The delicious food finally arrived, giving Fainyx approximately half a second to process what he was looking at before the rich aroma hit him and violently scattered every carefully organized thought in his head.
He knew that specific smell. He knew it in the profound way a person remembers something that belonged entirely to a different life, a sensory trigger that completely bypassed logical thought and struck a quiet, vulnerable place in his soul that was infinitely harder to defend against.
The earthy spices, the perfectly grilled meat, and the deeply familiar warmth radiating from the fermented broth sitting beside the main dish all hit him at once.
His small hand stilled completely over the wooden table as a painful, quiet pulling sensation bloomed in his chest.
It had absolutely nothing to do with physical hunger and everything to do with the forbidden word home suddenly surfacing in his mind before he could stop it.
He ruthlessly pushed the bubbling emotion down, forcing his delicate face to remain a mask of perfect stillness as he slowly picked up his utensils.
Beside him, Liam was already reaching for the wooden chopsticks with the wild enthusiasm of someone who had never used the exotic utensils before and had naively decided they were not going to be a problem.
It was immediately a massive problem.
The slick meat slipped from his grip on the first attempt, followed quickly by the second and the third.
Liam's jerky movements grew increasingly determined and increasingly unsuccessful, his brow furrowing deeply into the specific expression of a stubborn boy absolutely refusing to acknowledge that he was losing a humiliating battle against his own cutlery.
Adam watched the agonizing struggle for approximately ten seconds before letting out a long, exhausted sigh.
"Just use the spoon and fork," Adam instructed flatly.
"...Fine," Liam grumbled, his frown deepening as he set the chopsticks down with the dramatic air of someone merely tabling an argument rather than actually conceding defeat.
As his brother finally picked up a metal fork instead, Fainyx watched the amusing exchange and then, without any particular conscious thought, picked up his own chopsticks and cleanly lifted a piece of marinated meat.
His fluid motion was perfectly steady, exact, and completely natural simply because it truly was natural to him.
It was an effortless action embedded deep within his muscle memory, carrying over from a past life that technically no longer existed in this universe.
Suddenly, the entire table went completely quiet.
Fainyx continued chewing his food for a brief moment before he finally noticed the heavy silence.
His hand abruptly stopped mid motion, making him acutely aware of three distinct sets of eyes staring at him with varying degrees of absolute surprise.
Slowly, he lowered the wooden chopsticks back to the table.
Liam leaned entirely forward across the wood, his bright blue eyes sparkling with awe. "Fainyx, have you actually used those strange things before?"
Fainyx calmly reached into his coat and retrieved his notebook.
[ No. ]
It was a blatant lie, but an entirely necessary one to protect his secrets. He resumed eating his meal immediately, moving significantly slower and much more deliberately this time, artificially controlling each precise motion with the extreme care he should have been applying from the very beginning.
Liam loudly declared his little brother to be a natural born genius, while Adam simply murmured his approval in that distinctly quiet, understated way he said most things.
Weinhart offered a faint, knowing smile from the side. Fainyx kept his violet eyes locked firmly on his delicious food.
'Careless... I was far too careless...' he scolded himself internally.
'I absolutely cannot let tiny things like that slip through the cracks again.'
As he continued eating, the rich, savory taste settled deeply into his bones. The crushing homesickness he had ruthlessly pushed down returned in a much quieter wave, feeling significantly less sharp than before.
It was an emotion he could now safely hold at a distance and objectively observe rather than a sudden tidal wave that actively threatened to crack the mask on his face.
This incredible food was genuinely real. That was the singular, mind bending fact his brilliant brain kept returning to.
This was not a hazy memory or a poorly made magical reconstruction, but the actual, authentic cuisine sitting right in front of him in a fantasy world where it had absolutely no logical reason to exist.
Thankfully, the tense atmosphere at the table gradually relaxed as the delicious meal continued.
Liam enthusiastically started talking about the various side dishes, eagerly asking Weinhart questions about the ingredients and pointing things out to Adam, who politely responded with his usual measured interest.
The dynamic quickly settled into something warm, familial, and deeply comfortable.
Fainyx happily let the cheerful noise wash over him while he quietly chewed his food, lost in his own thoughts as he kept his magical senses discreetly extended across the bustling room.
Then, the front door gently chimed open.
A young man casually walked inside looking exactly like someone returning from an errand with absolutely no sense of urgency whatsoever.
He had messy black hair, dark black eyes, and radiated the kind of laid back, unhurried ease that heavily suggested the very concept of rushing had simply never applied to him.
"Ah, I am finally back," the young man announced to the room.
Instantly, the swinging kitchen doors violently burst open.
"WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?!"
The terrifying, non human man from the kitchen, the exact same blonde chef with the piercing gold eyes who had nearly uncovered Fainyx upstairs, stormed out into the dining room looking like a ticking bomb that had finally exploded.
The dark haired owner simply scratched the back of his head and offered an apologetic, goofy smile that proved he was intimately familiar with receiving this exact, furious reaction.
"Ahaha, I am sorry?"
"Sorry?" the gold eyed man hissed, his deep voice dropping into something considerably lower and infinitely more dangerous.
"You completely disappeared on me again."
"I honestly got held up on the road," the owner explained pleasantly, waving a dismissive hand.
"Some local knights stopped me for a random investigation."
"Tch," the blonde man scoffed, crossing his muscular arms over his chest. "You always manage to get yourself dragged into the most ridiculous nonsense."
"Maybe I am just incredibly unlucky," the owner chuckled softly.
"Maybe you are just a massive trouble magnet."
The owner simply laughed at the accusation. The blonde man clicked his tongue in clear irritation but did not press the issue any further.
Fainyx, who had continued eating his meal with the blank expression of a child paying absolutely no attention whatsoever to the adults arguing nearby, kept his invisible sound transmission magic running at full capacity and perfectly heard every single word.
