Warring States Survival Guide
Chapter 81 - 48 Soybean Cake_2

Chapter 81: Chapter 48 Soybean Cake_2

"Shut up and stop spouting bullshit! Don’t act like you don’t eat plenty yourself!" Harano snapped casually, but he actually felt pretty pleased. He’d always planned to build himself a house he liked to improve his living conditions; now the layout was good and the space was big enough, so a renovation would be just right.

The key thing was, this place was completely his—if he felt like digging out the basement and actually setting up a chemistry lab down there, nobody would care.

He wandered around for a bit before going to find Okurakiyebi, with Ah Man following behind and muttering complaints to Wen under her breath: "He’s changed, he’s not as respectful as before. He used to listen to me talk all day—now he’s telling me to stop talking bullshit!"

Wen shot her a cold glance, dropped her gaze and said nothing—Sis, if you hadn’t saved my life I wouldn’t want to respect you either. Nobody in this world can live with you for a whole month and still respect you; please have a little self-awareness!

Harano paid no attention to whatever Ah Man was mumbling behind him, that was just how she was—constantly nagging. The right thing to do was to ignore her. He went straight to Okurakiyebi by the door and politely asked, "Lord Okurakiyebi, this house seems like it hasn’t been lived in for a long time. What was it used for before?"

This was just basic house-buying common sense—check if it’s a mortgaged property, a forced sale, what happened to the previous owner, just to confirm clear ownership and avoid unnecessary trouble. And even though Okurakiyebi was stiff, he was straightforward enough, so when Harano asked, he simply replied, "This used to be the residence of Lord Kinoshita. It’s been vacant for over a year now."

"Oh, so did Lord Kinoshita move away?"

"Lord Kinoshita has already passed away."

Harano froze, suddenly getting a bad feeling, and cautiously asked, "Is this Lord Kinoshita the one that Lord Oda Sanmaru shot with the iron cannon...?"

Okurakiyebi nodded slightly, his face also looking grim—evidently he had a lot of resentment about winding up with this kind of lord.

Harano was speechless. He was just starting to get a better impression of Oda Nobunaga—wanting to keep his independence and personal freedom was one thing, but he actually admired Nobunaga as a person. The guy was generous and magnanimous. But who would’ve thought he’d pull a stunt like this? First kill a household retainer, then give the retainer’s house to someone else.

This wasn’t just about generosity—this was damn near inhuman!

Harano didn’t even know what to say for a moment. After a long pause, he hesitantly asked, "And the rest of the Kinoshita family?"

"The Kinoshita family is temporarily extinct," Okurakiyebi replied darkly. "After Lord Kinoshita died at Nagano Castle, Lady Kinoshita couldn’t maintain the household. She left behind a ’property transfer notice’ (the property deed) to get some money, for her daughter to use in the future to adopt a husband and restore her family name, and remarried herself."

Harano wasn’t surprised that Lady Kinoshita had run off. That Lord Kinoshita apparently had low status, didn’t own much land, and after he died and lost his yearly stipend, if his wife didn’t remarry, forget maintaining the house—she might well have starved to death after a while. She simply had no choice; it was a common phenomenon in this era. He was really just worried about the ownership, so he asked, "What about her daughters...?"

Okurakiyebi hesitated a bit, not very sure: "Lord Kinoshita had two daughters. The elder is maybe five or six, the younger probably three or four. They should both be at Lady Kinoshita’s family home now, being raised as foster daughters."

Harano nodded slightly. No problem with ownership, then. A five or six year old couldn’t suddenly marry and take back the ancestral home; as time passed, it would only get less likely. Really, what a disaster Nobunaga had created! It wasn’t just that he shot a guy dead with an iron cannon—he broke up a family, almost destroying their lineage. No wonder the other household retainers felt like rabbits mourning the fox and were eating their hearts out with resentment.

But all that was Nobunaga’s dirty work, nothing to do with him. He just griped about it in his heart and let it go. Glancing at the house again, he thought for a bit and asked Okurakiyebi, "If it’s convenient, could I walk around the manor as I please?"

"Of course, Lord Harano, feel free!" Okurakiyebi agreed right away. Now Harano was already an official resident here—whether he lived here or not, his registration was here, so naturally he could roam as he liked. Still, after agreeing, Okurakiyebi didn’t bother with any more pleasantries or give him the slightest welcome, just turned around and left. Looks like he wasn’t just rigid—he also hated socializing.

