Phong did not look up. That was how everyone knew they were in trouble.
He stood over the cooking station with the calm, focused stillness of a man whose hands were busy enough to stop him from committing violence with them. Oil warmed. Broth simmered. Meat, skin, and seasoning were arranged in clean lines under the light while the camp behind him waited for judgment.
Then he spoke, slowly, flatly. "Let me guess."
Nobody interrupted.
"Alexei provided genes from Little Fireball feather." He rolled one sausage carefully through flour without lifting his eyes. "Rico provided bad enabling."
Alex laughed so hard she had to lean against the table to stay upright. That only made Phong groan. He dipped the sausage next into egg, then breadcrumbs, movements precise and automatic even while his soul was clearly leaving his body in protest.
To the raccoon and the paladin, he said, in the same dead tone, "I will deal with you later."
Rico made a tiny wounded noise.
Alexei put a hand to his chest. "In my defense—"
Phong raised one finger without turning around, and Alexei stopped talking immediately. That was wise.
So the kitchen became the battlefield instead. Phong finished breading the newly made unfermented sausages and lowered them carefully into hot oil. Nem chua rán hissed to life at once, crisping golden around the meat. Beside that, the five-colored meatballs for mọc vân ám had already been steamed. He arranged them with the same care he would have used for guests he did not secretly resent, then poured over the rich, bone-deep broth thickened with gelatinous depth and set the bowls aside to cool and settle into their cloud-jelly form.
Then came the pork skin. He had boiled and dried it before hand. Now he dropped it into hot oil and watched it bloom into light, puffed bubbles, the kind that would later soften in soup and still hold that strange, treasured texture he grew up with.
Around him, Camp Orthrus tried very hard not to disturb the man cooking for three Pillars while planning revenge on a raccoon and a paladin. That became harder when the Timatoes arrived.
The little monsters rolled out from the growing beds with all the swagger of a gang walking into its own territory. Tiny fangs bared, spines up. Little snarls spilling from fruit mouths far too expressive for anything round and red. They fanned out in front of the newly returned group and announced, in no uncertain terms, that Camp Orthrus had owners now.
Alexei froze first.
Jake pointed weakly. "They're… posturing."
"They're asserting dominance," Emma corrected.
One Timato bit at the air near Jack's boot. Another rolled in a tight circle around Joanne like a tiny security check. A third spat a warning glob of boiling tomato juice at nothing in particular, just to make sure everyone understood the rules.
The Timatoes tolerated the elves immediately, though. That much had become obvious already. The little fruit-beasts treated them as acceptable for two reasons Phong could see clearly now. One, the elves were close enough to sentient plant life to count as kin of a strange sort. Two, they acted like the farmer's children.
That put them safely inside the circle. Everyone else, however, had to be evaluated. Even the regulars: Alexei, Jack, Joanne, Jake, Emma, Nyx, Bruno, Rico.
None of them escaped inspection.
And the truly funny part was this: even the people already used to Phong's mutated plants had no idea what to do with the Timatoes. Moletatoes made sense, given their limited sentience... Garlic mines made sense. Even the weeping onions, in all their choking malice, made sense once explained.
These things did not. They were too weird, too alive... Too full of tiny ego.
Emma recovered first. She crouched a little, phone already in hand, and started recording without even pretending she had better manners. The video caught the Timatoes rolling, snarling, showing off their fangs, biting the air in threat displays, and vomiting boiling tomato juice in little hissing arcs whenever someone breathed too close for their liking. One of them, noticing the camera, puffed up and did it again with more conviction.
Emma smiled, then she sent the video straight to Selena.
The group chat exploded in less than a minute.
Selena:
[WHAT IS THAT?]
Selena:
[WHY DOES IT HAVE A FACE?]
Selena:
[WHY DOES IT HAVE A TIGER FACE?]
Selena:
[IS IT ROLLING?]
Selena:
[WHY IS IT ROLLING IF IT CAN FLOAT?]
Selena:
[WHY IS IT SPITTING BOILING TOMATO?]
Selena:
[NO WAIT THAT IS NOT THE IMPORTANT QUESTION!]
Selena:
[IS IT SENTIENT?]
Selena:
[EMMA TURN THE CAMERA AROUND I NEED SCALE...]
Emma, without looking up, slowly turned the camera.
That let Selena see the Timato next to Jack's boot, tiny but clearly armed with enough attitude to overthrow a minor government.
Selena:
[OH MY GOD!]
Selena:
[OH MY GOD OH MY GOD!]
Selena:
[PHONG! WHAT DID YOU DO?]
Phong finally glanced at the screen for half a second.
"Nothing on purpose," he said.
Vanessa:
[I have given up.]
Selena:
[DO NOT SAY THAT]
[THIS IS IMPORTANT]
Vanessa:
[You said that about the elf pods too.]
Selena:
[AND I WAS RIGHT]
Vanessa:
[You stopped sleeping.]
Selena:
[THAT IS A SEPARATE ISSUE]
Another Timato rolled across the floor, bumped into Bruno's paw, and then snarled up at him like a tiny mafia boss daring retaliation.
Bruno stared. "Can I pet it."
Nyx answered immediately. "No."
The Timato answered too by trying to bite him.
Bruno withdrew his paw with dignity. "Fair."
On the phone, Selena was still actively unraveling.
Selena:
[Emma please tell me you got footage of it attacking something]
Emma:
[Yes.]
