The box of Marche's Insta-Jello™ sits on the steel counter. It does not just sit. It radiates. It broadcasts a high-frequency whine of artificiality that feels like it's vibrating behind Caelan's eyeballs.
Nyra stands with her arms crossed, a physical wall between herself and the offending object. "I will not cook with a color that does not exist in nature," she declares. Her voice is flat, absolute. It is not an argument; it is a creed. "Disqualify us. I don't care. Some things are more important than winning."
"And some things are more important than pride!" Lucien counters, his face pale with stress. He's frantically scrolling through his datapad. "Gideon Marche once bankrupted a food blogger for claiming his Insta-Pudding™ had the texture of 'sad plastic.' He didn't just sue her. He bought the parent company of her web host and deleted her from the internet. This isn't a duel, it's a loyalty test with a man who holds grudges like a king."
They are at a perfect, deadlocked impasse. Nyra chooses honorable death. Lucien fears a dishonorable and total annihilation.
They both look at Caelan.
He is silent, turning the garish blue box over and over in his hands. The happy cartoon raspberry seems to mock him with its dead, printed eyes. He is trying to listen, to find a Story Note, but there is nothing to hear. It is not silent like the Elysian apple was. The jello powder is screaming. A single, unending, monolithic shriek of chemical synthesis.
It is the taste of a factory floor. The sound of a fluorescent lightbulb's hum. The feeling of a focus group's exhausted compromise. It has no past, no future, only a permanent, plastic present.
He cannot find its truth because its entire existence is a lie.
The pressure of it is immense. Holt hasn't just given him a bad ingredient; he's given him a weapon designed to destroy his gift from the inside out. For the first time, Caelan feels a flicker of true, cold despair. What good is a god of truth in a world that manufactures lies so potent they can shout down reality itself?
He sets the box down. He walks to the sink and fills a clear glass with water. Pure, simple, life-giving water. An ingredient with a story as old as the planet.
He takes a pinch of the electric blue powder from the box and lets it fall into the glass.
The change is instantaneous and violent. The powder doesn't dissolve. It conquers. The water doesn't just turn blue; its very nature seems to shift. A slick, unnatural sheen coats the inside of the glass. The powder remains suspended in a chemical gel, a swirling nebula of falsehood.
And Caelan understands.
He had been asking the wrong question. He had been trying to listen to the jello. But its story wasn't inside itself. Its story was what it did to everything it touched.
Its truth… was its lie.
He turns back to his two shell-shocked teammates.
"Nyra is right. We can't cook with this," he says. Nyra nods, vindicated. Lucien's face falls.
"And Lucien is right. We can't refuse the challenge," Caelan continues. Now it's Lucien who looks relieved and Nyra who looks betrayed.
A dangerous, feral glint appears in Caelan's eyes. A look they have never seen before. "So we'll do something else. We're not going to redeem it. We're not going to make it delicious."
He holds up the glass of corrupted blue water. "We are going to put it on trial. The theme of the challenge is a celebration of this product. So we will celebrate its true nature. We will make a dish that is a perfect, honest, and brutal portrait of what it really is."
This is a new technique. A philosophy born of necessity. Holt wants to talk about purity? Fine. Caelan will give him a masterclass. He calls it Purity Inversion.
"We'll use its absolute, weaponized impurity," Caelan explains, his voice a low, thrilling conspiratorial whisper, "to reveal the purity of everything it touches. We will cook a dish that makes you taste the lie."
Nyra stares at him, her mind racing to catch up. A dish that is intentionally bad? No. Not bad. Honest. It is the most audacious, high-concept act of culinary defiance she has ever heard of. It's not just breaking the rules; it's using the rules to burn the whole stadium down.
The despair on her face is replaced by a slow, spreading grin of pure, predatory delight.
Lucien gets it a second later. His fear doesn't vanish, but it is forged into something harder, sharper. Resolve. This isn't just about survival anymore. This is about making a statement so loud that even a man like Gideon Marche will have no choice but to hear it.
Their quiet little dorm kitchen is no longer a kitchen. It is the command center for a work of magnificent, edible terrorism.
Caelan takes the entire box of Insta-Jello™. He walks with a calm, deliberate purpose over to the row of glowing jars—their library of living cultures. He stops before the most vibrant one, the mother culture, the heart of their operation.
"The sponsor wants us to create a dish that embodies the joy of Blue Raspberry Blast," he says, his voice flat and devoid of emotion.
He tears open the foil packet inside the box. A plume of artificially scented blue dust puffs into the air.
"Let's see what happens when a soul-eater meets a soul."
He upends the packet.
A torrent of lurid, electric blue powder streams down, hitting the surface of the golden, bubbling, living starter.
The reaction is immediate and horrifying.
The gentle, rhythmic bubbling of the Symbiotic Bloom instantly ceases, as if shocked into silence. A violent, chemical fizz erupts where the powder meets the liquid. The beautiful, warm golden color of the starter begins to curdle, turning a sickly, bruised shade of greenish-purple. The faint, happy light within the culture flickers, sputters, and dies.
The chapter ends on the image of the once-living culture, now a swirling, dead vortex of toxic blue, its life and its magic utterly extinguished.