Toriko 346 Review: Human Soul Soup

Toriko, Chapter 346: The Golden Cookware

We start off with a short scene of the Ten-Shell Five and whatnot eating the 120% Air and generally acknowledging how awesome Komatsu is to Jiji. We get a bit of a recap of the fights we missed -- Wabutora and Damala Sky lost their matches, which isn't unexpected since the two hardly had a personality to share between the two of them. Yuda won because Yuda is a badass motherfucker, and Nono, being a relatively important character as Komatsu's possible love interest and Setsuno's protege, won. Chiru's fight, which didn't finish, considered to be a draw. The Ten-Shell Five talk about how they actually lost since they had the advantage of their long lives and the food spirit advice from Warp World. They also note how the ones they fought against weren't even the best members since Chiyo and Komatsu are way above them in skill level.

We get a bit of a fun moment with Komatsu reuniting and trying to get autographs from the Ten-Shell Five and Jiji already getting them all for him.

Match then confronts the Ten-Shell Five with what we've been wondering for a while -- why are they sacrificing the inhabitants of the slums... which is bad. Asarudy responds that that is exactly the recipe for God... or the pseudo-God dish they're reviving. Don Slime and this mysterious King Enma Ika dude have apparently been gathering fragments of the full course over their lives. 

Apparently Jiji, Kaka and Chichi created a recipe that uses human souls for fertilizer, since cooking God requires a large amount of energy. Back in the past, they used animals for fertilizer before realizing humans are a far more efficient method, and relatively recently the Blue Nitro created the Four Beast to help gather even more humans. 

Asarudy notes how their replication of the full course is to revive Don Slime, but... it's apparently changed and Don Slime is mysterious and shit? Also, apparently Frohze cooked God without needing a crapton of human sacrifices, ensuring the fact that in the near future Komatsu will accomplish the same feat. Chin Chinchin note how with Food Immersion, he can take the place of fertilizer for several hundred people, provided that they give enough food for him. Pretty cool stuff -- Chiru, Yuda and Match also agree with this, though I'm slightly surprised how they glossed over the fact that they have sacrificed so many people and enslaved them and did the whole eugenics thing. Maybe at the end of this arc we'll have King Enma, the god of underworld, return those died to create God back to life? I honestly expected everyone to go all 'OMG YOU EVIL FUCKS'. Eh, we'll see. It wasn't done in malice, at least, since that was what they thought had to be done to cook, well, a fragment of God.

But they restate that their goal here isn't to cook God (a fragment of God, at least), but the Fish treasure Another, which normally takes 600,000 years to cook, but since the Soul World has a weird flow of time close to zero as we've established last chapter, they can cook Another in there... but they need the Golden Cookware. Which are the only ones that can withstand the test of time. Cool, isn't it, that one thing ties in with another? And it even ties in to something I've almost completely forgotten... the Seven Beasts of Area 6, because apparently all seven of them are the sources of the materials for the Golden Cookware.

First we've got the Shark King Raizame (a fucking lightning shark) that provides the knife, the Turtle King Pandora (a fucking fortress bone turtle monster) that provides the pot, the Coral King Corgolem that provides the chopping board (we've met this fucker before), the Scale King Atlantis (a weird-mouthed awesome-looking monster) provides the frying pan, the Octopus King Yamatako Orochi (a kraken with snake tentacles, and a pun on Yamata no Orochi) provides the ladle, and the Sea King Ocean (a fucking blob with a silly face) provides the apron. Last of the Seven Beasts is apparently the Clam King "Giant Shell", a.k.a. the giant clam that houses Blue Grill, providing the spatula. Which is cool.

Surprisingly Alfaro's Golden Plates or that Golden.... Sardine Can or whatever aren't listed, so what exactly are they? Are they just other stuff that happen to be gold?

Further tying into the infodump from last chapter, apparently all Seven Beasts are safe zones that Another once lived in to escape from Whale King Moon, and in the Giant Clam in particular, Another surpassed the speed of light and created the back channel... which is why the materials from their bodies can be used in the soul world. Again, another tie-in.

The Gourmet Knights will apparently head out to confront the Seven Beasts, which I assume will happen offscreen since other than Aimaru and Takimaru we don't even know the names of any of the others. Kuriboh and Melk are around to help craft the actual cookware. Meanwhile, Don Slime and King Enma meet up, talking about how Neo can be revived any time...