Warring States Survival Guide
Chapter 86 - 52: Soy Sauce King

Chapter 86: Chapter 52: Soy Sauce King

The trial production of soy sauce was a huge success. Harano was very pleased, but Ah Man had a stroke of bad luck and ended up contaminated like a little otter, knitting her bean-sprout eyebrows while wrestling with a philosophical question: Am I in a river? Is this a river world? Am I really living in a world that’s just one big river?!

But Aki, Yayoi, and the Momoi brothers didn’t have her level of curiosity—they weren’t the type who needed to get to the bottom of everything—and since they had no idea how long traditional soy sauce brewing was supposed to take, they just accepted this as totally normal, not the least bit surprised. —Maybe that’s why the smarter and more knowledgeable you are, the easier it is to go nuts!

After sampling the soy sauce, they all loved it, raving about how delicious it was, and Yayoi even ladled some out to take home, planning to bottle it up and treat everyone to soy sauce over rice for dinner.

Harano didn’t try to stop her. Even though that batch of soy sauce probably had chemical residue levels that would have future generations screaming "carcinogen!," eating it equals death, but honestly, the stuff modern people eat isn’t much cleaner, and food scandals pop up everywhere no matter the country; risks are high across the board—no point fussing over it. An occasional cheat meal won’t kill you.

Of course, this was just a test run, and the production process was nowhere near perfect. He planned to gradually improve and purify the process until he could produce a batch of soy sauce so safe you could chug a whole pot and not even blink. That, though, would take time; there was no point rushing it.

He was already starting to think about market segmentation. For example, Haidong County is right next to Ise Bay, so kelp—kombu—would be dirt-cheap. Why not buy up some, cook it into a broth, and blend that into the soy sauce to seriously boost the umami? He could produce a super-tasty "dashi soy sauce," then slap a markup of five or ten times for the high-end, show-offy market.

He could also try to procure some high-sugar crops, or starchy roots—say, boil down taro or yams for syrup to mix into the soy sauce and boost the sweetness, making a "sweet soy sauce" especially for the scholars, noblewomen, and kids. That market should be promising too.

Anyway, it was a sure bet—he’d rake in enough profit to renovate his house to look brand new and treat himself to an ultra-luxurious makeover, taking his standard of living to a whole new level.

By dinnertime, he was still obsessing over all sorts of techniques, making plans for his upcoming "premium soy sauce workshop," and had already cooked up more than twenty niche product lines in his head. Financial freedom felt within reach! Meanwhile, Ah Man was finally shaking off her daze—she simply couldn’t figure out how Harano did it, how he’d cut the brewing cycle from a year down to seven or eight days, and even less so how junk ingredients like wheat bran and rice bran could be turned into something as pricey as soy sauce. Eventually, she gave up thinking about it.

She let it go but didn’t pester Harano to spill what mysterious things he’d dumped into the vat. After all, even though she was still a kid, she’d been around the block and knew the value of a "secret recipe" like this—it didn’t matter how she asked, Harano would never reveal it. If she were the one holding onto such a secret, anyone who tried to take a peek would get a knife in the guts, and hesitating even a second would mean she was letting down her ancestors.

So, she didn’t ask. She simply picked up the soy sauce bottle, poured some into a dish, and held it up for a closer look—the soy sauce was a glossy brown, and in the light, it glowed with a wonderfully warm hue that was just soothing to the eye.

She lifted the dish and gently sniffed. The soy sauce was bursting with a complex aroma—alcohols, aldehydes, carboxylic acids, esters, phenols, acetals, furans—the whole package, blending into a mellow savory fragrance that drew you in and made you crave more.

Finally, she raised the dish with both hands and tipped the soy sauce back in one gulp. The flavor hit salty first, then umami, finishing sweet—salty with umami, and a sweet aftertaste. Anyway, it was miles better than the monks’ home-brewed charcoal-black soy sauce, which always tasted a little bitter anyway.

She carefully set down the dish, breathed out slowly, and closed her eyes in silent aftertaste. When she reopened them, she looked about as zombie-upgraded as a movie monster in mid-evolution, her eyes practically glowing green.

Damn! This soy sauce is top-shelf! This is a miracle! That guy didn’t screw up—he really made a batch as premium as a winter-aged bottle of the best sake. It was sure to fetch a high price, and with ingredient costs so low!

She may not have managed to let slip those clever lines about dung beetles, soy sauce, and idiots that she’d painstakingly cooked up, but she’d been there for the whole process—she had a solid sense of the raw materials and the yield, and she started running the numbers on her fingers then and there.

