*Cooking Master Boy! Ultimate* Underworld Arc Is Here—Has It Really Gone Completely Off the Rails This Time?

When Liu Maoxing in The True Chef Boy! Ultimate Chapter 182 was directly sentenced to extreme punishment as the loser of a “cooking showdown,” even written to the point of being reduced to ashes, the narrative focus of this work had in fact already stopped lingering on the familiar win-or-lose drama of cooking manga. Instead, it suddenly veered onto an almost spectacle-driven side road—like a film originally about a boy’s coming-of-age that abruptly cuts midway into a tour of hell. This kind of development is, of course, compelling enough, but while it grips the audience, it also exposes a sense of losing control that even the author himself has acknowledged. Based on the information available, Etsushi Ogawa once stated that this plotline happened “by accident,” and the series was even suspended for a time. That statement itself, more than any dramatic twist, feels like the clearest annotation of the manga’s current temperament.

On the narrative level, what is truly intriguing is not whether the protagonist has died, but how the work keeps postponing any final explanation of “death” itself. In Chapter 195, Chef Boy appears in a “particleized” form, and his companions attempt to use ancient divine beasts and secret arts to piece those remaining traces back together, bringing him back in a state somewhere between life and death; yet by Chapter 196, the resurrection is explicitly declared a failure. This string of reversals does create suspense, but it also feels like an over-edited road movie: just as the audience is ready to invest emotionally, the camera is forcibly dragged toward the next direction. As a result, the tragic weight of the character is somewhat diluted—and that is precisely where the regret lies.

But the deeper issue is that The True Chef Boy! Ultimate is clearly no longer content with a conventional hot-blooded trope like “revival.” What it wants is a much larger leap in worldbuilding. The author then announced the official start of the “Underworld Arc,” in which the executed Chef Boy will continue new cooking battles in the underworld, and the latest plot has offered an even more mysterious explanation: although his body has completely dispersed, his soul was protected by some kind of power, making him a “half-living person” rarely seen in a thousand years, thus setting him on a strict trial to return to the human world. From another angle, this actually gives the work a chance to redefine its protagonist—Liu Maoxing is no longer merely a boy relying on talent and passion to overcome challenges, but a figure who has returned from the edge of death, someone whose very identity has undergone a split.

If we compare it with similar works, this move—from realistic competition straight into the rules of the underworld—carries far more risk than reward. What is most precious about cooking manga is often that believable warmth between the everyday world and the characters’ obsessions. Once supernatural settings overwhelm the characters themselves, the story can easily be left as nothing more than a display of concepts. In player and reader communities right now, the most common opinions seem to fall into two camps: one treats it as a fully unhinged spectacle serial, following it precisely for how outrageous it is; the other is more concerned with whether Chef Boy as a character will be hollowed out by twist after twist. Unfortunately, the latter concern is not unfounded.

Still, I am willing to leave a little room for anticipation for this new arc, because the “Underworld Arc” at least provides a rare narrative opportunity: to make cooking not merely a technique for deciding victory or defeat, but a means of crossing life and death and proving that the self still exists. If the author can truly carry the “half-living person” concept into the character’s psychology and shifting relationships, rather than treating the underworld as just a more exaggerated arena, then this loss of control may yet have the chance to grow into another kind of sharp-edged story; but if what follows is merely an endless escalation of divine beasts, secret arts, and twists, then what it ultimately leaves behind will probably be nothing more than a lively yet hollow burst of fireworks.