We were never attacked on route, but we were (apparently) being watched the entire time. Of course, I had no ability to detect that. Tiamat and Baze took notice, and they along with Hieronymus kept watch round the clock, so whoever was following us couldn’t find a good time to strike.
The coupling for the night watch, by the way, was Tiamat and Syfer, Baze and Gorun, the archer, then Hieronymus and Maley. I couldn’t help but think that the Cait Sith kept getting the longer end of the stick. She was one of the few women I’d seen that looked her age. Besides, her and Miss Millia were just about the only single women I knew in this world.
Unfortunately, as Miss Maley was sixteen and Miss Millia fifteen, neither of them were within my target range. As an adult with morals, I wasn’t being attracted to highschool-aged girls. I would only ever go for women around my age, give or take five years. The only thing was, in this world, women of that age range were clearly grandmas, visually speaking. It was a dark world.
By the way, Yuri the ranger did not participate in the night watch as he had to prep and take down the camp, in addition to performing other miscellaneous tasks. Oh, and I didn’t either... because there would have been no point to it! I slept in the dog pile comprised of the field workers and Mister Milon’s assistants. I’m sorry, I was useless.
In any case, upon our safe return to Lishua, we received a thunderous welcome by Mister Milon and Mister Garish. They knew when we were returning thanks to Yuri running back to the city ahead of us. He served as our scout.
“Welcome back, Sir Eiji. We have everything ready on our end,” said Mister Milon.
Come again? I don’t get a break, or anything? We’re about to dive right into sugar making.
“We’re back. You’ve prepared things?”
“Of course.”
What was he going to do if I didn’t return with rygel? I had a feeling that there would be blood if I wasn’t able to refine any sugar. Terrifying.
“Don’t expect too much. We can’t fully recreate our refining techniques here.”
This was true. They didn’t have a filtration device, a centrifuge, or even a refrigerator. That tied our hands, forcing us to do this with a primitive method. Since my knowledge on the topic was very fuzzy, Tiamat’s assistance was a must.
That being said, the method itself was not difficult. First, we would wash the roots of the sugar beets before peeling them, dicing them, and soaking them in hot, but not boiling, water. The hot water would extract the sugar from the beets. We needed a lot of water, and firewood to heat it up.
I had checked these matters with Mister Milon before leaving for the harvest trip. The city of Lishua had plenty of water, and he said that we wouldn’t be short on firewood. I mean, I never doubted the abundance of water in the city after seeing so many public baths. Since the dawn of time, water has been critical to a civilization’s growth. That’s why cities were built close to large rivers.
In addition, the common diet of rice in Lishua was an indication of how much firewood they spent. The forest appearing in the middle of a field seemed to epitomize the aftermath of this to me. The end result of humans chopping down tree after tree. Encroaching upon nature. Since they had no concept of planting and farming trees, this was sure to become a major issue in the civilization’s future. In other words, the distortion caused by the hero’s imported culture reached far beyond the outbreak of beriberi. In fact, there were sure to be countless examples.
At the moment, I didn’t have the ability to start tackling deforestation, too. First, I had to save the people of Azur from beriberi. That was my top priority. As pathetic as it sounds, my plate was full from that. I was about to make sugar to make the people eat edamame to give them enough vitamin B1. What a roundabout method. Half of my problems would not have arisen if they were at least eating brown rice.
Let’s get back on track. After an hour or two, the sugar would start melting out of the beets into the hot water. At that point, we would take out the beets from the water and simmer down what was left. Once it was reduced and thickened, we would pour it into a container and let the rest of the moisture evaporate on its own. When that’s completely dried, we would have beet sugar, which was nothing like the powder white sugar we know.
Beet sugar is brown, and has a little bitterness to it. Still, it was one of the few sources of sweetness in this world, and could be used to cook. This would drastically increase the variety in available recipes. Now this world would have two of the five principal ingredients of cooking in Japan: sugar, salt, vinegar, soy sauce, and miso. As for the other three: my apologies. I don’t know how to make them.
While I could ask Tiamat for the technique, and they already had soybeans, I guessed that making soy sauce and miso would still take an incredible amount of work and time. At this moment I didn’t have that kind of time. We were in early summer. In the hottest time of the year, the number of beriberi patients would explode, because they sweat. Before that happened I wanted to have gagd meat and edamame popularized as much as possible among the residents.
“I introduced the doctors in town to Senzu. They were overjoyed to find that the patients they prescribed the beans to have begun to improve.”
Mister Milon spoke to me as I was lost in random thought, watching the sugar refinement process. I returned a vague smile. The patients would need to eat too much edamame each day to call it a prescription for the disease. I don’t think anyone could eat 600 grams of edamame each day.
“They seem to be experimenting with it, like grinding it into a tea.”
“Ooh. That’s...”
That’s it. That was the desperate struggle of humanity. I nodded wholeheartedly. The people of this world were working to save themselves.
“I hope they succeed.”
“So do I.”
Mister Milon seemed genuine, too. As promised, he seemed to be working on the edamame front without too much concern for profit. Of course, that doesn’t mean he would hurt his bottom line. He had done the math to make sure that, even after selling the goods for next to nothing, he would end up in the black. We were about to distribute an incredible amount of it, on top of the added bonus of the Senzu brand. To boot, if a sweet Senzu dish were to come out, he would end up with a more than healthy profit.
Saving people, being recognized for it, and getting rich off of it. What a beautiful stroke of accounting genius. This was how Mister Milon had built up the business he had. I would never expect a businessman to work for charity, either.
“I can smell the sweetness in the air.”
Mister Milon formed a smile. As we engaged in chit-chat, it seemed that the sugar-making was coming down to the homestretch.
“Hm. It looks like we got more than expected.”
Tiamat nodded, looking at the test batch of beet sugar. We had used about ten kilograms of beets to yield about 500 grams of beet sugar. That wasn’t half bad.
The remains of the now-sugarless beets, by the way, were to become livestock feed. While it wasn’t something any human would enjoy consuming, the faintest leftover sugar made the livestock chomp it down with glee.
“Then, let’s give it a taste, shall we?”
Lightly tapping on the congealed brown beet sugar, I made them into bite-size pieces. It wasn’t sandy like white sugar, but more clumpy. Most likely because it still contained some moisture. This couldn’t be helped, as we didn’t have a method to mechanically dry it.
I tried popping a piece into my mouth. With some thickness to it, the sugar contained a particular hint of flavor. A gentle, natural flavor. Still...
“It’s not that sweet... Did we screw up...?”
It had no overwhelming sweetness like the kind you taste when taking a spoonful of sugar. In comparison, the beet sugar was maybe a little sweeter than half as much as that.
“...Are you kidding, Sir Eiji?” Syfer, standing beside me, asked, as if he was holding something back.
“It’s good. Really good. This’ll treat that disease, right?”
“Yep. More precisely, a bean dish using this sugar will.”
“I see... I wish mom could have tasted this...”
A streak of tears fell down the swordsman’s face.