A koku of soybean cake, wheat bran, and rice bran could produce a little more than a koku of soy sauce. Soybean cake in large quantities was just 130 or 140 wen per koku; wheat and rice bran were basically animal feed, something only the starving would try to mix into buckwheat and eat—practically worthless. You could go to the mill and get a huge pile for just a few dozen wen.

The only thing that cost a bit was coarse salt, but Haidong County is right on the sea, so salt was plentiful—only just a bit pricier than rice. And if you went and stole—uh, bought—in bulk from the salt pans, it’d be even cheaper.

Doing the math, brewing a koku of soy sauce cost just over 200 wen, while a koku could easily sell for two kyan or more. No—this stuff was so premium, it should be priced like high-end sake: three kyan or above. That was a fifteen-fold profit! Better than highway robbery!

When she finished running the numbers, the green light in Ah Man’s eyes became even more intense. If it could be made into a laser and swept around, everyone else—Aki, Yayoi, and the rest, who were shoveling down soy sauce rice, sipping soy sauce radish soup, and marveling over soy-braised fish—would have been carved up in an instant.

Of course, she couldn’t actually do that—she wasn’t at the level where her eyes could shoot lasers yet. But eating was out of the question—she hustled up next to Harano, and, like she was angling for a shady D deal, whispered, "Those things you poured on the bean cake before, and later, that other stuff you sprinkled... relax, I’m not asking what it was. I just want to know—is it expensive? Is it worth a lot?"

Harano blinked, instantly guessing she wanted to know about costs. "Nope, not expensive. Averaged out, each koku of soy sauce costs just over a hundred wen right now. And that’s just for now—the cost will go down another 20-30% once I optimize the process."

He wasn’t exaggerating. Japan has four volcanic belts, volcanoes everywhere—sulfur was dirt cheap. Ordinary villagers could just hike into the mountains and pick up high-purity natural sulfur rocks—for free, basically. One of the volcanic belts ran right through Owari into the Ise Peninsula, so you really could just find natural sulfur rocks in the mountains. It was almost like getting something for nothing.

And then there’s alkali—say no more. Back in the Japan Middle Ages, people used the stuff for laundry every day, so if it was cheap enough for daily washing, it would never be expensive.

Raw materials were already this cheap, and Harano was planning to design new cooking equipment with good anti-corrosion features. If he could recover most of the dilute hydrochloric acid through condensation and reuse it, the costs would go even lower. In later years, like the 1950s and 60s, Japan started doing just that—cycling dilute hydrochloric acid with very little loss. That’s why soy sauce was so cheap back then; even in times of severe shortages and runaway inflation, the price never changed, and everyone could afford it.

Of course, right now that was just Harano’s concept; whether it was really doable, he’d have to see. He couldn’t get glass yet and would have to come up with some other way, but even without acid recycling, the costs were still totally manageable.

Ah Man agreed, murmuring softly, "No need to go any lower than that—costs of a little over 300 wen, tenfold profits... already pretty damn good."

Tenfold profits—that’s pretty much daylight robbery. For a secret like that, she’d be willing to stab the Emperor!

Still, it was Harano who held the recipe, and she didn’t mind—he’d always treated her well, never once refused her food or drink, always the best of the best. So if Harano was making money, she had zero complaints. He wasn’t like a typical Samurai, always pinching pennies as if spending a single wen would kill them. She’d be sure to share the benefits eventually, and life could only get better!

This time, she’d really gotten lucky—justice-vigilante double-crossing may have failed, but the second-hand windfall just kept piling up. Total blessing in disguise!

The more she thought about it, the happier she got, daydreaming about her future of endless food and drink. Her bean-sprout eyebrows jittered with excitement, and her eyes turned yet greener staring at Harano. The more she looked, the more kingly he seemed—maybe he really was destined to become the "Soy Sauce King." Just sitting next to him, she seemed to catch a whiff of money clinging to him, making her feel light and floaty and hard to control herself. She’s always had a dream—not the Iron Cannon one, a different one—of buying a huge barrel of good booze, soaking in it while she slept, slurping it as she went, living her best life.

Now, with the scent of cash wafting off Harano, the Soy Sauce King, she felt like that dream wasn’t far off—just within reach!

Harano started to get uncomfortable under her gaze, peeking down at himself, then at her, weirdly unsettled, starting to wonder if maybe there really was too much chemical residue in the soy sauce and she’d gone daft from eating it. But then he figured that was unlikely, so he got back to business, whispering, "So, how do we sell this soy sauce?"

He was a pro at using modern industrial theory to hack together soy sauce, but he hadn’t been in this era long. Selling the stuff for cash was another story—and he could only count on Ah Man, the "Master of the Martial World."

Yeah, sell the soy sauce, make his second bucket of gold as a transmigrator, and kick off a leisurely, high-quality lifestyle in Japan’s Warring States Era!