I Shall Survive Using Potions! Volume 1 Read online

  “Wh-What is this?!”

  “It’s delicious...”

  Munch, gobble, smack, snarf...

  All right, they love it! That’s some good, old-fashioned Japanese cooking for you.

  This should make cooking up any seafood dish a snap. That said, even though we were on a peninsula, we were still far enough away from the ocean that the day I could introduce everyone to sashimi still seemed a long ways away.

  The five guys working at the Maillart Workshop had always given rave reviews to my cooking so far, but today’s menu was on a whole different level. I’d used soy sauce as a base for the sauce that I used to cook the meat, combining that with something that was somewhat like horseradish. I’d also used a combination of soy sauce and miso to boil and grill up a few other dishes as well. I was finally able to recreate that flavor I’d been searching for all this time... It almost brought a tear to my eye.

  I also managed to make miso soup and some baked miso tofu for dessert. I even made some soy-sauce-flavored rice crackers for snacks when everyone was on break in-between work. I was so happy that I didn’t even think about putting together any specific menu, and just made a whole assortment of food. These weren’t exactly the healthiest dishes I’d put together, and I was pretty sure I went over the budget for only making food for one meal... Oops.

  “Everything’s been so delicious up till now, but this is the first time I’ve tasted anything like this! What happened for you to put on a spread like this?”

  Achille seemed so excited that I answered him honestly. “Nothing really. I just ended up making some new seasoning to try in my cooking. We used this all the time in my country, and I was finally able to recreate that flavor just now.”

  “Wow, that’s amazing! You should open up a restaurant if you can make stuff that tastes this good.”

  YANK!

  Bardot, Carlos, Alban, and Brian all grabbed a different part of Achille before dragging him away to the room next door. A few minutes passed before the five of them showed up again, acting like nothing had happened. Achille seemed a bit nervous as he turned toward me.

  “I mean, i-it’d be impossible for you to get this into a restaurant! Y-You wouldn’t get a single customer. Yeah...”

  YANK!

  Once again, Achille was dragged off into the other room. A few more minutes passed, and the five of them were back, acting like nothing had happened. Again.

  “Well, I mean, yeah, it’s good, but it’s not something you should have in a restaurant. Sure, it’ll probably get popular and stuff, but, uh, it’s not something you should feed to customers... And, er...” Achille was so confused by this point that even he didn’t seem to know what he was talking about anymore.

  I could pretty much guess what sort of lecture the four of them had been giving him after they dragged him away to the other room. At first, it was probably something like, “What are we gonna do if Kaoru decides to quit her job here to open her own restaurant?!” which was why he panicked and tried to say that my cooking wasn’t up to snuff. As a result, lecture number two was probably more along the lines of, “What if Kaoru loses her confidence and starts adding a whole bunch of weird seasonings instead?!” hence Achille’s confusion over what he should say now.

  His eyes kept flitting back and forth to me, looking pretty shook up over what to do.

  ...I guess I can’t say that for sure though...

  The next day, I tried making some of my new and improved cooking for the members of the Eyes of the Goddess.

  “““We should open a restaurant!”””

  You guys too, huh...

  But hold on a second... If I rented out a little shop to open a restaurant and had the kids as my workers, labor costs wouldn’t even be an issue... Wait, no, no, no! That would mean they wouldn’t be able to stand on their own two feet by themselves. Even if I taught them how to cook, what would happen when I was gone and they ran out of seasoning? I knew exactly what would happen to the children if the flavor of their food suddenly got a whole lot worse, and they wouldn’t have anyone around to support them.

  But there was an even bigger problem before all that: I’d be swamped if I opened up a restaurant! I’d have to always be working, morning to night. I didn’t come all the way to another world just to work myself to the bone! I was going to live a life of leisure at my own pace! I wouldn’t have to worry about money, and I’d have plenty of free time to myself. I was going to spend my days living the easy life as I tried to find myself someone to tie the knot with; that was the life for me!

  Heh...

  Heheheheheh...

  “Uh-oh, here comes Kaoru’s one man show again...”

  “Shh! That just has to be her talking with the Goddess in her mind... Probably...”

  “You don’t even believe that yourself, Emile!”

  “That look in her eyes is so evil, it just makes her seem like a bad guy who’s up to no good!”

  “W-Well... Yeah, I guess...”

  And so, Kaoru’s peaceful days continued for just a little while longer...

  Afterword

  Hello everyone, my name is FUNA. Thank you very much for reading through this book!

  This is the second series I managed to get officially published, but it was my debut title when I first began writing light novels online. That’s why this title holds a special place in my heart, but no one seemed interested in picking it up. I was afraid it was just going to disappear into the ether and that would be the end of it, but that’s when I got the offer to have it published! It was even a launch title, and it was getting a manga as well! I was so happy I was wriggling around on the floor out of pure joy.

  All that’s left now is to hope my humble wishes come true, so please don’t let this book flop so I can put out the next volume...and that it gets turned into an anime...and a movie...and game...and live action Hollywood movie adaptation...

  ...There’s nothing humble about that at all, is there?

  Anyway, I’m looking forward to your support so I can get one step closer to realizing my ambitions.

  Copyright

  I Shall Survive Using Potions! Volume 1

  by FUNA

  Translated by Garrison Denim

  Edited by Kris Swanson

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 FUNA

  Illustrations by Sukima

  All rights reserved.

  First published in Japan in 2017 by Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo.

  Publication rights for this English edition arranged through Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

  J-Novel Club LLC

  j-novel.club

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Ebook edition 1.0: February 2019