I moved through the streets of the port-town with confidence born out of familiarity.
Somehow, I just knew where to go, which direction to turn.
And once again, I decided not to question it.
Within an hour, I left the actual town, heading for the city's farms.
Such a massive gathering of people required its food supply to be equally as robust. Which is why, this place not only traded for it through land and sea, but also produced a considerable amount on their own, through the system of massive farms.
'Still,' I squinted my eyes as I approached a familiar abode. 'For burghers to have this kind of land…'
I shook my head.
For some reason, I just had no desire to question what was going on, or how I somehow managed to seamlessly enter my new role. The underlying reason behind everything that was going on just didn't appear significant enough for me to think about.
Before long, I've reached the farm. And a short exchange of money and services later, I left with a pig and tacit approval of the rancher to prepare it however I wish in one of his empty workshops.
Just what I wanted.
'Still, this gold?' I looked down on the unfamiliar pouch in my hand that I just took my money out of. I weighed it up and down before securing it back to my belt. 'It sure does come in handy.'
I wasted no time. And I needed exactly two things for my plan to work.
Good, tasty meat skewers for people to buy and then the soap to help them clean the grease from the food.
A perfectly simple, two-fold strategy of creating a need and then solving it - for money.
The memories I had of this world made it pretty clear - whilst not impossible to find, cosmetics and hygene products tended to be more on the pricey side, disallowing the greater population from using it.
'It's so damn easy and cheap to make, you stand to earn loads more if you can make it affordable.'
Within a quarter of an hour, I dismantled the carcass, splitting it into generally meat and fat piles.
I lit the fire within the workshop's forge before stiffling it with a huge, durable pot where I placed all the fattier parts of the pig.
'A sieve…'
I looked around the workshop.
And to my genuine surprise, I actually found it, just lying around with the other tools.
'This world…'
It was only now, with quite some time passing, that I've started to realize the absurdity of everything that I was doing.
Sure, I now had a pot-full of liquid fat with chunks of meat floating in it.
I ran the sieve through the pot a few times, fishing out most of the impurities while leaving the more annoying-to-catch ones to their fate.
Once the oil in the pot neared boil, I've covered it with a simple, metal grade.
A perfect place for a grill.
My eyes darted across the workshop, half confused by what I was doing, half-immersed in the task.
Once again, the workshop managed to catch me off guard with a supply of charcoal sitting at the ready in the corner.
I lingered on the black pile for a second.
'So that's a niche that's generally solved…'
Now that I started to somewhat calm down, all of my memories finally started coming together.
My days at the company where I worked much too hard to ever get promoted. And the reality of this place, with all its bits of lore, intricacies and politics.
"Haaah…" I leaned down on some big equipment I couldn't really recognize. Then I removed the pot of oil from the forge before setting it aside on the floor.
In then grabbed a small barrel before making a hole in the center of its bottom. Then, after stuffing it with some cloth, I poured the charcoal ashes from the forge inside, filling it nearly up to a half. Then, I scooped some water from a nearby barrel to slowly fill the bucket up to three-fourths of its volume.
Below, in a smaller cup, I collected the liquid dripping from the cloth stuffed through the barrel's hole.
Still…
I had no doubt, creating soap couldn't be that easy.
What rations should I follow? How many herbs per piece of soot per piece of the molten lard?
Thankfully, my system got my back. And with the amount of money I've got to set-up my company, I could safely just spend ten days on experiments. On the other hand, if my attempts succeeded early on, I would have more than enough to play the rest of my hand in a fancier way.
Just by saving enough to buy a cart, I could greatly improve the sales, directly relating to the amount of money I would make back. But even more importantly, it would directly relate to the clout this soap of mine would generate, once sold cheaply amidst the masses!
After waiting for the lye to collect in the cup, I stirred the animal oil again, watching as it slowly rendered as it shed its heat. Then, before the process could complete, I put the pot back into the forge before pouring all the lye collected in the cup.
Then, I just stirred the pot away.
For hours, all I did was stand over the forge, control the heat and stir the pot, adding the freshly gathered lye whenever enough gathered in the cup.
Only as the liquid started to thicken up and turn into a granular paste, I started adding the herbs and the crowns of the flowers I've collected.
And so, the process continued, with the oil slowly cooling down as it continued to thicken into a proper solid.
Before it could happen, I've split the half-thickened soap into two brick molds, before enriching one of them with a fist-full of finely ground charcoal dust I've gathered by rubbing pieces of it against each other over a small box.
Then, I finally wiped the sweat off my forehead before dropping my hands down to my hips, staring with a heavy breath at the two brick-forms worth of slowly solidifying soap.
At last, I could just clean the workstation from an entire day's worth of hard work, all the while observing how my soap finally came to be.
'Haaah…' I breathed out a loud sigh of exhaustion mixed with a sense of a job-well-done.
Now, all that was left, was to cut it down into a desired shape… and wait around a month for the soap to cure, losing its caustic feature and turning safe to use.
Yet, just as the reality of such wait hit me, my system's text panels emerged right before my eyes.
[Achievement: Create your first product!]
[Balanced Reward: Improved Curing - Allows instant-curing of the soap once a week, doubles the passive curing rate for the hygiene products.]
My eyelids shot right up my forehead before my eyes darted over to the finished soap.
'I could have it on the ready right away…'
I gulped my saliva down.
Then, I closed my eyes and held my breath.
'No, don't be stupid. If I can instantly complete it, it would be a waste to limit myself to just one load!'
Seeing how the soap was slowly starting to take the form I could somewhat recognize, I've realized two things.
Even though I've been using a workshop, I merely helped myself to things as they became needed or even necessary. But I didn't have those things at the ready.
Now that I completed the soap-making process once, though, I knew what to improve on.
And by all means, system's silver and gold coins of its seed investment did in fact weigh on my hip.
All that was left, was to make another mutually beneficent exchange with the ranch overseer.