It seemed gyoza was the staple food in the Taikyoku Nation.
Naturally, that sparked a conversation about everyone's local dishes.
"I mostly grew up on Japanese food. While I was on a warship, I ate military rations."
Wifey’s diet was centered on Japanese cuisine, of course, but her "home-cooked" flavors came from the Space Marines' dining hall.
"My family ate Japanese food too, but we had a lot of whole-grain bread and mashed potatoes. I love sausages, too," Claire shared.
I wondered if Claire's family followed a more German-influenced culture.
Next up was Melissa.
"My house was strictly Japanese. But we lived on a planet without much ocean, so we’d take trout, sweetfish, or catfish—any small fish, really—and turn it into tsukudani."
"Even though the shop sells burritos!?"
"Those are for the tourists. My dad and brother were obsessed with tradition."
Ren offered a smile.
"My home is meat. Or rather, I am meat."
"We knew that!" everyone shouted in unison.
When the conversation turned to "mysterious cultures," all eyes fell on one person.
Every gaze in the room focused on Tatiana.
"The guys in my hometown drink booze instead of eating meals. Families that actually cook make things like soba porridge, black bread, beets, tomatoes... mostly stews. They love mayonnaise, too. My grandma couldn't cook for her life, though, so I usually just got by on pastry bread from some random shop."
"...Tatiana."
I placed a hand on her shoulder.
"I'll make you something delicious someday."
"So annoyiiiiiiing!"
She hissed at me.
The Isono-Nakajima duo had a standard, unremarkable mix of Japanese and Western food.
"What about you, Kevin?"
"I was in a colony near the capital, so there wasn't much regional flavor. I just made whatever looked good on recipe sites. You, Leo?"
"For me..."
"Potatoes, right?"
Don't beat me to it, Isono!
"Kawagon... likes potatoes. Just kidding. We were so poor that we only had local ingredients. The soil was so barren we couldn't grow much besides potatoes. There was even a limit to how many nuts the wild animals would offer me..."
"What did you just say?"
Eddie interjected, which was rare for him.
"I said the wild animals would offer me nuts..."
"Why!?"
"I only realized that didn't happen on other planets after I joined the academy!"
"The Captain always casually drops these stories that prove he's not quite human," one of them remarked.
How cruel!
From there, the session turned into a contest of home-town pride.
People started going on about how this or that was delicious.
Then, the heavy hitter appeared: Eddie.
He started talking about the delicacies of the North Country.
"There's this stuff called ego, which is basically boiled and solidified seaweed..."
Why was that the first thing you brought up!?
I didn't hate the stuff, but surely his hometown had better things to offer! Like... I don't know... hegi soba!
When I’d gotten some fresh noodle samples from Claire’s product exhibition, Wifey and I had been hooked. There hadn't been enough to share with everyone, though. We had plenty of dried noodles, but it wasn't the same. It had to be the fresh ones.
Having completely failed to land his opening hook, Eddie was promptly ignored.
And his region had so much good food, too!
Anyway, that was fine.
After that, the plan was to share some herbal tea with Shiyun, Mr. Liang, and the female crew members.
"This is an antiparasitic medicine," Shiyun said, showing us the leaves.
Hrmmm...
My intuition flared.
Immediately after eating, I rushed to the research section.
"Can you analyze this?"
I handed over the herb set.
Wifey and the others noticed my odd behavior and followed.
"Lord Groom, what are you looking for?"
"Well, I had a thought. Maybe the space creatures we call Ghouls didn't actually invade the Taikyoku Nation. Maybe their roots are actually native to that country?"
"Huh?"
"I’m wondering if Ghouls are creatures that were evolved through Higher Existence technology, just like Zork and the Proone."
"Ah... though it doesn't seem like Zork was given his."
Zork had discovered ruins. The Proone, we knew, were herbivorous shellfish that someone had granted intelligence.
So, what about the Ghouls?
The result came back almost immediately.
"We’ve discovered toxicity against the cultured cells of the Ghouls," the researcher, a former graduate student, reported.
"...Lord Groom. As I've told you before, if you have a hunch, tell us immediately."
"Yes, ma'am."
"...So. The parasites are..."
"Native to the Taikyoku Nation."
One could argue "so what," but...
"In other words, Lord Groom, you believe a Higher Existence is behind the Ghouls?"
"I don't think it's for some mundane reason like wanting territory or galactic unification, though."
As we talked, another event occurred.
Zashiki-warashi-chan appeared out of thin air.
"It's here."
She pointed at the cultured Ghoul cells.
I activated my ESP to visualize the "Zork network."
A connection was active!
"The cells are connected to the network! We might be being bugged!"
"Handling it!"
The researcher pressed a button, incinerating the cells.
"Thanks. I'll bring you some snacks later."
I smiled at Zashiki-warashi-chan, but she shook her head.
That wasn't it?
I looked at the network again.
It was connected somewhere else!
I traced the line... right to a ventilation duct.
"Kevin! Send in the spider drones!"
"On it!"
Within minutes, Kevin's drones arrived.
Scary! It always gave me the creeps when they swarmed like that.
"It seems Ghouls stay alive even as mere scraps of meat."
Come to think of it, they’d said they couldn't figure out the biology even through dissection. It was simply too primitive.
But then it hit me.
What if every single cell was a Ghoul in itself?
Just like Kevin's drones.
They were just so heavily camouflaged that looking at them told you nothing.
"Meat fragments confirmed inside the duct! Self-destructing drones!"
The scraps were incinerated.
Drones were certainly convenient for things like this.
But the moment I felt relief, I went pale.
A terrible thought had crossed my mind.
"Lord Groom... out with it. What are you thinking?"
"T-The Taikyoku Nation... the capital is in trouble. It’s not just infected people. These things could be hidden everywhere..."
That was it.
The mystery was solved.
No wonder there weren't many of them in the traditional sense!
Whether they were germs, bacteria, or viruses, they were a collective of tiny organisms. It made sense that their population growth seemed slow.
And why did the hosts become like zombies?
Because they were being eaten!
The host was being consumed from the inside out!
Eventually, the host would just fall apart.
That was why they needed life support systems!