Green Monster Epic

After dismissing the three allies who were overly eager and assertive, Alan was inwardly seething with frustration and helplessness.

To say that Grandmaster-level cooking had as low a success rate as Alan had implied was certainly an exaggeration. The fact that Alan had succeeded on his first attempt, even with a great deal of luck, still required considerable skill and adaptability; otherwise, it would have been nothing more than empty talk.

Alan also had his own concerns. Grandmaster-level cooking not only demanded extremely high skill but, more importantly, depended on the quality of the ingredients. At least with Alan's current abilities, he couldn't create Grandmaster-level dishes without sufficiently excellent ingredients.

However, every top-tier ingredient suitable as the main component of a dish was rare and invaluable. Even a single failure would be enough to make any tribe bleed internally.

For example, the main ingredient Alan used last time was a hydra capable of infinite growth and casting several different types of magic simultaneously. With enough effort and time invested in nurturing it, the long-term returns would far outweigh the value of a mere Grandmaster-level magic dish—by a significant margin!

Even now, Alan had Saint-level hydra flesh, marrow, and other equally precious ingredients on hand, but they weren't qualified to be the main ingredient for Grandmaster-level cooking, which shows how demanding this level of magic cooking was in terms of ingredients.

Not everyone had Alan's boldness to give up a tribe's future guardian beast in exchange for a declining tribal talent.

Coupled with the pitiful success rate of Grandmaster-level cooking, if Alan rashly agreed to the requests of the three allied tribes and attempted cooking that he hadn't fully mastered, the result would inevitably be a complete loss. The financial loss to the three tribes would be minor; the real fear was that they would resent Alan, suspecting that he deliberately avoided success to prevent their increased strength from threatening his power and authority. That would not be a good thing for the Wildlands, which had only just begun to improve.

Reform is always at risk of being interrupted and reversed before the newly established vested interests become the mainstream. Clearly, the new generation of tribes in the Wildlands wasn't strong enough to become the mainstream, or even to protect themselves. They were in a fragile stage, in need of time. If the Four Pillars Alliance were to fall apart at this point, it would be incredibly difficult to change the Wildlands back from its old ways.

The evening banquet was truly torturous for Alan. Despite his best efforts to persuade and explain the difficulties, he couldn't convince the adamant kobolds. Only when he sensed the Saint-level kobold's tone and attitude gradually turning cold did Alan reluctantly resort to excuses such as his injuries from the previous great battle not yet healed and the energy he had spent on cooking since his return. Ultimately, he managed to postpone the matter, but he promised Davinci and the others that he would help their three tribes each create a Grandmaster-level magic dish within 20 years at the latest.

Of course, Alan also set an extremely high price for his services, as a way to express his dissatisfaction with the three tribes' aggressive attitude. The three tribes didn't object to this.

What remained was to tell them the requirements for the relevant high-level main ingredients, so they could start searching and collecting them during this time.

After sending away the three important allies, Alan hadn't even had a moment to rest when the major churches of the Temple of Nature sent people to offer congratulations, their real purpose self-evident.

Alan, with the self-consoling thought that 'raising one sheep is the same as raising a flock,' used his exclusive skills as a bargaining chip and negotiated conditions with the various forces, agreeing to start cooking dishes for everyone in 20 years.

In fact, Alan could sense that although the Temple of Nature's church forces were also eager to obtain Grandmaster-level dishes, they weren't as urgent as the three allies. After all, they were large and powerful, with countless trump cards in their hands. They had no shortage of demigod-level or higher experts, so one more or less demigod-level existence wouldn't make much of a difference to them.

Their eagerness was more about gathering more detailed information about magic cooking, understanding its value, and then deciding whether to invest more in it.

Among the churches of the temple, the Oakwood Theocracy, which had the best relationship with Green Field, was the most concerned about this matter. They not only sent Oscar, a high-ranking legendary figure with a close relationship with Alan, as an envoy but also reassigned Oscar to oversee the affairs of the Grand Chapel in Green Lake City to better facilitate communication with the Green Field Tribe.

