Dao of the Deal

Muchen was out of bed early the next morning, driven more by force of habit than business necessity. He took advantage of the clear weather to get some work done outside. Building a firepit in the cleared area behind the house was only a matter of a few hours of effort, Muchen's efforts in cultivation once more paying off in the field of manual labor. He could have had a simple fire going in much less time, but he wanted to have a little bit of control over the heat once it got going. In the end he managed to build something that almost deserved to be called a stove.

With that done, Muchen was prepared to try out one of the specially made pieces of equipment that he had hauled all the way from the capital: a pot still, formed from copper and sparkling in the sunlight. It made for an impressive sight once he hauled it from his cart and positioned it over the fire pit. While he was at it, Muchen also grabbed one of the barrels of cheap wine.

The pot could only hold half a barrel at one time, but if things went well Muchen wouldn't mind doing a second distillation. And if things didn't go well, then the only way he could improve was by trying again.

"That's a lot of wine," Yize said. He'd come back from his early hunt just as Muchen had been putting the finishing touches on the fire pit, and had drifted over to see what was going on. Chuhua was still busy with her own daily errands, while Xinyi no doubt had her own matters to attend to.

"It's not for us to drink," Muchen said. The barrel wasn't really meant for one mortal to handle, but cultivation made concerns like that irrelevant. He removed the hood on top of the still and poured in wine until the pot was mostly full. As expected, the barrel was half-emptied in the process. Muchen put the lid back in place on the barrel, then placed the hood back on top of the pot.

The pot still must have looked odd to Yize's eyes. The wine being poured into a pot was ordinary enough, but the lopsided cone shape of the lid, leading to a folded over peak that turned into a thin tube extending far from the edge of the pot, didn't serve any obvious purpose to those not versed in its secrets.

Once you understood the science, of course, the purpose was straightforward. Alcohol boiled at a lower temperature than water. Therefore, if one put a pot of water over a heat source and collected the resulting vapors, they would tend to have more alcohol by volume than the original liquid. If you repeated the process enough times, you'd eventually have a product worthy of being called hard alcohol.

Well, there was probably a bit more to it. Fortunately, Muchen had time for a bit of trial and error.

He gave his setup one last look. Heat source, check. Pot full of booze, check. Tool for collecting vapor, check.

Right now the neck of the still was set to drain into the first of many ceramic cups Muchen had arrayed around him. The liquid that was being boiled off would be different as time passed. Muchen intended to collect the output of the still in separate containers so that he could at least somewhat keep an eye on the changes.

Everything was ready. Muchen lit the fire and sat back to wait.

"Is this how you intend to get rich?" Yize asked. He sounded a little skeptical. Muchen couldn't blame him.

"It's one of the arrows in my quiver," Muchen said, giving Yize a look. The difference from the last time he'd seen him really was striking. "Cultivation going well?"

Yize nodded. "After receiving enlightenment, I've had steady progress."

Muchen nodded. After years of shouldering the entire responsibility for keeping himself and his sister alive, it was no surprise that Yize had leaped at the chance to change his situation. Even if an ordinary person might find the practice of cultivation tiring or dull, Yize would be willing to persevere.

It hadn't taken much progress to cause a great change in his life. In a sect a disciple with three open meridians was hardly worthy of special treatment, but out in the wild a little bit of strength or speed could easily mean the difference between a successful hunt or a hungry night.

"What dao do you follow?" Muchen asked.

Yize didn't respond right away. As the silence stretched on, Muchen worried that he had overstepped his bounds.

"Hunting."

He probably should have expected that a boy who had supported his family for years by hunting would choose such a dao. Even if it seemed obvious in retrospect, though, Muchen was touched that Yize had been willing to answer such a personal question.

Unfortunately, his dao itself was less than ideal, at least from Muchen's perspective. It fit with Yize's personality and life experiences, and right now it helped him to gather more resources from the wild more efficiently than he had before, but it would only hold him back in the long run.

Muchen was attempting to build a successful business, an engine of profit. His own dao was well suited for that endeavor. He also had Xinyi on his team. He still hadn't dared to inquire as to her dao, but it was obvious that her only role on the team was as muscle. With Yize's dao also inclining towards violence, Muchen's nascent organization was starting to look more like an army than a profitable endeavor.

Military might could be turned into profit, but that kind of thing was risky and liable to lead to reprisals. Besides, Muchen wanted to play to his own strengths, both from his dao and his technical know-how. That meant making win-win deals with satisfied customers, not plundering from the bodies of defeated enemies.

"Do you enjoy hunting?"

As far as Muchen knew, a cultivator couldn't change his dao. Or at least, if such a thing was possible the results would be catastrophic. One did not simply change out one's guiding philosophy as if you were flipping a page in a book. Especially when it had already been used as the basis for mystical might.

On the other hand, his experience with his own dao suggested that there was a certain amount of give and take. Muchen wasn't being programmed by the heavens above to become a single minded spiritual cash register, pursuing profit above all else. His cultivation hadn't been impeded when he changed the focus of his business, or even when it took some time to get the new business up and running. It was only in those moments when he'd given up on running a business and making money that he had been in real conflict with his dao.

