“How did you…?” Severin stammered to himself but was interrupted before he could finish his sentence.

>>Why didn’t…<<

The door suddenly burst open.

>>…you tell me?! What can you cook!?<<

“…you tell me? What can you cook!?”

The same question. The same voice.

One came directly from the girl’s mouth, the other magically appeared in Severin’s head.

It was unclear what exactly he wanted to ask. Either way, the question stayed unanswered. Even if Em had heard it, right now she had obviously no intentions whatsoever to answer him. Instead, she stood there gaping at the outlandish-looking kitchen before expectantly turning towards her silent boss.

The girl curiously observing her surroundings gave Severin enough time to calm down and figure things out. However, he still hesitated to answer her. He didn’t know how.

Bread.

The System even managed to ruin his surprise for Emily. The more he thought about it, the harder it became for him to control his facial expressions and hide his displeasure.

‘Good thing I didn’t tell her anything beforehand and didn’t unnecessarily raise her hopes.’

Between realizing that Emily was still waiting for him to say something and his own inability to come up with a response, he ended up summoning a bluish floating screen via which he assigned his [Employee] to the cooking station; effectively granting her access to the cooking book and the ability to check all recipes herself.

“Aaah! Bread!” The girl was making all kinds of high-pitched squealing noises as she excitedly jumped and ran around in the room. Until she suddenly leaped towards Severin and looked up at him with huge eyes.

“Can we start making some? Please?”

Seeing her unexpected reaction, he wasn’t able to refuse her; that’s what he had planned to do, anyway. At the same time, he couldn’t completely suppress a sad smile as he answered, “Sure. Let’s give it a try.”

He gave her a small pat before she ran off, trying to put her magically obtained knowledge into action.

‘What did that girl go through that even…?’ He refused to dwell on it and followed behind her.

Somehow the girl and her surroundings were already covered in multiple varieties of flour, leaving Severin speechless.

They started familiarizing themselves not just with the recipe book and its contents, but with the kitchen as a whole. During that time, Severin had to address an issue.

“Just so you know, but today is an exception.”

“What is?” The girl asked absentmindedly, fascinated by the sink the same way Severin had been a few minutes earlier.

“You working in the kitchen.”

“What…” Emily was quick to object, but Severin wouldn’t let her have any say in the matter and quickly continued to explain.

“I’ll need you in the store while I handle things in here. Later on, I’ll come help you out again. Don’t worry, you’ll get your share!”

At least for now, Severin didn’t intend to bake any bread to order; not that it was realistically possible even with the System aiding to considerably speed up the crafting process, to begin with. Instead, he decided to produce a fixed amount of one hundred loaves or so and sell these over the course of the day.

Just like a lot of bakeries handled things. Minus the ‘getting up in the middle of the night’ part; today being the only exception. Maybe once he got another [Employee] he could handle things differently.

In the end, after promising Emily her daily fill, she gave up on the matter without too much of a fight.

They started working and talked about a bunch of different stuff. Such as Emily being woken up by a flood of System notifications; amongst them the confirmation that a quest has successfully been fulfilled, granting Severin and every one of his [Employees’s] the ability to communicate directly with each other.

In an attempt to familiarize himself with this new skill, he used this method to tell Emily about his own plans regarding this new kitchen.

On one hand, the work was more laborious than Severin had originally thought it would be.

Even with just a very limited variety of products that couldn’t compare to that of a real bakery at all, just kneading and shaping the dough for the one hundred-odd loaves of bread by hand was strenuous to him. That was although the heat one would expect one would usually find in such an environment had already been taken care of by the System, making sure the room temperature was rather pleasant.

The process itself was simple enough, not complicated at all. With only a handful of required ingredients, there weren’t too many opportunities for either of them to mess things up.

In fact, Severin was confident that as long as someone took their time to instruct him step by step, and told him the ratio of all the ingredients, he wouldn’t even need to rely on the System to finish the work. After all, it was just some water, salt, one or two kinds of flour, and some sticky stuff the System simply labeled as mother dough.

He was getting cocky.

On the other hand, there was much less waiting involved than he had anticipated; once again, thanks to the System taking care of things. Even someone like him knew that letting the dough rise for merely thirty minutes would be far from sufficient under normal circumstances.

The baking time, however, still seemed to be unaffected as far as Severin could tell with his limited experience.

But even that idle time was still too much for Severin to handle in his current tired and exhausted state. Unlike Emily, he had had no sleep yet. The moment he was sure that the oven was filled to its maximum capacity and that everything else was sufficiently prepared and ready to go, he looked at his assistant and asked, “Can you handle things on your own from here on?”

For a moment, she was taken aback, but soon had a wide smile on her face as her chest swelled with pride.

“Of course! Leave it to me.”

Severin nodded, satisfied, and turned to leave and take a rest.

“If anything comes up, don’t hesitate to call me.”

He stopped for an instant and debated whether he should remind her to let the bread rest after it was done, but ultimately decided against it. Not only did she know as much about the process as he did, but he also didn’t want her to feel compelled to refrain from immediately tasting the bread once it was out of the oven. Even he himself had to admit that the smell was becoming harder and harder to resist; if he stayed any longer, he might lose any self-restraint.

Dragging his feet, Severin finally shuffled outside. Greeted by the empty space in front of him, he didn’t hesitate and quickly bought the chairs and tables he had already cast an eye on beforehand and with a simple flick of his wrist, made them appear in their pre-selected locations.

With the current menu, this setup might not live up to his original expectations, but it was a start.

He slowly headed back to his usual sleeping space, but halted a meter before reaching the store’s door.

‘Tonight I upgraded the store, got a new kitchen which I also upgraded, and then even arranged this outdoor area which by itself won’t make me any profits. And for how much? Around maybe fifteen thousand altogether? Fuck that! Might as well…’

Without giving it any further thought or even looking at the costs, Severin resolutely added another building onto the mountaintop as if it was nothing.

Today he would finally sleep in a bed.