You want to know why Martin was thrown out, Shiv? Why him and not you? Because you both got mad, but your anger leads you places. Your anger has a direction. It has an action behind it, and that fucking matters a lot. It matters more than you can ever fully imagine.

  Martin's anger is like a bomb. A useless bomb. It goes off inside him. And he uses it as an excuse to abuse himself. Why? His father doesn't respect him. His mother's dead.

  We all have problems. No one gives a shit about our problems. We're here to cook. We're not paid to be understood. We are not respected for our pain. We are loved when we make something that people like. And even then, that's barely possible because people are stupid cunts who don't know what they like. So we have to try again and again.

  He smashed up his station because he's a crazy person, Shiv. He's a crazy person who thinks that by destroying something, he can express his anger. That is not an expression of anger; that is an expression of being felling impotent. And I don't need impotent people in my kitchen. I need insane people in my kitchen. To come in day after day, take it up the ass, and think it won’t happen again tomorrow.

  That's why you're still here. Because you got mad, and then you promptly diced 500 potatoes during the busiest night of the month. That's anger. He's not angry; he's just upset that he isn't who he thought he was.

  Give your anger some proper bite.

  Give your rage some fucking purpose. Keep doing it. Do it until you’re dead. Don’t expect a release. Anger is not a release. Anger is to be used up. If we feel like shit and are all felling tired afterward, then we know that we did the right bloody thing.

  I’ll tell you this again: We’re not here to feel good. We’re here to cook good fucking food. That’s all.

  -Georges Archambault

  233 (I)

  Rage

  Pillar of Orichalcum 266 > 269

  “Chuck me the fucking heart again,” Shiv said when he finally calmed down. The floor beneath him was cracked. The walls were fissured. The building had probably sunk a full meter into the ground. At the end of it all, Shiv’s inertial sheath sounded like a storm trying to tear its way out from the insides of a metal barrel, the noise both resounding and unnerving. “I need a hit.”

  It was a hell of a thing when a Legendary-Tier Pathbearer lost control. If Shiv harnessed enough tides, he could crush a city to rubble between his hands. Smash his way through a mountain. Rip the very land beneath him asunder and strike the plates far below. With even more tides, he could do a hell of a lot more than that. He could make the world shake and quiver. He could become the storm on the horizon—the cataclysm waiting to erupt.

  That cataclysm was spilling out from inside Shiv, and he couldn’t put it back. An ocean’s worth of anger gushed out, and he couldn’t keep it caged inside any longer. His Berserk Skill raged inside him, and his Psycho-Cartography rattled and cracked as it desperately tried to keep him together.

  “What… just transpired?” the Anointed One whispered, as he stared down at the Deathless’s newest corpse. The body bore no marks aside from the blood leaking out of its eyes, nose, and ears. Shiv’s blood pressure turned out to be Legendary-Tier as well, and an uncontrolled activation of a Shapeless Tide tore his brain vessels into shreds. The aneurysm was both magical and unavoidable.

  Shiv was powerful, but he was a man wrestling with a giant when it came to all the rage he felt just then.

  “I had an aneurysm. I think. Can’t tell. Got too pissed, and something broke inside me. Chuck the fucking heart, or I start draining the world. Not asking again.”

  The words left Shiv’s mind as he was in a trance. He didn’t think. He wasn’t even fully here. Only his Psycho-Cartography kept pulling him back from a mindless rampage, and even then, it barely managed.

  Psycho-Cartography 96 > 98

  The chained heart was cast in his direction, and Shiv drank its vitality deep as he accelerated toward another resurrection. When he surfaced from his white-red mana, bellowing waves of boiling rage crashed together inside him. Shiv wanted to rip his way out of the kitchen, fling himself in the direction of Flamecrown Castle, discharge his sheath, and obliterate everything around the Supervolcano. And that was just the appetizer. The main course was slowly beating Maiden the Genius to death for taking his last refuge of peace away from him.

  His cooking…

  He felt like he'd lost the ability to breathe.

  All that fighting and bloodshed—he did what the System wanted. He gave it more strife and death than—

  “Fuck,” Shiv said, all too calmly. “Fuck. I need… I need…”

  The building began to shake around him once more. The Gingerbread-Knights trembled and cried out. Some began to physically crack from his rage alone.

  It seemed the emotional effects weren’t just one way.

  Shiv became an ocean of bitterness, and the sheer loathing he felt nearly unraveled his sanity. It was hard to control himself, hard to think. He was more rage than thought now, and on the verge of succumbing to his full bestial nature.

