“Mother nature created plants that develop a burning sensation when ingested to prevent animals other than its intended ones from eating it. Then people came, ate the plant, decided that they *liked* having their mouths set on fire and became the biggest consumer of said plants instead. Nature planned, people happened.” - Londario Esquevel, Botanist and biologist from Elmaiya, circa 201 FP.

“*Cough* How do you even eat this so easily!?” blurted Celia out even as she coughed and panted, her skin gaining a slight reddish tint as the unliving girl sweated profusely and even teared up.

While the unliving were no longer truly bound to mortal norms, certain physiological reactions still affected them just as if they were alive. Pleasure from sexual acts were one of those things. Another was reaction to certain foods. While foods that they were allergic to during their life no longer bothered them, some reactions remain unchanged, like the effect of spicy food.

Precisely what Celia experienced at that moment.

Aideen – along with several other locals who caught sight of Celia’s predicament – had a good laugh at the spectacle. She had a bowl of the same meat and vegetable stew Celia was eating before her, along with several flatbreads to eat it with. Like Celia's, the greenish stew had plenty of small seeds floating on its surface, and was exactly as spicy as it looked like.

Unlike Celia, however, Aideen was more used to such flavors. Ptolodeccan cuisine often involved plentiful spices as well, although they used different spices. Their preference for strong flavors that often sent foreigners reeling with their tongues on fire was the same, however.

“Just more used to this style of food, I guess? I honestly missed this and didn’t notice until I had some here,” replied Aideen nonchalantly as she scooped up more of the fiery stew with a piece of flatbread and happily munched down on it. The burning sensation helped enhance the rich mix of flavors the dish offered, and just reminded her more of the food from her hometown. “Though I guess most foods in your region of the continent were usually less stimulating compared to this.”

While the food in Posuin and Knallzog both made use of a good amount of spice – not as much as in Ptolodecca, but reasonable enough – the northern regions of the Clangeddin Empire, where Celia hailed from, were poor lands for growing spices. As such, salt was typically their most common seasoning, and the cooking there tended to methods that extracted the most of the natural flavor of the ingredients.

Orcish cooking was similar to that, taken to a more drastic extreme. Even then, some places in the prairies grew various sorts of wild spices, and the orcs made use of them, if sparingly due to the low amount they could gather. Places like the territory of the Greyscales at the shoreline that grew their own were rarities, and even they don’t use that much in their cooking, compared to Ptolodeccan cuisine.

Or the cuisine in Alfheim, for that matter.

The local cooking was a celebration of strong flavors and spiciness, one that might have seemed overwhelming at first, but would complement the main ingredients well once someone got used to it. Aideen easily adapted to the local flavors, though Celia had a noticeably harder time with it. Then again, even in the orcish lands she was gasping when she had to deal with food that had a slight amount of spiciness to it.

Alfheim’s residents had a much higher tolerance for spice and their cooking was adjusted accordingly to suit their tastes.

“Here, drink some of this,” said Aideen as she poured a milky white beverage from a metal pitcher to the clay mugs set on the table. The beverage was some sort of drink made from fermented milk and kept cool in the underground stream before it was served. It was something that was just right to cleanse the palate after having some of the fiery local cuisine.

“Haaah, thanks. Finally can feel my tongue again,” said Celia after she drank the contents of her mug in one go. The younger unliving woman then used a small towel to wipe the sweat and tears from her face – provided on the table for precisely that purpose – before she looked at the bowl in front of her with some trepidation. Eventually, she ripped off another piece of the flatbread and timidly dipped it into the stew before she ate some more.

“Why… is this so addictive to eat!?” complained Celia a short while later. The sweat ran down her face in rivulets once more, and her eyes were tearing up as she chewed. She alternated between bites of the spicy food and the cold, milky, sour drink that washed most of the spiciness off her palate, eating more despite her obvious suffering. “It still tastes like it set my tongue on fire but once you wash it down you keep wanting to have more of it… Why!?”

“That’s the joy of spicy food, Celia. Might as well get used to it while we’re here. My homeland’s cooking uses different spices but they’d easily match these folks with their love of spiciness,” replied Aideen with a smile. The entranced look on Celia’s face, one that seemed uncertain whether she should be feeling pain or pleasure at the moment, was nothing new to her. It was a common sight to see in Ptolodecca when they had foreign visitors.

Even her original hometown of Vitalica was the same, as the cuisine of the region was similar to each other, which often caused some distress to visitors from the Elmaiya Empire or the eastern Jarldoms. The rarer visitors from the north had less issues, however, as they were pretty used to spiciness in their own cuisines.

It was interesting how people in a whole different continent developed their own styles of cooking. The food in Knallzog and Posuin often used spices from Ur-Teros, which they imported regularly, but Alfheim was so far inland that it would not have been an economical thing to do. Instead, they made use of their own local spices, which Aideen learned was also quite popular in the Kingdom Down Under.

That was another thing for her to look forward on.