Chapter 17

"But, if I give up here, even Mr. ○West would say it's no good."

A few days later, I began a new endeavor on the beach.

It wasn't necessary to do it specifically on the beach, but here, there was no one around, and the best part was that I could freely enjoy the bounty of the sea.

"Here, there's plenty of salt, after all."

What I was now challenging was an advanced original magic of the earth system.

First, I would experiment with using the abundant seawater, which I could use freely, to create salt with magic.

However, this magic is also written in the book left by my master.

It seems that adventurers often use magic to refine and obtain the small amount of salt contained in soil, rock masses, animals, plants, and even the corpses of monsters when they run out of salt.

Humans are a mysterious creature; even with plenty of food, they can lose their appetite and die just because it lacks salt.

For humans, salt is that important.

Getting back to the topic, thanks to the tips in the book from my master, I successfully obtained a large amount of high-purity salt quickly.

Even if it wasn't 99.9% sodium chloride, the white, powdery salt was a cut above the slightly yellow salt and rock salt in the mansion.

"Actually, I might be able to make a living selling salt."

I thought such things, but I shouldn't be satisfied here.

I was planning to revive that seasoning using this salt as a material.

"First, I'll start with miso."

Soybeans are a popular crop not only in our domain but in this world as well.

They are used as animal feed, cooked in soups, and added to mixed grains in porridge.

Since they are cheap, I managed to get a bag of soybeans from a tenant who was farming near the mansion before I came here.

The payment was the fur and meat of rabbits I had caught myself.

Now, all I had to do was make miso using these soybeans and salt.

Since there is no miso in this world, it would be a completely new endeavor, but fortunately, there was a magic that could serve as a reference.

It seems that some powerful mages can instantly make wine from grapes they have prepared themselves.

There are also mages who can make ale from barley, rum from sugar, and mead from honey.

It appears that the mechanism by which carbohydrates turn into alcohol is known in this world, and there are mages who make alcohol from various materials.

They can perform the fermentation process, which usually takes a long time, in an instant with magic.

While it might seem ridiculous to those who seriously make alcohol, it turns out that it's not that bad.

This is because the taste is still better when made by professional breweries, and while some mages can make alcohol that rivals professionals, the quantity is often insufficient.

Most of them make it as a hobby and enjoy it with their families.

Still, if you can ferment alcohol in a short time, it should be possible to ferment miso as well.

"First, miso. Then, I'll move on to miso paste, and finally, soy sauce fermentation with magic. The possibilities are endless."

I immediately began making miso.

"Haha... I never thought it would be this difficult..."

In front of the miso and soy sauce I had finally completed, I recalled the hardships of the past year.

With magic, it should be easy to make.

I didn't need a large quantity, just enough for myself.

If I could go back in time, I would warn myself about such casual remarks.

I knew the process of making miso because my grandmother in the countryside used to make it herself.

I had even helped her a few times.

Actually, cooking the soybeans is usually done with magic, so I didn't do it.

However, it was easy to use magic to transform the beans into a cooked state.

Everything went well until the next step of mixing the ingredients, but I stumbled at the fermentation stage.

The materials would rot no matter how many times I used magic.

Back in high school, my biology teacher once asked a question during a casual conversation in class.

"What do you think is the difference between fermentation and decay?"

Everyone gave various answers, but the correct answer was this:

Fermentation and decay are the same phenomenon.

Fermentation is useful to humans, while decay is harmful.

Thus, I wasted mountains of soybeans while rotting them, and I kept exchanging rabbits and soybeans with the tenants, who began to look at me strangely.

Despite thousands of failures, I eventually succeeded in making miso.

And I repeated the same failures with soy sauce.

Considering that I could succeed in difficult magic described in advanced books after a few tries and had successfully developed various original magics, I never thought I would fail repeatedly with miso and soy sauce.

However, in the case of soy sauce, the failures were of the type where I couldn't progress from the miso paste stage, so I wasn't wasting soybeans.

Still, I was exchanging soybeans every day, so the tenants looked at me strangely.

The tenants stopped using soybeans in their meals because I was exchanging them so frequently.

They probably realized that they could eat meat every day by exchanging with me and rabbits or wild boars.

