I read vol 9 a few years ago but I have shelved this series because I just have so many tbr books. But this series is now all on kindle unlimited except vol 13, the latest, so I picked up this series again. I had forgotten most of what happened before and was hoping that it would have some kind of summary recap but nope, even though it does have a character summary chart which probably hasn’t been updated since vol 7. Fortunately, it has a decent wiki page that helps bring me mostly up to speed.
Vol 10 is the last volume in the main story of this food porn romcom. Most of the events still revolve around some food. But as it is revealed that the ML was imprisoned underground to absorb the evil energy as a special nature of his race and he is the last of his race who have all been sealed underground, I’m kind of surprised that no one, including the FL, has expressed how inhumane that whole deal is. I also wonder whether it’s possible to unseal other people from ML’s race now that there is an alternative method of neutralizing the evil energy (or whether they have all died since I have forgotten most of what happened in vol 9). The king of Kakuriyo is so improbably useless that I don’t know how other nobles still respect the king.
Finishing this left me with such a fulfilling feeling. While I adore the characters and am sad to see them go, it was very satisfying to see the entire story get tied together in the volume. Yūma drew on events and characters that appeared throughout the whole series and made everything come full circle for an epic conclusion!
I cannot express how much I love this series and how much it's meant to me to be able to read it, much less in Japanese. I'll definitely revisit Aoi and her story of found family, adventure, and (of course) cooking sometime in the future. 5 stars.