Volume 2 - CH 48

After proposing the collaborative menu, Alme enjoyed chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Heston until she finished her coffee.

After this, they will exchange letters and decide on a good date for the prototype meeting. She’ll have to ask about Falk’s schedule as soon as possible.

After leaving the store, she bought ingredients at the market and went home.

The ingredients are not for ice cream, but for home cooking. All ice cream-related purchases will be made tomorrow.

She’s been busy lately, so today she’s going to spend some time relaxing until she goes to bed.

It’s now past dusk. In the kitchen on the second floor, Alme cut up the vegetables she had bought and threw them into the pot with chopped bacon.

Tonight’s dinner is vegetable and bacon soup, chewy flat bread with nuts and a tomato and bean salad.

In keeping with her grandmother’s words to eat well, Alme cooks a reasonable amount of food for each meal.

She only makes ordinary home-cooked meals, so although her cooking skills are decent, she’s only concerned about nutrition.

She has both a refrigerator and a freezer at home, so she is grateful to be able to make everything in advance. Leftovers are the friend to working singles.

As she simmered vegetables in a pot, she thought about the day.

(I’m looking forward to the coffee float prototype meeting. I’ll bring mint leaves and cherries, too. Speaking of floats, cherries are the best decoration.)

She tried to remember the floats she had at a café in her previous life and imagined how this and that would turn out.

With an unexpectedly exciting appointment at Café Heston, Alme’s notebook was a little more crowded again.

The future that was torn up and left blank on the day the engagement was broken off is gradually becoming more colorful.

However, only the most recent plans have been filled. The far future still remains blank.

Getting married, having and raising children…is still a black slate for her future plans.

She wondered if one day this blank space will be successfully filled in to the schedule.

She pondered such thoughts as she stirred the contents of the pot around and around.

(…matchmaking, huh? I wonder what kind of person Mr. Darnell will introduce me to. I wonder if I’ll get along with the right person next time…)

Haa, she let out a deep breath. In order to fill in the blanks in the future, she has to start by establishing a relationship with someone.

Alme can’t help but feel overwhelmed at the thought of having to start building a relationship from scratch again. However, she is also anxious about remaining single for too long.

She just realized how painfully unreliable she is in troublesome situations.

Right now, she can still rely on her friends, but in the future, those friends will also have families to prioritize.

Ena and Aiden will probably have children soon, and Jayla boasted that she would marry a handsome man.

And Falk, too, will one day be in a relationship with the daughter of a good family…

In that case, she should also have a family and home herself and be able to solve some problems there.

This is not the time to feel tedious, she must also work hard to find a relationship.

“Once my life is stable, I need to start getting ready for marriage. I should work hard as a replenishment worker for that…”

Falk recently offered her a job as an ice magic replenisher at the temple, and she was immediately hired. As he said, there seems to be a demand for ice mages.

From now on, she will be able to earn a fixed income on the side, so she will be able to live without being nervous about the shop’s sales, which vary from day to day.

At the beginning of next week, she is supposed to receive a detailed explanation at the temple, so she’ll make her debut as a replenisher from there.

Along with the replenishment work, she can start marriage hunting.

After making a plan in her mind, she changed her focus and turned her attention to the inside of the pot.

The vegetables were poked with a soup ladle to check the softness. It looks like the carrots and potatoes were well cooked.

Turning off the fire on the magic stove, she poured the soup in a bowl.

Speaking of which, she smiled at the thought that she had never treated Julio to a home-cooked meal.

If the matchmaking goes well, she wondered if…she will one day have a life where she can serve a home-cooked meal to her partner.

If that future comes, she would like a husband who eats well. How nice it would be…

She was thinking happy maidenly thoughts, but then told herself not to expect too much. Because the more she expected, the more she knew that when things didn’t go her way, she would be knocked to the ground…

Alme looked far away and switched her thoughts to reality.

And then… Suddenly, something moved at the edge of her vision.

On the wall near the stove…a black bug runs up the wall to the immediate right of Alme. This black glowing insect is…

“Gyaaaaa!! Get out!!”

Right next to Alme, running along the wall next to her face was a black bug. Moreover, it is an oversized black bug the size of a thumb.

She was startled by its closeness and size, and involuntarily jumped away. At the same time, the soup she was holding in her left hand spilled out, scalding her hand.

“Whoa…Whoa!! hot, hot, hot! black bug don’t you dare go near the pot! no, no, no, don’t, don’t, don’t come closer!!”

Screaming and fussing alone, she hurriedly closed the lid of the pot. The black bug dashed past the wall around the top of it.

With momentum, Alme placed the soup on the table, half throwing it down, and turned on the faucet of the magic sink.

She exposed her left hand, which was vigorously soaked in hot soup, in the water and let out a cry. This pain and the redness of her skin… it looks like a solid burn.

While cooling her hands with water, she ran her gaze to search for the black bug.

But the black bug had already run off somewhere. It looks like Alme is going to sleep in suspense tonight. Please don’t run into her bedroom…

She lifted her cold hand out of the water once and worried while checking the condition.

“It’s better to cool burns, right? Ice magic should okay, right…?”

It’s worth a try since it’s her own body anyway.

She put her hand on the burn on her left hand and let the magic cold air flow over it. The tingling pain eased as she cooled it. She decided to keep using ice magic on it until she goes to bed.

…However, the next morning, she got frostbite, which, combined with the burns, was terrible.

At that time, Alme was still more concerned about the whereabouts of the missing black bug than her own injuries.