They might wonder what I was using the soybeans for, but as the son of the lord, they didn't think I was exploiting them, so they continued to exchange with me.

Fortunately, my family didn't say anything.

They probably treated me like a sore spot.

Strangely, the magic for making alcohol worked perfectly on the first try.

I exchanged the quails and barley I had caught with the tenants near the mansion and made barley shochu and ale.

I also successfully made wine-like alcohol from wild grapes and strawberries I had collected in the wilderness.

Although I could only taste a little because my body was still a child, it was quite delicious, so I decided to store it in magic jars I made from the earth and seal them in a magic bag.

I aimed to extract silica, alumina, and water from the earth, shape them into clay, and then transform the material to achieve the state of a jar that had been fired at high temperatures.

I briefly considered using fire magic to bake it, but it was impossible to maintain high-temperature fire magic for a week, so I quickly dismissed the idea.

At first, the jars I made were fragile and leaked badly, wasting a lot of clay, but after hundreds of trials, I finally succeeded in making jars suitable for storing alcohol, miso, and soy sauce.

In terms of the aesthetic design of the jars, my lack of artistic sense meant they probably wouldn't sell, but as long as they could store the fermented foods without leaking, they would be fine.

If they didn't leak, the quality wouldn't deteriorate when stored in a magic bag.

So, it felt like I had spent the past year focusing on making jars, miso, and soy sauce.

I also refined salt with magic and, upon discovering an island to the south, tried refining sugar from sugarcane growing there.

Sugarcane is apparently cultivated in the southern regions of the Ringleia continent and on islands in the southern seas.

Of course, it is exported to the capital, northern regions, and even to the Arkart Holy Empire, but I had never seen it in our Baumeister domain.

Apparently, the production is extremely low compared to the demand, making it much more expensive than salt.

Given our financially strained Baumeister family, it would be more practical to buy salt, which can be purchased in much larger quantities than the luxury item sugar.

Usually, honey from the forest and fruits, or vines that produce a light, sweet syrup when boiled, are used to add sweetness.

To make a long story short, I can now make saba miso-ni (miso-marinated mackerel) and pour soy sauce over sautéed scallops.

In rivers connected to the sea, even in the south, salmon-like fish migrate upstream, so I can also make chan-chan-yaki (grilled salmon with miso) and soy sauce-marinated salmon roe.

"But now, I need something else even more."

Rice, the staple food of the Japanese, was essential.

I thought it might be cultivated in the south, but apparently, it wasn't grown in our domain.

However, after checking books, I found that it was grown in other southern regions.

When I learned this, I couldn't help but think that my new father was foolish.

Why wouldn't he grow rice, which has a higher yield than barley, when there was no shortage of water?

Creating rice paddies would be difficult at first, but they wouldn't suffer from continuous cropping problems.

If we were going to clear land anyway, it would be better to create rice paddies, I thought.

Of course, this was just talk from a wastrel son who didn't help much around the house.

I didn't think my advice would be taken seriously, and since it was grown in the south, I would have to obtain it myself.

I could buy it at the market, but to do that, I would need to create a teleportation point outside the domain to enable instant teleportation.

"First, I need to go to Breichburg, the largest commercial city in the south, where the Breichrader Margrave's castle is located."

Breichburg, the capital of the powerful Breichrader Margraviate, was the largest commercial city in the southern border region.

Despite the previous margrave's major failure and the struggle to recover from the damage, it remained a major city.

Nobles with southern territories always had their favorite merchants set up branch offices and reside there, and many people from the surrounding areas visited for tourism and shopping.

Most importantly, the headquarters of various guilds, including the adventurers' guild, which oversees the southern border region, were established there.

"The next goal is to make it possible to teleport to Breichburg."

I had plenty of money in my magic bag to buy rice.

There were the master's assets, the military supplies of the Breichrader Margraviate, and the materials from monsters I had obtained before their destruction.

Furthermore, I had produced a large amount of fermented foods, salt, and sugar over the past year.

Combined with the jars for storage, I had already stored tens of thousands of jars in my magic bag through my daily efforts.

While the number seemed excessive, it was also a form of training to increase my magic power.

As I got used to it, the efficiency of magic power usage improved, and the amount of items produced increased during the training to increase my magic power.

While offensive magic would have been fine, I often