Harano didn’t mind. He took Ah Man and Wen for a stroll around the manor to check things out, see if it was livable and decent for people. After a while, he thought it looked pretty good. The farmers here were generally stronger than the ones in Hibi Village, with healthier faces and a relatively well-off life. When they saw him—a Samurai with a maid—they weren’t especially scared either, looking like people who’d seen some things.

Then they wandered over to the workshop and warehouses. They weren’t allowed into the storage—Oda’s Lang Faction was guarding it tightly. The water-powered mill was too primitive, currently out of use, and Harano wasn’t interested in going out of his way to see it. Finally, following the noise and the smell of beans, they found an oil-pressing workshop, where artisans were using ancient methods to press soybean oil—digging out wooden troughs, filling them with beans, then repeatedly slamming wedges with huge stones by manpower to squeeze out the oil.

Well, it wasn’t just soybeans—flax seed or rapeseed could be pressed too. It just happened to be soybeans this time—probably prepping materials to make paint for building repairs.

Nothing much to see though, just a typical oil-pressing workshop. The air was thick with the pungent, fishy smell of beans, making it pretty unbearable. Ah Man took just one look and lost all interest, about to urge Harano to leave, but saw him rummaging through some burlap sacks.

She glanced over and found the bags were full of bean cakes—nothing special. Curious, she asked, "What are you looking at this for?"

Harano absentmindedly flipped through the bean cakes, thinking aloud, "If you wanted to buy bean cakes, how much would they cost?"

Ah Man answered without thinking, "They’re cheap. Depending on the year, soybeans are four or five hundred Wen per koku, and after pressing for oil, a pile of bean cakes is just over a hundred Wen!" Then she caught herself—Harano lacked common sense—so she quickly added, "This stuff is really hard to eat, reeks terribly, practically can’t be swallowed, and if you eat too much you’ll pee blood, so don’t mess around!"

She suspected Harano was close to being broke and now planning to save money by buying bean cakes instead of rice. But Harano was just unfamiliar with the era, not actually lacking in life smarts—bean cakes really aren’t edible for people. Eat them as a staple, and your kidneys won’t be able to take it; peeing blood is no joke. Even lots of livestock don’t like bean cakes by themselves—they have to be mixed with something.

Like horses—they don’t care for them much. Give a horse soybeans and it’s delighted; give it bean cakes and it’s not happy at all. Horses are smart, like people—they can tell the difference between "fresh meat" and "jerky/canned meat." If you really fed your horse nothing but bean cakes like they do in novels, with no oil or anything, you’d better be careful it doesn’t kick you.

Donkeys and mules are dumber, they can manage. Pigs will eat them if you cook them—if not and you feed big chunks of protein straight, they can get indigestion and the runs. The real fans of bean cake are cows, which have several stomachs; they eat it, chew it back up, swallow again, and can digest it all slowly. The large chunks of protein don’t bother them at all, and the digestion rate can reach over 70%.

Harano wasn’t a biology expert—maybe a few errors in the details—but he got the general idea and would never use bean cakes as food for people. That’s basically asking to die—he wasn’t that crazy. But he’d thought of something else, maybe a way to make money—not tofu production, there’s little profit in that, but something you could mass produce, easy and fast for earning cash.

Of course, it was just an idea for now—he still needed to go back and figure out if it could be done, and whether the product would actually sell.

Still, it was better than nothing. Places like Hibi Village didn’t have these conditions; there was no way to scrounge up cheap raw materials. He’d stayed there like a dope with nothing to offer.

The balance in Harano’s mind was starting to tip. The only downside was the [second daily task]—he really wished he could go back to the modern era, and if he didn’t check each morning for thick fog on Ise Mountain he felt restless.

He weighed his options, his gaze slowly settling on Wen. But after a moment, deciding you couldn’t bully the honest kid, he immediately switched his gaze to the back of Ah Man’s head.

Say, if I bought Ah Man a horse and had her practice riding hard, made her get up at four thirty every morning and race over to Ise Mountain by sunrise to check for heavy fog, then rush back and report if there was, would she go for it?