Episode 5: The Brewery
[Today’s Diary]
Date: July 25
Weather: Wow, seriously hot as hell.
Young lady’s mood: 🫠 -> 😩💨
ㄴ This is bad.
ㄴ There’s been a snag in the brewery process.
ㄴ I finally confessed to the young lady.
ㄴ I feel so sorry for making her worry all by herself.
ㄴ Wow, isn’t this literally like a cow stepping backward and catching a rat? It was this simple?
* * *
Strange.
There was no way those two should have met.
‘Why are they talking to each other?’
I was switching guard duty with Rosi and approaching them when I stopped in my tracks.
It was an extremely uncomfortable combination.
‘Not that the young lady is uncomfortable.’
It was because I had something to feel guilty about with both of them.
Should I run?
‘...No.’
That would be a poor move.
It was obvious I’d get caught and taken to task sooner or later.
Then should I go over and make excuses?
‘That won’t do either.’
I would get to taste the young lady’s glare and the elf’s spirit magic at the same time.
That would be the worst.
In that case.
“.......”
I erased my presence and secretly took position behind the young lady.
Then, from behind her, I quietly cleared my throat.
“Ahem, ahem.”
“Eek! You scared me!”
Mm.
That’s the stuff.
Seeing the young lady jump in surprise made all my worries from just moments ago vanish.
Thwack— thwack! Smack!
“If you’re here! Make some! Noise! When you! Move around!”
“Hahahaha.”
My calves are legs of cast iron. The tips of the young lady’s shoes are nothing to them.
After kicking me for quite a while, the young lady eventually tired herself out and stood there huffing.
“Ugh... Only my foot hurts. Do that again and you’re fired, fired!”
“Eeeeh?!”
“What do you mean, ‘Eeeeh’?! I seriously thought my heart was going to drop! You’d better know I’m only letting you off this much because it’s me!”
“Yeeees...”
Dejected.
However, this body of mine.
This was hardly my first time pulling a prank like this.
‘The young lady will never fire me.’
This is what you call a learned prank.
Mm-hm.
“...Um, my lady?”
Meanwhile, Elir, who had been watching this scene from close by, called out to the ducal lady.
She looked utterly dumbfounded in her own way.
Until now, no matter how much the young lady turned the household upside down, she had at least maintained her dignity as a ducal lady,
but right now, she looked exactly like a child her age—
—that thought was written all over Elir’s face.
I looked at her face and smiled with satisfaction.
‘This is all thanks to my virtue, I tell you.’
“...Then, I’ll trust in you and wait, my lady.”
“Mm. You must’ve spent a lot of time worrying. Hurry up and go take care of your work.”
‘The young lady said something like that?’
Just as my mouth fell open in surprise,
Elir’s sharp, narrowed eyes widened as round as they could go.
Of course, the young lady, who was looking straight at her, narrowed her eyes sideways.
She really was skilled at reading people’s reactions.
“Not going? Looks like you’ve got time to spare.”
‘...Of course.’
They say if a person suddenly changes, they die.
Mm.
‘But didn’t the young lady already die once?’
Did she change?
Hmm.
I’ll have to test that later.
Checking changes in condition before and after reincarnation is a very important virtue for a bodyguard.
“Mm-hm.”
As I nodded to myself in understanding,
the gazes around me stabbed into me, as if they were looking at some strange bastard.
“What’s wrong with him today, Marie?”
“Perhaps he didn’t take the medicine he was supposed to, my lady.”
“So you’re saying he was always a strange bastard?”
“Yes.”
As expected, the world is still far too dull and pedantic to understand me.
“But where were you headed so early in the morning?”
I looked at the young lady, who was recoiling in horror, with a gentle smile.
It really is fun seeing the young lady make all sorts of expressions.
“The brewery. How far has it progressed?”
Ah.
It just had to be there?
And here I’d been turning the mood upside down until just now to keep her from mentioning the brewery?
‘Shit.’
I couldn’t bring myself to curse in front of the young lady.
The blood pumping from my heart was gathering in my head.
‘Gyaaaah!’
Meanwhile, Elir noticed something suspicious and poured a sharp gaze onto me.
‘Do you know how hard I tried to avoid her...?’
“I asked how far it’s gotten.”
The young lady, too, was gradually overlapping with the way she had been before her reincarnation.
I began speaking in a trembling voice.
“There’s a problem with one important process...”
“And?”
“...I don’t really know when it’ll be completed either...”
“.......”
The young lady closed her mouth.
Across from me, the elf’s eyes were shaking as if an earthquake had struck them.
“...In the meantime, we are bankrupt, my lady.”
Eh.
“Bankrupt, my lady?!”
The lively atmosphere of dawn instantly sank into a swamp, and gloom filled the air.
* * *
“So, what’s the problem?”
Lucy pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose and let out a low sigh.
According to her expectations, at least the basic framework should have been completed within the next week.
“Was the additional manpower I sent not enough?”
An unexpectedly large amount of manpower had been put into constructing the brewery.
Of course, the first reason was that Lucy herself wanted to drink it as soon as possible.
However, that was not all.
This makgeolli,
might become a way to resolve the financial crisis that was approaching.
‘One month from now.’
From then on, the ducal residence would slowly begin shutting down its smaller businesses one by one.
After that, things would collapse like weeds after rain,
and she remembered finally being able to breathe once she became engaged to the crown prince.