Oscar was now stuck before the demigod advancement threshold. Although as an elf, he had a long lifespan and plenty of time to train and cultivate to complete the breakthrough, the bottleneck of the demigod was difficult, and he wasn't very confident that he could cross that peak.

Fortunately, he had accumulated some good materials over the years, as well as contributions he had made to the church. Taking advantage of the church's mission to send him north, he simply exchanged all his contributions for a Son of Acorn and brought all his accumulated materials with him, hoping to use the effect of Alan's magical magic dishes to take himself one step further.

The Son of Acorn had two meanings in the Oakwood Theocracy. One was the successor cultivated by the church. Before they could inherit the power of the church's high-level, they were often given this title and sent to various positions to rotate learning and training. The other meaning was the literal one: the fruit born from the flowering and reproduction of the oak tree. However, this oak tree wasn't an ordinary oak tree but was bred by the Father of the Oak, Sylvanus's main oak tree, naturally containing a strong natural aura and some unrecognizable divinity.

In the past, although these kinds of acorns were precious in the theocracy, they could often descend into the world of Fayman through divine grace and other methods because the flowering and fruiting cycle of the oak tree's main body in Sylvanus's kingdom of God would take a turn. Now, with the destruction of the Father of the Oak's kingdom of God, the main oak tree representing its divinity and divine power also collapsed and died, and the Son of Acorn had become an absolute treasure that would decrease with each one used.

Oscar had painstakingly earned this seed through hundreds of years of hard work and contributions to the theocracy. If the effect of Alan's Grandmaster-level magic dishes was indeed as magical as the intelligence said, then he could pay Alan the corresponding reward and have him cook a dish for himself.

The decline of the Oakwood Theocracy was a fact. In recent years, the number of newly promoted powerhouses in the theocracy was far less than that of other churches backed by gods. Many talented people who originally had the opportunity to step into legend had been unable to move forward because of the lack of important inheritance methods such as divine grace, and eventually wasted their lives.

For the continuation of the theocracy's inheritance and for the Father of the Oak to wake up from his eternal sleep, the theocracy had been working hard to maintain the Father of the Oak's believers. As long as they had enough faith power as nourishment and fuel, then the Father of the Oak's extinguished divine fire would have a chance to reignite, so that the sleeping god could return to his position.

However, besides needing powerful eloquence and charisma, tending to believers also required miracles and the demonstration of powerful abilities, all of which required the theocracy to have enough talents and powerhouses.

Ultimately, this formed a vicious cycle. Tending to believers required the theocracy to send powerful clergy members to preach and display divine grace everywhere, but it became difficult for the theocracy to cultivate talents. Clergy members could only learn natural magic through study and couldn't shorten the learning time through divine grace and other methods, which slowed down their progress.

The decrease in the ability of grassroots clergy members often weakened their persuasiveness, and the number of believers who believed in and followed them naturally decreased.

The fewer believers, the smaller the overall base of talents that could be discovered, and the number of high-quality talents naturally decreased, causing the strength of the theocracy to decline further…

Therefore, the Oakwood Theocracy attached great importance to any means of assisting in enhancing strength. From the beginning of the magic chef's emergence, the Oakwood Theocracy had been the most active Temple of Nature church force in cultivating magic chefs, and they had gained a lot from it through years of practice.

Oscar also hoped that he could advance to demigod, contribute greater strength to the theocracy, and dedicate his meager strength to the awakening of the Lord of Service—the Father of the Oak.

Alan didn't expect that Oscar himself would have such a need. When the other party took out his treasured materials and sincerely pleaded, Alan knew that he had no reason to refuse.

Perhaps the high-level members of the Oakwood Theocracy had also calculated this point, so they gave the precious Son of Acorn to Oscar to exchange for Alan's Grandmaster-level magic dishes through his relationship.

End of this month, give yourself a thumbs up, you actually didn't update too much.