Strong drive to win and to control. In fair conditions, can pull 120% of his ability — the perfect team leader. But in adversity, once the situation slips, prone to self-doubt that affects his judgment.] [Latent weaknesses: 1. Holds a certain bias against "home-style" flavors and traditional "hearth warmth" dishes, deeming them beneath the stage. 2. Over-reliant on precision equipment and process; relatively weak at improvising under sudden situations.] Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve.

Read this novel on the original website. Looking at Ethan's report, Chris was secretly amazed. The assessment was frighteningly precise. Hadn't tonight's restaurant-takeover failure perfectly confirmed the "latent weaknesses" in this report? His own liquid-nitrogen salmon — that unorthodox, off-the-books move — had hit exactly the blind spot in Ethan's thinking. He opened David's report too — the Chinese-American contestant who chased perfect knife work.

The system's verdict was "a technically masterful craftsman, not a creative artist." His stress tolerance was only C+. Then Sarah — the system called her "highly likable with a strong capacity to learn, the perfect team glue, but personal style not yet clear." He even saw his own report.

[Contestant: Chris White] [Culinary Rating: B (75/100)] [Ability radar:] [Heat Control: A] [Knife Work: B+] [Seasoning: B+] [Creativity: A-] [Stress Tolerance: C+] [Process Management: S] [Technical traits: self-taught, but with a terrifying ability to turn everything into data. Skilled at building order out of chaos and finding the optimal solution. His understanding of heat has surpassed pure technique, reaching a near-instinctive intuition.] [Psychological assessment: calm on the outside, extremely proud within. An obsessive hunger to win. Under enormous pressure, can unleash astonishing potential, but also prone to high-risk operations in pursuit of the extreme.] [Latent weaknesses: 1. Incomplete foundational knowledge; blind spots in the common-sense of certain culinary domains. 2. Over-reliant on data and logic; may struggle with purely emotional, artistic culinary challenges. 3. His stress threshold is high, but once it breaks, the consequences could be catastrophic.] S-rank process management. C+ stress tolerance. Looking at his own report, Chris gave a wry smile. The system really pulled no punches with him. It mercilessly pointed out his greatest strength and his most fatal flaw. He was like a giant with a lame leg. In some areas, strong enough to crush opponents. In others, fragile enough to shatter. The report was a mirror, letting him see himself more clearly than ever.

He closed the system panel and turned his eyes back to the kitchen below. The sky had already begun to gray. The eight-hour hell marathon was finally nearing its end. In the kitchen, only three still held on. Ethan, David, and a woman named Anna. Maria had fainted from dehydration in the sixth hour and been carried out by medics. Another man, in the seventh hour, his hand cramping so badly he could no longer grip the knife, had given up in tears. The three who remained were a spent force.

Their movements had slowed to slow-motion, sluggish and mechanical. Each one soaked through, as if fished out of water. But their eyes were all fixed, hard, on the bucket before them. The bucket that meant life. By eye, Ethan's bucket held the most potatoes, nearly full. David's was a little less, but not far behind. And Anna was clearly trailing.

"Time!" Vane's voice — like the horn of heaven, or hell — rang through the dawn kitchen. The three, almost at the same instant, threw down their peelers and collapsed to the floor. The crew came forward at once to tally their eight hours of "spoils." With an electronic scale, they weighed each, one by one.

"Anna, net weight peeled, 121 pounds."

"David, net weight peeled, 145 pounds."

"Ethan…" The crew member looked at the number on the scale, paused, a thread of awe in his voice.

"Net weight peeled, 172 pounds." The result needed no words. Despair appeared on Anna's and David's faces. Vane walked up to Ethan. Ethan struggled up from the floor. He stood ramrod straight, though his legs shook without stopping.

"Congratulations, Ethan." Vane looked at him, and for the first time, approval showed in his eyes.

"In eight hours you peeled 172 pounds of potatoes. You've won not just the round, but my respect.

"Tell me — how do you feel right now?" Ethan raised his head, his lips cracked, his voice raw as if scraped with sandpaper.

"I feel… I could peel for another hour." Hearing that, Vane froze, then burst out laughing. He took off his own chef's coat and draped it over Ethan's shoulders.

"Welcome back, soldier.

"Now get upstairs and sleep. You've earned yourself a day of rest." Ethan didn't say thanks. He silently adjusted the coat still warm with Vane's heat, then dragged his exhausted body, step by step, up the stairs to the second floor. As he passed Chris, he stopped. He looked at Chris, his eyes complicated.

"Last night, you won," he said hoarsely.

"But next time, I won't give you any chance at all." With that he lingered no longer and walked straight to the lounge. Watching his back, Chris knew the confident, strong, even conceited Ethan was back. No — a more terrifying Ethan had crawled back from hell. He would be Chris's strongest rival in this competition. And yet the corner of Chris's mouth curved up, beyond his control. There wasn't the slightest tension in his heart. Only endless, boundless excitement.