‘That part is a little suspicious, though.’
At any rate.
It meant that this current peace would not last long.
“Haa...”
‘Do I have to find another method after all?’
But the problem was that there was no time.
With a worried expression, Lucy let out a sigh deep enough to make the ground collapse.
“Haaa...”
“.......”
Rio glanced sideways at her with a guilty expression.
Thinking about it now, Rio himself had clearly been affected by the financial crisis as well,
but he had been soaked in peace and forgotten all about it.
Even though they had returned together, the fact that he had made Lucy worry alone pricked his conscience far too much.
In the end, he decided to confess.
“The manpower itself is more than enough. The equipment has all been built, after all.”
“Then what? Is that one thing such a difficult problem?”
“Yes. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it makes up the beginning and end of makgeolli.”
Lucy’s eyes trembled faintly, filled with both worry and doubt.
She seemed to have plenty of concerns in her own way.
“I’ll explain the details once we go there in person.”
Rio did not want to make the master he served worry.
‘That’s why I went back and forth all the way to the borderlands to consult experts.’
But they did not understand the brewing process of makgeolli.
No.
They did not even try to understand it.
‘They looked at me as if asking why I’d go out of my way to use mold.’
In the end, after going in circles and solving nothing,
they were only proceeding with small-scale production.
“.......”
“.......”
Silence.
Lucy’s group did not say a single word on the way to the brewery.
Even Rio, whose mouth seemed like it would float on its own if he fell into water, did not open his mouth in that moment.
“We’ve arrived.”
After walking for a short while, Lucy’s group arrived at the brewery.
As they entered the building, their eyes widened and they looked around.
Shiny machines.
Rotating blades of some unknown purpose.
In their eyes, it was already a complete facility in itself.
“What more do we have to do here?”
Rio pondered for a moment.
It was probably true for all alcohol,
but among them, makgeolli in particular used mold, so its fermentation process was extremely important.
Fermentation here meant that microorganisms such as mold or bacteria decomposed organic matter and converted it into substances beneficial to the human body.
‘...And I’m supposed to explain that?’
Even in the modern world, when people who didn’t know heard the word mold, they were likely to think it was already rotten.
And this was a medieval romance fantasy?
‘There’s no way they’d have something like that.’
.
.
.
But then.
“This is the fermentation process, isn’t it?”
“...!”
Such a thing actually happened.
Rio’s eyes flew open as if they would pop out, and he turned to look at Elir.
“How did you know that?!”
“...Recently, there was a paper published by a certain scientist who was studying the deterioration of wine flavor.”
To think there had been such a historical event.
Rio was relieved that, thanks to this, he could avoid another dull and pedantic explanation.
‘Thank you, nameless scientist!’
“Then this will be quick.”
“Could it be...?”
“Yes. We need to carry out the first fermentation through these machines, but one problem has arisen.”
“What problem?”
“First, please take a look.”
After saying that, Rio started up the machines.
Rattle-rattle—
From above, crushed powder and water poured down with a pattering sound.
Whirrr—
Then, after they stuck to the rotating blades and became a well-mixed dough, Rio peeled it off and moved it to a place shaped like a mortar and pestle.
Thud—
And as the pestle descended automatically and began pressing the dough into the shape of the mortar,
it soon formed into something resembling pizza dough.
“Isn’t it working fine?”
“Making the shape wasn’t difficult.”
That much could be done by grinding down the laborers.
But the real problem lay elsewhere.
Rio took the well-pressed dough and entered a drying room made of wood outside the building.
Inside the drying room lingered a damp yet warm air.
Wooden shelves filled the wide space in neat rows.
And straw was piled over them like a covering.
Several pieces of dough had already been placed on the shelves.
“If we leave this here, the initial fermentation will be finished after about a day.”
“No, then what on earth is the problem?!”
Lucy felt as if her face was about to burst.
‘Every moment counts...!’
She thought he was trying to explain a bottleneck in the process,
but that was not it.
Instead, he was leisurely making dough.
‘My blood pressure...!’
Groaaan—
When Lucy shouted and then let out a pained groan,
Rio gave a small sigh and continued speaking.
“The dough rots during this process.”
“Isn’t it supposed to rot?”
“It’s slightly different, but skipping the details and going straight to the conclusion, it’s too difficult to control the ventilation.”
The temperature needed for the yellow koji mold in nuruk to take hold properly was about 32 to 36 degrees Celsius.
He had thought that, just like when making one or two bottles, all they needed was a constant temperature and humidity.
But.
There was something he had failed to consider in the process.
‘Mold produces heat on its own when it propagates.’
What would happen if there were many of them nearby?
They would affect one another,
and the internal temperature would exceed the appropriate range and overheat.
As a result, the important microorganisms died off,
and some of the nuruk even rotted.
“And when one rots, everything around it rots as well.”
The greatest mistake Rio had failed to account for.
Temperature control and ventilation during mass production.
And while all that was happening, hearing talk of bankruptcy had brought Rio’s mind to the brink of exploding.
“.......”
Once again, silence fell over the group.
Then.
Elir, who had been quietly listening beside them, raised her hand with a subtle look in her eyes.
“So all we have to solve is the temperature and ventilation?”
“That’s right? After that, the process should run even with only a small number of employees.”
“...I think I can solve that.”
In that moment,
Rio witnessed a halo shining behind her head.
“M-Maji tenshi!”
“...?”