BXBX NOVEL Chapter 398 - Snake Wine
A rather giant mountain of rice, and a rather ecstatic Japanese guy standing right in front of it. When they approached that mountain of rice, Eisen quickly jumped off the Red Dragon’s back and stepped up toward the Beastperson in front of it.
"So... You worked pretty hard last night, huh?" Eisen asked him with a smirk, and Jyuuk immediately nodded his head in response. "Of course we did! Especially Caria was of a lot of help, though." Jyuuk said with a smirk as he looked over toward the small myconid girl tiredly laying on Cabarum’s back.
"How so?" The old man asked, slowly approaching Caria to take her off of the Horse Automaton’s Back, waking her up in the process, while Jyuuk explained what he meant.
"Well, it seems like her element ranked up last night, and the mushrooms she can grow using a person’s ’Essence’ can now act as independent soldiers of sort, taking part of the abilities of the person. She seems to be able to influence which abilities to concentrate on, though. So, Caria grew a lot of Mushrooms off of my body, some using my Plant Control ability, and others using my Element.
Using the help of those guys, we were able to make everything grow a lot faster, and the collection went over far quicker too." With a smug expression, after hearing that Jyuuk was talking about how great a help she was, the Myconid crossed her arms with a smile and nodded her head just once. "Hehe, of course! The Great Caria can only be helpful to anyone, there’s just no other way!" She exclaimed and then pointed into the air with her finger, while Eisen chuckled slightly. "Of course, of course. Now, Jyuuk... I need your help with something else as well. Your element can probably help speed up the process of fermentation, right?" Eisen asked him, before the Beastperson slowly nodded his head.
"Probably, I haven’t really tested it so far, but... In the end, it allows me to make plants rot very quickly as well, so a controlled fertilization shouldn’t be too hard." He pointed out, before Eisen nodded his head with a smirk.
"Perfect, then let’s get started, shall we?" Eisen suggested and immediately cracked his knuckles, before quickly getting to work using some mana-crystals to create as big a container as he possibly could. He didn’t want to use the glass bottle that he prepared for this, after all, the glass bottle was for the finished product and not the fermentation-process itself.
But after finishing that container, which ended up being about four meters in height and width, even if the crystal-walls were really quite thin, before Eisen started shoveling the raw glutinous rice into that container, before starting the regular process of simply cooking rice. First, Eisen washed it properly, got rid of the dirty water, and then started to cook the rice like you normally would to eat it, using his element to heat everything up. And while the rice was cooking, Eisen turned toward Jyuuk to ask him to do something else.
"Alright, you probably know how Rice-Wine is made using Chinese Yeast Balls, right?" The old man asked, and Jyuuk nodded his head immediately. "Yeah, of course. There’s some kind of mold in there that breaks the starch down into sugar, which the yeast then turns into alcohol. Why?" The Beastperson asked, and Eisen just smirked at him.
"I’d like you to create such a mold colony for me, if you can." Eisen asked him, and with a wry smile, Jyuuk just sighed in response. "Couldn’t you have told me earlier..? Fine, give me like thirty minutes." The Beastperson replied and then sat down on the ground with a little bit of raw rice and a mana-crystal in his hands, before seemingly trying to really work on creating that exact type of mold that Eisen just asked for.
"Thank you. In the meantime, I’ll prepare a little bit more rice, I guess." Eisen chuckled, continuing to create more mana-crystal containers, something pretty wasteful of the crystals, now that Eisen thought about it. He could re-use them later on, something which he definitely would do, and using simple de-compression, Eisen was able to largely increase the amount of mana-crystal that he could use for these things.
They were just supposed to be an easy material to use and re-use, after all, so it was fine if they weren’t as dense as before for now.
Either way, after a little while, Eisen got enough containers up and ready to be able to make enough rice-wine to fill the large bottle up enough. After all, it didn’t need to be filled completely, considering that the giant snake would need to get inside of there as well later on.
"Alright... Now we just need the yeast and mold." Eisen said with a smile on his face, already preparing the yeast that he needed for everything in a seperate container, before Jyuuk brought over a large crystal-platter covered in mold, slowly starting to pour it into the bowl as well while letting it regrow constantly.
"This should work like a treat, really." Jyuuk said with a laugh on his face, before taking a proper look around at the mass amount of rice-filled containers.
