I Flooded the Romance Fantasy with Dopamine – Chapter 3

Mikhail (1)

***

After a short squabble with Boris, who annoyingly insisted on following protocol, Mikhail rode on horseback with only the two of them for a long time.

The horse saddle was uncomfortable without a backrest, and the pastoral, rustic scenery was boring.

When I thought about it, even the capital was a backwater village among backwater villages, lacking not only the internet but even electric streetlights.

Just as such complaints were rising to my throat, the smell of the air subtly changed.

Something sour, musty, and nauseating began to mix with the scent of grass and earth.

When we finally reached the distillery, Boris dismounted from his horse first.

He straightened his clothes, cleared his throat once, and then shouted powerfully toward the distillery door.

“His Highness the Grand Duke is here! Is anyone inside!”

A moment of silence followed.

Just as I thought I heard something clatter and fall inside, the door opened with a rattling sound soon after.

A skinny worker, dressed in clothes stained with grime, popped out with a startled face.

“Y-Yes? Wh-Who did you say….”

He saw Boris’s not-so-fancy but formal servant attire, and then me, Mikhail, looking down at him languidly from atop my horse behind him, and he sucked in a sharp breath.

He didn’t know my face, but seeing the expensive-looking clothes, the fine horse, and the servant in tow, it was certain.

That I was the master of this territory, His Highness the good-for-nothing Grand Duke.

“W-Welcome, welcome! If you’ll just wait a moment, I’ll get the owner……!”

The worker didn’t even finish his sentence before scrambling back inside.

I dismounted from the horse.

As I stepped inside, the sight of the few workers moving about busily came into view.

At the shout that His Highness the Grand Duke had arrived, the inside of the distillery instantly became as quiet as if water had been thrown over it.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and bowed their heads, staring at me with frightened eyes.

Along with a wave of hot air, the sour and sweet smell of boiling grain assaulted my nostrils.

Soon after, a middle-aged man who appeared to be the owner of the distillery emerged.

His clothes were slightly better than the workers’, but he couldn’t hide the weariness and anxiety etched on his face.

The man came running, almost crawling, and prostrated himself before me.

“Y-Your Highness! To what do we owe this visit! For such an esteemed person to be in this humble place…!”

“Lead the way. I want to have a talk.”

“Ah, y-yes, yes! This way…!”

The man guided me to a small space made by roughly clearing out a corner of a warehouse, a space too embarrassing to even be called a reception room.

A creaking chair and a stained table were all that was there.

I gestured to Boris with my chin.

“You go outside and watch the horses.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

Boris withdrew, and only I, Mikhail, and the owner were left in the room.

The man stood there, fidgeting restlessly.

I sat down in the chair, crossed my legs, and asked bluntly.

“What is your name?”

“Ah, it is Anton, Your Highness.”

“Anton.”

I tapped my fingers on the table and continued.

“Why did I come to such a humble place? It’s simple. The alcohol tasted terrible, so I came to see for myself.”

Anton’s face turned deathly pale.

As expected, he had come in person, angered by the low-quality alcohol.

The fear that his head might be lopped off washed over him.

“My apologies, my deepest apologies, Your Highness! How could the alcohol made by country folk like us possibly suit Your Highness’s palate! Please, kill me!”

“I didn’t come here to kill you. I came because I was curious.”

My voice was still flat.

“Just how in the world do you make alcohol for it to have this kind of taste?”

At my prompting, Anton hesitated for a moment.

He just looked down at the floor, his lips trembling.

Finally, in a voice that seemed to have resigned itself to everything, he began to speak.

“……I will be honest, Your Highness. I am a man who originally knows nothing about how to make alcohol.”

“You don’t know?”

“Yes. If I had known… I wouldn’t have come to the Far East Maritime Province in the first place. I wouldn’t have been in debt either.”

Anton gave a bitter smile.

“……”

“I used almost all the subsidy from the state to pay off my debts, and all I had left was my body and this land. I had no choice but to farm. I had never even tried raising cows or sheep.”