Selena:
[Send.]
Emma sent another clip.
Vanessa:
[I should have hidden her phone.]
Selena:
[TOO LATE]
[I NEED SAMPLE COLLECTION]
[I NEED OBSERVATION LOGS]
[I NEED TO KNOW IF THEY ARE FRUIT OR ANIMAL OR PLANT OR SOME BLASPHEMOUS OTHER THING]
Phong returned his attention to the stove and muttered, "Other thing."
Alex laughed again from somewhere behind him.
The Timatoes kept patrolling. The chat kept detonating. The oil hissed around the sausages. And under all of it, while three Pillars sat in his camp waiting for New Year's Eve dinner, Phong cooked like a man trying very hard to keep the world in manageable pieces even as it kept inventing new categories of impossible around him.
Phong served the first dishes before the main course.
The fried nem chua came out golden and crisp, stacked high on a plate with a bowl of dipping sauce on the side. Beside it, the mọc vân ám sat in its bowls like polished little clouds trapped in broth, the five colored meatballs held inside the jelly with neat care.
The three Pillars accepted the food like they had every right in the world to sit in his camp and eat from his work. Which, unfortunately, they probably did.
Bai Hu ate with the same calm arrogance she wore like armor. Little Yama looked far less grand in human form, stuffing food into his mouth with the focus of a teenage boy who had decided manners were for weaker species. Mr. Zero, meanwhile, somehow managed to look like a rich executive at a company dinner while sitting in a half-built camp on Floor 2 of the dungeon.
After the first bite, he smiled and looked around.
"Everyone should join," he said. "It is New Year's Eve. There are neither positions, nor reputation differences."
That got a few looks. Mostly because hearing a Pillar say something so normal sounded wrong. Still, no one argued.
So the camp gathered. Alexei, Dominic, Séline, Camille, Bruno, and Joanne handled the mọc vân ám well enough. Alexei actually looked pleased, which made sense.
"Russian food has jellied meat too," he said, already reaching for more.
Séline nodded. "French cuisine has similar dishes."
Camille added, "The texture is not new."
That left the others in more uncertain territory.
Jake stared at the bowl like it had insulted him personally. Jack was trying to be polite but clearly did not trust anything that moved like that under the spoon. Emma tasted it with the caution of someone approaching a contract clause written by a demon.
Janet compared it first. "This feels like the jellied eel the British make."
That earned an immediate grimace from half the table. Then she tasted it.
A pause.
"The flavor is fine," she admitted. "The texture feels wrong to me."
"That is because your soul is weak," Joanne told her.
"Or because food should not wobble like that," Janet shot back.
The fried nem chua did much better. Alex liked it at once. Janet too. The elves needed one bite to decide it was the greatest invention of the night and immediately started trying to steal extra pieces from each other. Little Fireball got one tiny bit and strutted off with it all smug as the only Pillar who had yet to be recognized as such by the farmer and his friends.
Then Alex asked the question that made half the table turn toward Phong. "So this can be fermented and eaten raw too, right?"
Phong looked at her. "Yes."
Alex nodded like this was excellent news. "Make that for me later."
The table went silent.
Jake was the first to recover. "Raw pork."
Emma stared. "You want raw pork on purpose?"
Alex shrugged. "Germans love Mettbrötchen."
That shut down a surprising amount of resistance, mostly because nobody wanted to start a food nationalism war in front of Séline, Camille, and three Pillars at the same time. Phong took the opening while people were still dealing with Alex's taste in risk.
He looked at Bai Hu, then at Mr. Zero. Then asked, "Why didn't the Soerai give any EXP when killed?"
That made the camp quiet again.
That had bothered all of them.
Bai Hu took a slow, amused look at Alex first. A very deliberate look. Enough that Alex narrowed her eyes at once.
Then the White Tigress smiled and refused. "I won't answer that directly."
Phong clicked his tongue softly in annoyance. Mr. Zero, on the other hand, seemed delighted by the question.
He leaned back, tapped one finger lightly against the side of his glass, and said, "A hint, then."
Everyone listened.
He pointed, not upward or toward Bai Hu, but toward the path leading deeper. "Think about the obsidian canyon on Floor 3. Or a certain ruin with pixies in it. That should be enough plot hook for your next quest."
Jake frowned first. "The one with the spider body snatchers and those giant cockroach nightmares?"
Mr. Zero smiled wider. "Yes."
That was all he gave them. And somehow it was enough to make the answer feel worse than not knowing.
Bai Hu groaned and looked at him with annoyance that felt oddly close to sibling irritation. "You spoil the humans too much."
Mr. Zero did not even try to deny it. "I enjoy them when they bite back."
That answer made Phong dislike him more. It also told him the hint mattered.
So while the rest of the camp kept eating, laughing, and trying not to think too hard about why Bai Hu had looked at Alex before dodging the EXP question, the thought settled into the back of Phong's mind.
Obsidian canyon, spider body snatchers, monstrous cockroaches. And now, Soerai with no EXP yield, plus dungeon pixies. A thread existed there. He just could not see the full pattern yet.
For the moment, dinner rolled on. Three Pillars ate at his fire. His camp, human and monster alike, shared food on New Year's Eve.
And above all of it sat the strange truth Phong had grown too used to. No matter how wild the day became, by nightfall he still ended up feeding impossible things.