My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode : 114

Chapter: 227

With his core R&D team assembled – a motley but promising crew of an obsessive-compulsive note-taker, a cheerfully volatile experimentalist, and a pragmatist who probably dreamt in flowcharts – Lloyd’s next, most pressing task was to find a home for his burgeoning soap empire. The disused smokehouse, while charmingly rustic and steeped in the nostalgic aroma of clandestine chemistry, was hopelessly inadequate for the scale of production he now envisioned. It was like trying to build a warship in a bathtub.

“We need a factory,” Lloyd announced the next morning, standing with his newly assembled team in the cool, dew-kissed gardens of the estate. Jasmin stood beside him, her usual timidity warring with a newfound sense of importance, clutching a list of potential herb suppliers Lloyd had asked her to research. Ken Park was a silent, imposing shadow a few paces behind, his presence a quiet, unwavering statement of ducal authority. Alaric, Borin, and Lyra, the three alchemist apprentices, looked on with varying degrees of quiet intensity, boisterous curiosity, and practical assessment.

“Not just a workshop,” Lloyd continued, his voice ringing with the quiet confidence of a man who had just secured a fifteen-thousand-gold-coin operating budget. “But a purpose-built manufactory. A place with space, with access to resources, with a logical workflow. A place we can build from the ground up to be efficient, safe, and, most importantly, discreet.”

“The old West Wing stables are currently underutilized, my lord,” Lyra, the pragmatist, offered immediately, her mind already sifting through logistical possibilities. “The drainage is adequate, the structure is sound, and it’s close to the main larders for tallow transport.”

“Too close,” Lloyd countered instantly, shaking his head. “Too visible. The smell of boiling tallow and lye, the comings and goings of workers… it would attract too much attention, too many questions. We need isolation. A place where Borin’s… ‘enthusiastic experimentation’… is less likely to startle the Duchess’s prized peacocks or, you know, level the guest quarters.”

Borin grinned sheepishly. “The last explosion was very small, my lord! And we learned so much about the unexpected volatility of powdered moonstone!”

“Precisely,” Lloyd said dryly. “So, we scout. We need a location on the periphery of the estate grounds. Something sturdy, something forgotten, something we can claim as our own sovereign territory of soap and science.”

Their scouting party, a bizarre procession of the heir apparent, his stoic bodyguard, his loyal butcher-girl-turned-forewoman, and three alchemists, set off. They spent the better part of the morning exploring the vast, often-neglected outer reaches of the Ferrum estate. They dismissed a crumbling shepherd’s hut as too small, a remote hunting lodge as too difficult to supply, and an unsettlingly creepy abandoned mausoleum that Borin had suggested with far too much enthusiasm.

Finally, guided by a half-forgotten memory from Lloyd’s own bored teenage wanderings in his first life, they found it. Tucked away in a shallow valley, screened by a thick stand of birch trees and overgrown with ivy, stood a massive, disused grain mill. It was an old, sturdy structure of thick stone walls and a heavy slate roof, built to last for centuries. A wide, sluggish stream, now mostly silted up, ran alongside it, the remnants of the old mill channel still visible. The great wooden water wheel, its timbers green with moss and decay, hung silent and still, a ghost of its former purpose.

“This,” Lloyd declared, his eyes gleaming with a vision only he could see, “is it.”

The team stared. The place was a wreck. The heavy wooden doors sagged on rusted hinges, windows were boarded up or shattered, and the interior, when they forced a door open with a groan of protesting wood, was a cavern of dust, cobwebs, and the lingering, musty smell of forgotten grain. Pigeons had clearly taken up residence in the high rafters, and a family of particularly large, unimpressed-looking rats scurried away into the shadows as they entered.

“It’s… rustic, my lord,” Alaric commented, peering nervously into the gloom, already looking as if he wanted to start meticulously cataloging the different species of mold.

“It’s perfect!” Borin boomed, his voice echoing in the cavernous space. He pointed towards the massive, silent water wheel visible through a grimy window. “Look at that! The potential! We can rebuild it! Use the stream’s power! We could rig up a system of gears, connecting rods… power large, counter-rotating mixing paddles in the vats! Constant, automated stirring! Think of the efficiency! The sheer mechanical elegance!” His eyes shone with the fervent light of an engineer who had just been handed the world’s most interesting, if slightly dilapidated, chemistry set.