He paused for a moment and let out a sigh.

“But, Your Highness, I don’t know if you are aware. The grains and potatoes harvested here are really, truly difficult to store. Even if we build a warehouse, there isn’t enough space, and if you look away for just a moment, they quickly rot or get eaten by rats and insects.”

He continued, shuddering.

“The rats here are like some kind of monster. Rat pups the size of a forearm swarm in packs, and the cats we let loose to catch them end up getting bitten to death instead.”

Anton let out an empty laugh.

“I know how to make beer or kvass, having learned it over the shoulder back in my hometown, but as you know, that kind of alcohol spoils quickly.”

‘Of course it does. There’s no pasteurization technology, nor any proper sealing technology.’

If he boiled it, the taste would obviously be garbage.

I thought to myself.

“So… so I had to do something with the leftover grain before it rotted away. I started making what they call distilled spirits, clumsily following what I’d seen in a book.”

“…”

“The alcohol Your Highness just tasted is, in fact, the result of many terrible failures, a product that was finally made ‘passably edible’.”

He pointed to his own eyes.

“Once before… I made it wrong and drank it, and my vision just went completely black. Thankfully, a priest who was on his rounds healed me and I barely managed to open my eyes, but for a few days, it was truly hell.”

Anton’s voice was calm, but the pain and desperation contained within it were conveyed in their entirety.

“Even if I make it into alcohol like this, it doesn’t sell well. All the farmers around here are in the same situation as me. They all brew alcohol with the rotting grain in their own homes. There are just a few neighbors who occasionally buy mine, saying it’s a little better.”

Only after hearing the owner’s story did I understand everything.

‘I was expecting far too much.’

To these people, alcohol was not a luxury item to be savored for its taste and aroma.

It was a means of survival, a way to utilize the grain that would rot and be thrown away anyway, to forget the cold of this harsh land, and to soothe the sorrows of a difficult life, if only for a moment.

It was nothing more and nothing less.

It was worse than I had thought.

This may be the world of a romance fantasy novel, but that was only the story of the capital and the nobles.

The reality of the frontier was this miserable.

‘Mikhail, this guy was truly a flower raised in a greenhouse.’

His memories were of no help at all in understanding this reality.

I stood up from my seat.

“This has become a nuisance.”

I muttered as if to myself, then looked at Anton.

“Lead the way. I need to take a look around this distillery.”

“Pardon? Y-Yes, yes! This way…!”

I had to see with my own eyes what needed to be fixed and how.

The inside of the distillery, which I entered following Anton, was utter pandemonium.

Hoo-keun.

A blast of heat hit me the moment I opened the door.

It wasn’t just because of the firewood burning under the giant copper still.

The air was thick with the sour yet sweet smell from the fermentation tanks, a smell that made it hard to tell if the grain was rotting or fermenting.

With every breath, I felt those nauseating particles embedding themselves deep in my lungs.

I unknowingly furrowed my brow.

The floor was just a muddy dirt floor, and the place was covered in cobwebs and unidentifiable stains.

And there were potatoes and grains on the verge of rotting, placed haphazardly.

‘Wow…….’

A sigh escaped me on its own.

They make alcohol here, with that?

If this were 21st-century South Korea, they would have been hit with a merciless fine and a double-whammy business suspension.

“This is the still we use, Your Highness.”

The place Anton pointed to had a crude copper pot.

A pot still.

It was the most primitive form of distillation equipment.

The cooling system was nothing more than a copper pipe submerged in a stream.

It was as clear as day that with that thing, all sorts of impurities would happily come along hand-in-hand with the alcohol.

‘They probably only distill it once, of course.’

Fuel is also money.

There was no way they could afford to run that thing multiple times.

The root of the problem was clear.

Half-rotten ingredients, and a single distillation.

And the fact that all of this boiled down to two words: ‘poverty.’

For a moment, I was seized by the impulse to fix all of this.

Use clean ingredients.

Distill it at least three times.