  Everything he had, every fiber of his being, wanted him to commit violence, to inflict harm on those around him. It didn't matter if the fae magic would see him subsumed by bread tumors. It didn't matter that he couldn't hurt the Anointed One in any meaningful capacity. It didn't matter that it would probably kill all the chefs and condemn the customers within Monster Mystery Meat to a series of brutal deaths.

  This was his last measure of worth. The System wanted him to be a fighter. It wanted him to be a violent animal, an avatar of untamed destruction. So he would give it what it wanted. He would give it so much of what it wanted that he would collapse the very structure it was built upon. If the world was going to infest his heart with decaying blood, then he would return that a thousand-fold on the—

  Psycho-Cartography: Stop. You are angry. You are emotional. But you need to be more than that. You need to be a Pathbearer right now.

  "I can't cook!" Shiv shouted. "I can't—I can't do anything. They've taken my felling peace from me. I won’t ever feel right again! I won’t!”

  Psycho-Cartography: You are behaving like a petulant child. You are acting like Martin. Remember him? Remember how Georges removed him from the kitchen? For what reason?

  Shiv thought back to his past. He pushed through the forest of his misery and thought hard. He remembered Martin, how the man smashed up the fish station, how Georges threw him out even as he broke. And, as Martin broke down crying in the alley behind the Swan-Eating Toad, begging for another chance, telling them that his mother had passed, that he was alone, Georges did something only he could do.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  He told him he didn’t give a shit, that Martin was useless, and that he was fired, effective immediately.

  No one ever saw Martin again after that day.

  Shiv had thought the act to be vile. He'd hated Georges in that moment and spent a good while glaring at the head chef, despite all he'd done for him. Georges took offense to that and decided Shiv had additional preparatory duties on the spot. Shiv agreed and countered that punishment by being perfect for the rest of that night. He carved potato after potato. He even made sure all the vegetables were prepared, washed clean to a sparkling shine.

  But then, afterward, when he was expected to receive a reprimand for the dirty looks he was shooting the head chef, he was instead given a lesson.

  No one cared about your anger—not in the kitchen, not in your life. They cared about what you could offer them, what you could deliver.

  And so Shiv focused himself. The feelings of rage didn't recede, but he surfaced from his anger. He was no longer drowning. Instead, he was like a person cast to and fro upon the turbulent waves, struggling against the battering tides.

  Psycho-Cartography: Good, this is good. Now, the next part will be even harder. You need to figure out how to finish this dish, even if you are cursed.

  "But how?" Shiv snapped at the skill. "How do I do that?"

  Psycho-Cartography: I am a Psychology Skill, not your Cooking skill. We understand this: that Curse will affect everything you do in the kitchen, everything you create in life. You will need to figure out how to remove it, one way or another. In the meantime, we must work around it.

  "Are you well, Undying One?" the Knight of the Summer Court called out. He sounded like he wanted to mock Shiv but also seemed genuinely unsure what was wrong with him.

  "Yeah," Shiv replied with a rasp. "I'm just... Just give me a fucking moment, okay? Before I go off like a bomb.”

  He took a second and centered himself. The fury he felt was constantly building and wasn't going to fade any time soon. But compared to the time he was consumed by the Culinary Berserker skill, this was nothing, nothing at all. He could still control his thoughts.

  He didn't need to make an effigy of Georges to center himself, but he probably did need his mentor's guidance. What would Georges do right now? Shiv thought back. He tried to remember if Georges and the rest of the Swan-Eating Toad had ever encountered anything like this, but Shiv's life after the time the Raven threw him off Blackedge was practically nothing but novel experiences. Shiv doubted that Georges had ever been Cursed in the same way, and the rest of the Swan-Eating Toad were even less afflicted by world-ending threats and divine adversaries.

  This was a uniquely Deathless problem.

  "Shit," Shiv snarled. "Looks like I'm gonna need to come up with something on my own…”

  Let's see here. The problems I'm dealing with are decay and blood. The decay part was harder to handle than the blood. Shiv could potentially constantly just drain the blood out of his meal using his Biomancy field, but that wasn't practical. That was also probably going to stain whatever he made with a wretched flavor of metallic gore. The decay, though… If his meal constantly decayed and turned into something fetid, then how was he going to offer it to anyone? There was no way a fairy princess would accept something like that. And the bread man was probably going to mock him over a dish like that as well. Something told him that the Faebread might be willing to eat bits of people raw, but a rotten, bloody mess? No.

  I've got to figure out how to deal with that decay first. That’s the main problem.

  "There is no shame in surrender if there is something wrong with your soul, Undying One," the Anointed One said. His words bordered on the periphery of a taunt, but he still sounded uncertain.

  Shiv's anger demanded that he respond. It demanded, but Shiv didn't obey. Instead, he directed the frustration inside him into considering more options.