"And you want me to accelerate the fermentation of all of these..? You know I need to get to sleep soon, right? You should probably sleep a little as well, you know, for ’that’." Jyuuk pointed out, and Eisen just nodded his head with a smile.
"Don’t worry, I have the time in mind. And it’s fine if you just help out to jump-start everything. Within an hour or so, you should be able to push it along to a point that would usually take around two or three days at least. At that point, the bubbling should start, and when you wake up again, we can finish it up, and tomorrow I’ll pour that wine into the bottle and we’ll head over to the Island Boss with it." Eisen said with an excited smirk, but Jyuuk seemed rather conflicted about this whole thing.
"Weren’t you the one worried about me hurting the eagle chick using my necromancy?" He asked, but Eisen turned to him and nodded his head. "Ah, I see what you mean... Well, some might see it as cruel, but in the end, drowning your enemy is a valid way of killing it. We could just somehow try to injure it in a non-physical way as well and then stuff its body into the bottle. In the end, I’ll most likely be using its materials anyway, so I don’t see much of a reason why this shouldn’t be alright." The old man pointed out, before Jyuuk scratched the back of his head with a nod.
"Right, I guess. Well, anyway, should I get going right away?" Jyuuk asked him and pointed at the rice-containers, before Eisen nodded his head in response. "Yes, please. I’ll just mix the yeast and mold in for now, just wait a little." The old man explained and quickly grabbed the large bowl, simply pouring a little of the mixture on top of each container of cooked-rice, starting to stir it into everything as much as he could.
And then, Jyuuk started to get to work with using his element to properly start the process that Eisen was hoping for, after the old man quickly closed each container shut properly.
Just as Eisen had figured, around an hour later, everything already started to bubble in response to the start of the actual fermentation-process while the rice started to float on the liquids pulled out of it.
And when that hour was over, Jyuuk quickly got to sleep after working through the whole night in response to Eisen’s request, while the old man himself stayed up a little longer to finally put all of the pieces of the large bottle together so that they could fill it up as soon as they could. Of course, after connecting all of the pieces, which in and of itself was already quite the spectacle, Eisen also started to enchant the surface of the glass, on the inside. It was supposed to be an enchantment to help both keep the snake in, while also making sure that some properties of the snake could properly be extracted.
Due to the sheer size of the bottle, Eisen enchanted it from the inside, and chose to just spend his sleep inside of there, staring at his work in a way that he hasn’t done before while dozing off.
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A few hours later, when Eisen woke back up, he was surprised to see that the bottle was surrounded by a lot of people who were curiously trying to take a peak at the structure larger than most of the houses in town that appeared over night, and some of those that took a look were part of Eisen’s group.
Of course they knew that Eisen was the one that made it, after all, even if he didn’t announce it to them, this kind of item had ’Eisen’ written all over it. The fact that Eisen was sleeping inside of it also helped them figure this out, though.
And when the old man saw everyone standing outside, he quickly used his demonic transformation to jump back out of the bottle and then landed in front of them with a broad smile.
"Alright, good afternoon, everyone." The Old man said, slightly stretching his body after just waking up, and the first one to speak up was Evalia.
"What the actual fuck is this?" She asked confused, and Eisen tilted his head in response, "What do you mean? It’s the bottle I said I’d make." He replied, and Evalia looked at him and the bottle behind him in absolute horror.
"You said you’d make a bottle, not a house!" She exclaimed, but Eisen just started to laugh. "Well, Brody was also pretty surprised yesterday. But anyway, I’m making Snake-Wine using the Island Boss, so the bottle needs to be that large." The old man explained, and with a confused expression, the Heavenly Artist looked at the giant bottle and at Eisen in his fully-increased size.
"And how do you think you’ll be able to get it there?" She asked, and Eisen quickly pointed at the six Dragons that once more gathered near them. "With their help, of course." He replied, and without even fighting it, the Dragons accepted that they had to do this without fighting back. Eisen wasn’t sure why they just did whatever all of them wanted to so quickly, and why they were so scared of him and the other Originals.
So, he wanted to somehow get them to jump over their shadow and talk back to him finally, which was why he was telling them to do a lot of different things for him. Of course, that was just part of the reason, he really enjoyed being able to use literal Dragons to help him out with a lot of troublesome things.
He even wanted to take it so far as to ask one of them to bring him to the mainland by flight. For one, it would be way faster, and two, it would simply be a lot cooler.