Boldly discard the heads and tails of the distillation run.

Just by following the basics, a much better product would emerge than what they had now.

‘What would happen if I just ordered these guys to ‘use clean ingredients and distill it three times’?’

I didn’t even need to see it to know.

The cost would go up, but even if the quality improved, there would be no one to buy it.

In the end, it wouldn’t be profitable, so they would either go bankrupt or defy the order and secretly go back to the old way.

Then if they got caught, I would get pissed off again, punish these guys, monitor them, receive reports…….

Just thinking about it was exhausting.

I had experienced firsthand in the South Korean military just how inefficient it was to give orders without solving the fundamental problem.

‘In the end, money is the problem.’

To solve this problem, money was needed to build a proper warehouse to store the grain and potatoes so they wouldn’t rot.

That money comes from the taxes paid by the territory’s residents.

And the largest share of the tax revenue in this backwater territory was, naturally, the liquor tax.

‘Damn it, it’s a vicious cycle.’

In the end, for me to drink good alcohol, these people have to make a lot of good alcohol and sell it outside, and to do that, they have to improve the quality, and to improve the quality, they have to sell it outside.

It was a perfect circular argument.

‘No, there is one way.’

A word flashed through my mind like lightning.

Jack Daniel’s.

And the process that makes that whiskey special.

Charcoal mellowing.

A simple method that required no additional distillation or high-quality ingredients.

The cost was also dirt cheap.

I cleared my throat once and put on an expression as if a good idea had come to mind, but it was so commonplace that it was no big deal.

Then, in the most indifferent and languid voice possible, I asked Anton.

“Anton.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Is charcoal common and cheap around here?”

Anton’s eyes widened for a moment.

Why charcoal all of a sudden?

He tilted his head for a moment before answering.

“Yes, well……. There’s wood everywhere, so charcoal is all over the place. It’s produced in such large quantities that it’s practically worthless, but…….”

‘Excellent!’

I cheered inwardly.

As expected, the golden rule of isekai possession stories worked.

The common sense of a modern person is innovative technology in another world!

Now, if I just tossed out one simple piece of knowledge, these ignorant otherworlders would be filled with admiration, kneel before me, and worship me like a god.

Just imagining it was so enjoyable that the corners of my mouth crept up slightly.

“Crush that charcoal finely, and filter the distilled alcohol through it. Very many times, slowly. Then at least it won’t taste like dishwater. No, it will be purer than the holy water used in the church.”

Now, it’s time for you to be amazed.

‘Ooh, Your Highness! Such profound wisdom!’ Go on, shout it.

But Anton’s reaction was 180 degrees different from my expectation.

Far from being amazed, he looked at me with an expression as if he were choosing his words carefully so as not to offend his superior.

Anton soon seemed to have made up his mind and began to speak.

“…Your Highness.”

“What, is there a problem?”

“Where should I sell the alcohol made that way?”

“…What?”

The smile vanished completely from my face.

It was an unexpected response.

I once again realized that I had been looking at the world too simplistically.

Reality was a sewer.

Reality was different from the cheap isekai novels I used to read.

Filtering alcohol with charcoal also incurred a cost.

For these people, no matter how cheap it was, there was no reason to incur that cost.

The problem wasn’t the quality of the alcohol.

The problem wasn’t the technology.

Demand.

A place to sell.

Customers.

The problem was, precisely, the ‘market.’

What’s the point of supply when there’s no market?

It’s all just toxic inventory that strangles the producer.

‘Damn it, do I have to do marketing myself or something?’

There’s no internet or anything, so maybe something like celebrity marketing?

But who would advertise it?

Who in this Far East Maritime Province.

I, Mikhail—or rather, Kim Jae-han who had possessed Mikhail’s body—only remembered after sweating a few drops in the heat of the distillery.

‘I, I am the celebrity.’

And not just any celebrity, but one of the most famous celebrities in this country.

The good-for-nothing 7th Prince of the Empire.

The Grand Duke of the Far East Maritime Province.

Mikhail.