  Instinctively, he sank his Biomancy into his ruined utensils and gritted his teeth. He tried to restore their composition, and then another old memory returned to Shiv, one that had nothing to do with Georges or the Swan-Eating Toad. Instead, this had something to do with his earliest experiences with Biomancy.

  Cancer.

  He'd give himself cancer when he'd tried to heal his wounds, the first time he plunged down into the Abyss. Biomancy-made Cancers were constantly growing, constantly regenerating, and Shiv could cultivate them. In fact, it was so easy to cultivate cancers that they were practically the first and most brutal mistake a Biomancer could make.

  Memorization 14 > 16

  Alright, alright. So, let's see if the decay actually affects a cancerous cell as well.

  Shiv began his tests. He ripped a piece out of his new body's thigh and rapidly tried to regenerate it. He did it sloppily, and the cells inside began to divide in an uncontrolled and chaotic manner. The replication turned into a cascade, and a bubbling mass of cancers began to spread out from the strip of meat. Shiv cast it on the grill station, and it glistened bright white as The Chef Unwavering took hold of it.

  Parts of the meat began to rot, but then the rotten section quickly found itself countered as a crashing tide of bulbous matter spilled forth. A war took place between the uncontrolled cellular mutation and the corrosion of the Genius’s Curse. Every time the two forces met, blood sprayed out from between. Shiv clenched his teeth. This wasn't good. Even if it temporarily stymied the decay, he could see the rot was winning; the cancers were being driven back.

  This wouldn't work. Not unless he could change the equation entirely. It would last long enough as a meal if the Faebred ate it immediately once Shiv finished it. But something told Shiv that the Anointed One had already figured out the gist of what was up, and that he would delay until Shiv had completely lost control of his dish—until it was little more than strips of spoiled rotten meat. And even if he didn’t, Shiv didn’t have it in him to serve actively rotting pieces of meat.

  A feeling of self-loathing climbed inside the Deathless, but he squashed it quickly thanks to Psycho-Cartography. Every slight emotion was compounding on itself. Shiv began to suspect that it wasn't due to the heart, but mainly the fae themselves. They also provoked delusion and other emotional extremes needed to keep a close watch on his mental state, if nothing else.

  So, if I can't control the blood and can't stop the decay, what can I do?

  Shiv froze time and tested another thing. He shaped a golem from his Vitae and bestowed it with The Chef Unwavering. As he commanded it to work on his behalf, he watched as everything it touched and tried to create spilled apart into putrid rot and blood as well.

  “FUCK!” Shiv shattered the golem with a backhand. The Curse had him bad.

  Golemancy 26 > 28

  With that failure, Shiv looked back to his Last Morsel. A bitter feeling welled up inside him once more, but there was a tinge of hope as well. He could, of course, still make meals. But it wouldn't be done by his hands. No, it needed to be consecrated through the System’s sadistic bestowal, something that was as much a weapon designed for murder as it was a cooking instrument.

  Shiv looked up at the mold-choked ceiling, narrowing his eyes. Is that why you gave it to me? Is that why I got this as a reward from the mana core?

  The System, as always, remained silent.

  It was always silent, unless it was trying to expose him to new kinds of conflict or rewarding him with a level gained, a piece of equipment, a new Feat, Skill, or Blessing.

  The System took, gave, and provoked, but it never soothed, it never consoled, it never cared.

  Shiv cared. Shiv struggled. Shiv needed to cook. But he couldn’t. There was no easy choice—no simple way for him to overcome this Curse. His heart broke as he realized he would likely need to use the Last Morsel to make up for what he lacked. But he also vowed that after this was done, he would rip this fucking Curse out of himself and shove it up Maiden’s ass.

  Shiv immediately began rooting through himself using his soul, desperately trying to find where Maiden had left her foul touch imprinted upon his soul. If he could discover it, then maybe he could break it. But Curses and Blessings weren’t like skills. They were far more nebulous—borderline untraceable, much like his Unique Skills.

  “Godsdammit!” Shiv hissed to himself when he couldn't find the Curse anywhere within his being. "Later… Later. I'll find a way. I swear on all the fucking gods I know and the System itself, I'll find a way."

  For now, he wanted to try maintaining his pieces of flesh one more time. If he was forced to use his Last Morsel, he would at least do all he could to prepare the ingredients before letting his Legendary item take over.

  He threw a new series of meat strips on the grill, and he bade his mana hydra to converge on it. The meat burned and bubbled, searing and crackling on the grill, then cracking and vomiting rivers of blood like a dying animal. His vision doubled as his rage worsened. His Psycho-Cartography screamed inside him as his skills went to war with each other.

  Psycho-Cartography 98 > 100 (Skill Evolution Imminent)

  Berserk 40 > 47