Chapter 34: Real Estate (2)

Chapter 34: Real Estate (2)

Muchen was out of bed early the next morning, driven more by force of habit than business necessity. He took advantage of the clear weather to get some work done outside. Building a firepit in the cleared area behind the house was only a matter of a few hours of effort, Muchen's efforts in cultivation once more paying off in the field of manual labor. He could have had a simple fire going in much less time, but he wanted to have a little bit of control over the heat once it got going. In the end he managed to build something that almost deserved to be called a stove.

With that done, Muchen was prepared to try out one of the specially made pieces of equipment that he had hauled all the way from the capital: a pot still, formed from copper and sparkling in the sunlight. It made for an impressive sight once he hauled it from his cart and positioned it over the fire pit. While he was at it, Muchen also grabbed one of the barrels of cheap wine.

The pot could only hold half a barrel at one time, but if things went well Muchen wouldn't mind doing a second distillation. And if things didn't go well, then the only way he could improve was by trying again.

"That's a lot of wine," Yize said. He'd come back from his early hunt just as Muchen had been putting the finishing touches on the fire pit, and had drifted over to see what was going on. Chuhua was still busy with her own daily errands, while Xinyi no doubt had her own matters to attend to.

"It's not for us to drink," Muchen said. The barrel wasn't really meant for one mortal to handle, but cultivation made concerns like that irrelevant. He removed the hood on top of the still and poured in wine until the pot was mostly full. As expected, the barrel was half-emptied in the process. Muchen put the lid back in place on the barrel, then placed the hood back on top of the pot.

The pot still must have looked odd to Yize's eyes. The wine being poured into a pot was ordinary enough, but the lopsided cone shape of the lid, leading to a folded over peak that turned into a thin tube extending far from the edge of the pot, didn't serve any obvious purpose to those not versed in its secrets.

Once you understood the science, of course, the purpose was straightforward. Alcohol boiled at a lower temperature than water. Therefore, if one put a pot of water over a heat source and collected the resulting vapors, they would tend to have more alcohol by volume than the original liquid. If you repeated the process enough times, you'd eventually have a product worthy of being called hard alcohol.

Well, there was probably a bit more to it. Fortunately, Muchen had time for a bit of trial and error.

He gave his setup one last look. Heat source, check. Pot full of booze, check. Tool for collecting vapor, check.

Right now the neck of the still was set to drain into the first of many ceramic cups Muchen had arrayed around him. The liquid that was being boiled off would be different as time passed. Muchen intended to collect the output of the still in separate containers so that he could at least somewhat keep an eye on the changes.

Everything was ready. Muchen lit the fire and sat back to wait.

"Is this how you intend to get rich?" Yize asked. He sounded a little skeptical. Muchen couldn't blame him.

"It's one of the arrows in my quiver," Muchen said, giving Yize a look. The difference from the last time he'd seen him really was striking. "Cultivation going well?"

Yize nodded. "After receiving enlightenment, I've had steady progress."

Muchen nodded. After years of shouldering the entire responsibility for keeping himself and his sister alive, it was no surprise that Yize had leaped at the chance to change his situation. Even if an ordinary person might find the practice of cultivation tiring or dull, Yize would be willing to persevere.

It hadn't taken much progress to cause a great change in his life. In a sect a disciple with three open meridians was hardly worthy of special treatment, but out in the wild a little bit of strength or speed could easily mean the difference between a successful hunt or a hungry night.

"What dao do you follow?" Muchen asked.

Yize didn't respond right away. As the silence stretched on, Muchen worried that he had overstepped his bounds.

"Hunting."

"What I'm working on will create wonders to sell that haven't been seen on the Qianzhan Continent before," Muchen said, only exaggerating a little bit. There was probably an alchemist or two out there who made their own moonshine, but he'd never seen anything stronger than wine available for purchase when he'd been out stocking up on social lubricants. "That isn't enough by itself to make money, though."

Yize thought for a moment before he replied. "You need to find customers."

Muchen nodded. No doubt Yize had gone through the same thing whenever he'd caught particularly valuable prey. "I can guess about the kind of person who might be interested. In order to turn a guess into silver, though, somebody has to go out and track them down."

"It would be a very different kind of hunt," Yize said. "I'm not sure I would be cut out for it."

"Well, nothing would be trying to kill you," Muchen said. He switched out the now almost full second cup for another. The process was starting to speed up. After a moment's thought, he reached in with a poker to try and reduce the intensity of the fire a little. He was pretty sure he wanted to keep the wine at a low simmer rather than a rolling boil, though with the tools available to him he couldn't be too precise.

The second cup still smelled a little suspicious. Muchen didn't want to get to taste testing until he had something that he was at least sure wasn't poisonous.

"There are bandits between here and Jiliu City, at times," Yize said.

That was a fair point. It was hardly possible to find an occupation on Qianzhan Continent that didn't have any risk of death associated with it. Muchen wasn't entirely sure if the prospect of a life or death fight was something Yize saw as a positive or a negative, judging from the smile on his face.

"I want our operation to be the biggest business on the continent, someday," Muchen said. "For that to happen, I need people by my side who are more than glorified caravan guards."

Muchen didn't mind surrounding himself with people who could handle themselves in a fight, but it was far from the most important hiring criteria. He wasn't looking to set up his own gang of brigands, after all.

The third and fourth cup had been filled. Muchen moved the fifth into place before giving the fourth a sniff. It wasn't obviously unfit for human consumption. He took a sip.

It tasted like cheap rice wine, but stronger. He'd peg it as being a little less alcoholic than well drinks back on Earth. It wasn't something he'd drink for fun, but with a whole continent of people out there who had never had anything stronger than wine, there should be plenty of customers. Not to mention that he still hadn't even tried filtering it yet.

He held the cup out to Yize, who took a taste before staring at the cup in shock.

"What is this?"

Muchen smiled. "A first step."

He'd need to put in a lot more work to nail down the final process. For starters, putting this fortified wine through another round of distillation might be needed to get something he could properly call hard alcohol.

Still, this was enough to prove that it could be done. That the devices he remembered from Earth could be used here. In time, he'd open up a whole new world of commercial possibilities.

"I don't know if it truly fits with my dao," Yize said, gazing solemnly at the cup he was holding, "but I'm willing to give your ideas a try."

That was all Muchen could ask for. As long as the people around him were at least willing to try to pull together in pursuit of profit, they'd end up going a long way down the road of capitalism eventually.