"I have wanted to be a hunter for as long as I can remember," Yize said.

Muchen nodded. Worst come to worst, having a skilled hunter on the team could be useful even outside of pitched battle. Vast swathes of the Qianzhan Continent were given over to wild beasts, hiding great treasures as well as great danger. If Yize could venture into the trackless wilds and return with valuable prizes, it would certainly help the bottom line. Unfortunately, that kind of thing wouldn't have much synergy with the rest of what Muchen had planned.

"Because of your father?" Muchen asked. After all, yize had learned his trade by following in his father's footsteps.

The first few drops were starting to trickle out of the still, now. Muchen leaned down and gave the cup a sniff, then wrinkled his nose. Unless he missed his guess, it was borderline poisonous. He frowned as he watched the liquid continue to drip into the cup.

Well, he'd known that different parts of the wine would evaporate at different rates. Maybe if he stuck with it he'd start getting drinkable spirits eventually. Or maybe he'd screwed up the whole process.

"I did want to be like my father," Yize said, pulling Muchen out of his worries. "Now, I enjoy the hunt."

Muchen nodded, encouraging him to continue.

"Tracking down valuable prey, avoiding the predators I can't fight, and finding the right moment to strike," Yize continued, "it's difficult, but it's satisfying to rise to the challenge."

Muchen smiled. This was better than he'd expected. If Yize just liked being outside every day or just enjoyed killing things, it would have been tricky to direct his dao toward more generally useful productivity. "You might be able to find the same sort of satisfaction outside of the hunt."

Muchen certainly remembered hearing people from his past life talk about the sales process like they were big game hunters. He didn't like to think in terms of such an adversarial relationship with his customers, but he was willing to use whatever tool in the box was most suited in order to get through to his future employee.

"How so?" Yize asked.

The first cup was a little over three quarters full. Muchen switched it out for the new one. He gave his first distilled product another sniff. Either distilled rice spirits were a lot rougher than anything he'd ever been exposed to, or this cup was going to have to be thrown away. For now he set it aside to be reevaluated later.

"What I'm working on will create wonders to sell that haven't been seen on the Qianzhan Continent before," Muchen said, only exaggerating a little bit. There was probably an alchemist or two out there who made their own moonshine, but he'd never seen anything stronger than wine available for purchase when he'd been out stocking up on social lubricants. "That isn't enough by itself to make money, though."

Yize thought for a moment before he replied. "You need to find customers."

Muchen nodded. No doubt Yize had gone through the same thing whenever he'd caught particularly valuable prey. "I can guess about the kind of person who might be interested. In order to turn a guess into silver, though, somebody has to go out and track them down."

"It would be a very different kind of hunt," Yize said. "I'm not sure I would be cut out for it."

"Well, nothing would be trying to kill you," Muchen said. He switched out the now almost full second cup for another. The process was starting to speed up. After a moment's thought, he reached in with a poker to try and reduce the intensity of the fire a little. He was pretty sure he wanted to keep the wine at a low simmer rather than a rolling boil, though with the tools available to him he couldn't be too precise.

The second cup still smelled a little suspicious. Muchen didn't want to get to taste testing until he had something that he was at least sure wasn't poisonous.

"There are bandits between here and Jiliu City, at times," Yize said.

That was a fair point. It was hardly possible to find an occupation on Qianzhan Continent that didn't have any risk of death associated with it. Muchen wasn't entirely sure if the prospect of a life or death fight was something Yize saw as a positive or a negative, judging from the smile on his face.

"I want our operation to be the biggest business on the continent, someday," Muchen said. "For that to happen, I need people by my side who are more than glorified caravan guards."

Muchen didn't mind surrounding himself with people who could handle themselves in a fight, but it was far from the most important hiring criteria. He wasn't looking to set up his own gang of brigands, after all.

The third and fourth cup had been filled. Muchen moved the fifth into place before giving the fourth a sniff. It wasn't obviously unfit for human consumption. He took a sip.

It tasted like cheap rice wine, but stronger. He'd peg it as being a little less alcoholic than well drinks back on Earth. It wasn't something he'd drink for fun, but with a whole continent of people out there who had never had anything stronger than wine, there should be plenty of customers. Not to mention that he still hadn't even tried filtering it yet.

He held the cup out to Yize, who took a taste before staring at the cup in shock.

"What is this?"

Muchen smiled. "A first step."

He'd need to put in a lot more work to nail down the final process. For starters, putting this fortified wine through another round of distillation might be needed to get something he could properly call hard alcohol.

Still, this was enough to prove that it could be done. That the devices he remembered from Earth could be used here. In time, he'd open up a whole new world of commercial possibilities.

"I don't know if it truly fits with my dao," Yize said, gazing solemnly at the cup he was holding, "but I'm willing to give your ideas a try."

That was all Muchen could ask for. As long as the people around him were at least willing to try to pull together in pursuit of profit, they'd end up going a long way down the road of capitalism eventually.