Chapter: 228

Lyra, meanwhile, was already pacing the main floor, her practical gaze sweeping over the space, ignoring the dust and decay, seeing only workflow and potential. “The main grinding floor is large enough for the primary boiling and mixing vats,” she mused, tapping a thoughtful finger against her chin. “Good stone foundation, can handle the weight and the heat from the hearths we’ll need to build. The upper lofts,” she pointed towards the high, dusty second floor, “are perfect for the drying and curing racks. Excellent airflow once we un-board those windows. And that side chamber,” she indicated a smaller, stone-walled room that had likely been the miller’s office, “would make an ideal, secure laboratory for Alaric’s precise measurements and your scent distillation experiments, my lord. Away from the heat and steam of the main floor.”

Lloyd listened, a slow smile of satisfaction spreading across his face. This was why he had chosen them. Borin saw the potential for innovation, for power. Lyra saw the path to practical, efficient implementation. Alaric… well, Alaric was probably already mentally designing a color-coded labeling system for the mold samples. They were perfect.

“Exactly,” Lloyd confirmed, clapping his hands together, the sound startling another flurry of pigeons from the rafters. “This is our foundation. Our manufactory.” He turned to Jasmin, who had been looking around with wide, slightly overwhelmed eyes, trying to picture this derelict ruin as a bustling factory. “Jasmin, your first official task as forewoman. We need this place… cleansed.”

And so, the work began. Under Jasmin’s increasingly confident, if still slightly timid, supervision, two capable, no-nonsense maids assigned by Roy from the household staff – a stout, pragmatic woman named Martha (a different, younger Martha than the Head Cook, a fact that initially caused some confusion) and a quiet, tireless girl named Pia – arrived with buckets, brooms, and a shared expression of grim determination. The Great Mill Clean-out of the Ferrum Estate commenced.

It was an arduous, thankless task. Years of accumulated dust, grime, rat nests, and pigeon droppings had to be shoveled, swept, and scrubbed away. The silted-up stream channel had to be dug out by a team of grumbling estate laborers, redirected to once again flow through the mill race. Rotted floorboards were torn up, broken slates on the roof replaced, shattered windows re-glazed. Borin, to everyone’s surprise, proved to be not just an enthusiastic theorist but a surprisingly skilled amateur engineer, directing the laborers with booming, cheerful commands as they worked to repair and reinforce the massive, ancient water wheel, his mind already buzzing with designs for wooden gears and power-transfer systems.

While the basic infrastructure was being wrestled back from decades of neglect, Lloyd, with Lyra and Alaric at his side, began drawing up the formal plans. Using large sheets of vellum spread out on a makeshift table, Lloyd translated the images in his head into concrete designs. He sketched the layout, guided by Lyra’s sharp, logistical insights. The raw materials entrance here, flowing logically to the initial processing and melting stations. The primary boiling hall here, with specially constructed, fire-brick-lined hearths designed for sustained, controlled heat. The lye extraction and storage area over there, in a separate, well-ventilated chamber, with strict safety protocols Lyra insisted upon. The scent infusion lab here, clean and isolated. The curing lofts upstairs, with meticulously spaced racks designed by Alaric for optimal airflow and easy inventory tracking. The final packaging and shipping area here, near the main doors.

It was a symphony of practical creation, a fusion of Lloyd’s futuristic, Earth-inspired engineering concepts, Lyra’s logistical genius, and Alaric’s obsessive attention to detail. The old grain mill was not just being cleaned; it was being reborn, reimagined, transformed from a monument of forgotten industry into the cradle of a new one. The foundation of the soap empire was being laid, not just with gold and plans, but with sweat, dust, and the shared, burgeoning excitement of a team that was beginning to believe in their eccentric young lord’s strange, fragrant vision.

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While the old grain mill echoed with the sounds of scraping shovels, hammering mallets, and Borin’s booming, occasionally explosive, engineering suggestions, Lloyd turned his attention to the second critical pillar of his burgeoning empire: the supply chain. A state-of-the-art factory was useless without a steady, reliable, and cost-effective flow of raw materials. Tallow, ash, and, most crucially, the finer oils that would elevate his product from ‘surprisingly effective’ to ‘undeniably luxurious’, were the lifeblood of his entire enterprise.

This was not a task for an alchemist or a forewoman. This required subtlety, negotiation, an understanding of the intricate, often treacherous, web of commerce that crisscrossed the Duchy. This required Ken Park.