A brief, pregnant pause settled between the two strange men before the owner's voice suddenly dropped significantly lower. It was a hushed whisper clearly not meant for the dining room to hear, but it remained crystal clear to Fainyx's magical eavesdropping.
"By the way... who exactly are those rich kids sitting in the back?"
Fainyx's tiny hand moved steadily to lift another piece of grilled meat without faltering.
"They are just random nobles," the gold eyed man replied, his tone dismissive and entirely casual.
"Those two smaller boys actually have a decent amount of mana circulating in their cores, and the adult servant traveling with them is significantly stronger." The blonde man paused briefly to assess the room.
"Still, none of them are even remotely comparable to me."
The owner chuckled warmly, patting his friend's shoulder. "Well, yeah. Of course they are not comparable to you."
"Because you are literally a thousand year old dragon."
Fainyx set his wooden chopsticks down with absolute, mechanical calm.
He smoothly picked up his ceramic cup, took a slow, measured sip of the hot broth, and thought one very clear, very distinct sentence.
'A what...?'
A literal dragon. An ancient, mythical beast of legend was currently working the kitchen line in a Korean barbecue restaurant.
He had read countless dusty tomes about dragons in his mother's library.
He had personally encountered them during his past life while playing the game, knowing them to be enormous, ancient calamities operating at a terrifying level of power that made most grand human conflicts look like minor, petty inconveniences.
He logically knew that dragons existed within this fantasy world, but he had simply never expected to find one standing in a dining room, irritably scolding a restaurant owner about disappearing on a random Tuesday afternoon.
He kept his delicate face entirely still and regulated his breathing to remain perfectly even, while the inside of his mind was currently having a considerably more violent, panicked response to this absurd revelation.
The dragon's deep voice abruptly shifted, entirely losing its irritated, casual edge and suddenly gaining a terrifyingly sharp, focused intensity.
"Wait..." A heavy, dreadful pause followed. "There is that smell again."
Fainyx's racing thoughts sharpened immediately, his survival instincts screaming into overdrive.
"It is the exact same lingering scent I noticed upstairs earlier," the disguised dragon muttered darkly.
"So it truly was not just my imagination playing tricks on me."
Fainyx continued to chew his delicious food. Slowly and naturally, he made absolutely sure there was nothing even remotely suspicious about any movement he was currently making, projecting the flawless illusion of an innocent child having a quiet meal with his beloved family.
"Hey," the dragon prompted, nudging his boss.
"Do you happen to sense something incredibly strange coming from that noble's table in the back?"
A tense, suffocating silence followed the terrifying question.
Then, the black haired owner let out a soft, considering hum, a sound that heavily suggested he was already paying incredibly close attention to their exact location.
Fainyx absolutely did not dare to look up from his plate.
He felt the invisible phenomenon before he could even properly identify it.
It was a highly subtle shift in the ambient quality of the air directly around their table, a heavy, creeping sensation extending toward them that was not quite physical pressure and not quite mana in any conventional sense.
However, it was undeniably some incredibly advanced form of magical perception being directly aimed their way.
The transmigrated owner was actively analyzing their mana cores.
"I can clearly feel three sources of mana over there," the owner whispered quietly. A long pause stretched out.
"But..."
Another terrifying stretch of silence.
"There is absolutely nothing registering on that smallest child."
Fainyx's chest tightened painfully under his velvet vest.
"Maybe the tiny kid is just completely talentless," the dragon suggested with a dismissive shrug.
"No, that is not it," the owner replied instantly, his voice carrying a deeply unsettling, absolute certainty that Fainyx did not find reassuring in the slightest.
"Literally everything in this entire world possesses some trace amount of ambient mana. Every single human, every tiny living creature, and even the potted plants in the window. But that specific child sitting right there has absolutely zero."
The catastrophic problem, Fainyx understood immediately and with agonizing clarity, was that his master level mana concealment was simply far too perfect.
He had forcibly erased his magical presence so flawlessly that the resulting void was now glaringly visible to anyone with high tier sensory abilities.
Creating a visible absence in a fantasy world where literally everything radiated mana was considerably more suspicious and conspicuous than simply displaying an unremarkable, average core.
'I have successfully concealed myself directly into an entirely new, catastrophic problem,'
Fainyx lamented internally.
Yet, he stubbornly kept eating his meal. He remained perfectly calm and outwardly unbothered, while his brilliant mind was already rapidly calculating an escape route.
He wondered if he could politely excuse himself, analyzing whether drawing immediate attention by standing up to leave would be significantly worse than just staying put and playing dumb.
He desperately searched for any possible version of this timeline that ended without someone walking directly over to his table.
"How incredibly interesting..." the black haired owner murmured softly.
Footsteps instantly followed the statement.
Fainyx heard the approaching sound well before he saw the physical movement.
The heavy boots stepped steadily and unhurriedly across the wooden restaurant floor, heading directly toward their private table with the relaxed, terrifying certainty of someone who had firmly decided to investigate an anomaly and saw absolutely no reason to approach it with any particular caution.
Accepting his fate, Fainyx finally looked up from his meal.
The Korean owner stopped just a few short steps away from their table, his deep black eyes settling directly onto the youngest noble with an expression of open and entirely uncomplicated curiosity. He looked exactly like a fascinated scientist who had just stumbled upon a bizarre anomaly he desperately wanted to understand, and had simply decided to walk over and poke it.
Fainyx boldly met the stranger's intense gaze. He kept his delicate face perfectly still and emotionally blank, betraying absolutely nothing to the searching man.
'This afternoon...' Fainyx thought quietly, suppressing a heavy sigh,
'Has just become significantly more complicated than I ever could have planned for...'