"Hmm, this works well enough, huh..?" Eisen muttered to himself as he looked at the liquid with a thick, honey-like consistency, and then slowly just tried to give it a taste. Usually, the Low-Grade Health Potion didn't taste all that bad, even if it was somewhat medicine-like, so Eisen wanted to make sure that the taste of this was actually passable when even more concentrated than usual. If it tasted horrid, then nobody would want to buy it either way.
And when Eisen scooped some up with his finger and placed it on his tongue, he immediately noticed that the taste was actually quite strong, and pretty unpleasant, especially if you had to use a few of them at once.
"This is no good at all..." The old man muttered to himself, and then tried to remember what Rouge did during the Alchemy lesson. He had added some ground-up dried berries to the mixture at the start to give it some better taste, but if he did it like that, then those things would just end up being lost in the process because they were sifted out, or would simply not be pushed to the bottom of the bowl in the last step.
Then that meant that it needed to be flavored properly afterward, so Eisen had to try and spend some time in the Ship's kitchen to figure some things out for that when he actually properly made everything that he needed for the setup.
Either way, for now, the old man had to take these different pieces and supersize them, and try to make as many of them as he could. For now, he wanted to make five different setups. Four for low-grade mana and health potions, as well as the same setup just for their average-grade versions. So first things first, Eisen quickly got to work and made the actual metal pieces that he needed to, and then applied a thin layer of mythril to the parts that needed it using some slightly heatened-up Mythril, liquification, and regular transmutation at once so that he could evenly apply it as if it was some sort of paint.
Of course, after that he quickly roughed the mythril surfaces for the grinder up properly as well, and then moved on to make the setup like it was needed.
Due to the size of everything, Eisen wouldn't be able to stack everything on top of each other to let the contents of each bowl just drop into the next through a thin pipe, so he instead needed to come up with a different solution. He would still make a hatch at the bottom of each bowl, but that would just make the contents drop into another small container where they would be scooped out along a pipe with the help of a spiral with a diameter as wide as the interior of the pipe itself, to make sure everything could be moved through like intended. That way, it would be possible to actually place the bowls directly next to each other, because the pipes would be able to lift the different liquids or powders up to the place where the next bowl needed to be filled up as well.
And the rest of the work was just supersizing everything else that he made, so while it did take him a fair few hours to do so, it wasn't something major.
But while he was in the middle of his work, two more people entered the Dungeon. Kairyuu and Jyuuk.
"Ah, hello again!" Eisen exclaimed as he looked over toward the two new people, although Kai seemed pretty surprised to see five nearly identical Demons standing there, working on some large metal constructions.
"Yeah, hello again... What are you doing here?" The Sea Dragon asked, surprised and curious, and Eisen slightly chuckled and quickly motioned over to the smaller setup that he already made.
"Look over there, it's supposed to be a Potion Mass-Production system I'm working on." The old man explained, before Jyuuk took a look at the thick potion still left inside of the last bowl, quickly inspecting it.
"Erm... If you make something like that, won't that kind of mess up everybody else that wants to open a business as a potionmaker?" Jyuuk asked, but the old man shook his head and winked at him with a laugh.
"Not really to be honest." The old man replied, and he had a quite simple reason for that. "The Potions that Starlight will sell will work on a very simple principle. Quantity. If you need a potion quickly, there will always be one available. But because they're mass-produced like this and made through a machine, their quality should be stuck at 'High'. And the only potions with such a high quantity will be Low and Average Grade Mana and Health Potions, so the most basic there are. It shouldn't be that tough to set yourself apart as a smaller business if what you make is of high quality." Eisen explained quite swiftly, and Jyuuk just slowly nodded his head in response.
"Huh, so you did think it through, huh..?" The Beastperson muttered to himself, before Eisen looked at him and the Sea-Dragon-turned-human next to him. "Now then, did Jyuuk speak to you about our idea yet?" With a smile on his face, Eisen crossed his arms and looked down toward Kai, who just simply smiled.
"Mhm! I do have one sea creature under control that should be some help. It has a 'Fear Aura', so it's going to keep other monsters away from you as well, and while it's not necessarily that much faster than your ship, it's going to be a steady speed because you won't need your sails, and that also means you won't have to rely on airflow and different currents as much." She explained and interlocked her fingers behind her back wth a broad smirk, making Eisen pretty curious about what kind of creature it was.
"Is that so? Is it outside already?" Eisen asked curiously and slowly deactivated his transformation and rubbed some of the sweat from his face with a cloth, before Kai nodded her head. "Mhm, we connected it to the ship already as well~!"
And so, the three of them swiftly made their way out of the Dungeon so that Eisen could take a quick break and see what kind of monster it actually was that would be pulling the ship from now on, and to his, quite large, surprise, he was soon met with the face of a turtle staring at him, as if grinning broadly.
But confusingly enough, it seemed like the front of the ship was directly where part of its shell usually was, and when Eisen looked over toward Kai to wait for her to explain, he was just met with a smug smile.
"It's an Ocean Turtle!" She exclaimed, and Eisen slowly nodded his head. "I can see that, yeah... But is it alright like this? What about its shell?" The old man asked, before Kai quickly nodded her head to calm Eisen's worries down.
"Oh yeah, it's fine! It can control its shell as easily as mana. And it's so thick that we don't need to worry about hurting it either, it's completely fine like this. I wouldn't force it to do anything it doesn't want to anyway." The Sea-Dragon said reassuredly, before Eisen slowly moved his fingers through his beard with a nod.
"Is that so? Well, I have to say, at least the connection should be strong like this, huh?" He asked and stepped over to the edge of the ship, seeing that parts of the turtle's shell were literally pressed against the wooden hull of the ship, not letting it loose at all.
"For sure, as long as it doesn't end up cracking any of the wood, we should be fine."
"Yeah, let's hope it doesn't..." The old man replied to Jyuuk next to him, and then nodded his head. "Well, if that's it, then I'm sure we should be able to make it to the central island again very easily as well."
"And on top of that, there's a path that we'll be able to take that we couldn't take before because the waves were too strong, but now we should be able to do it. Kai said she knows which path I'm talking about, and that it shouldn't be an issue for the Ocean Turtle to move through there. It seems like it can use magic to control the water a little as wel." Jyuuk pointed out, leaving Eisen to just smile in satisfaction.
"Well then, if that's the case..." Eisen muttered quietly and then quickly stretched his body out for a moment, noticing that the sun seemed to be slowly going down. "Will you be staying for dinner, Kai?" The old man asked, and the Sea-Dragon slowly looked over toward Jyuuk who nodded his head without hesitation.
"Then I would love to!" She replied, before Eisen chuckled in response, before noticing something else that might be a bit of an issue. "Well... Is it an issue for you to eat the meat of Dragon-Type monsters?" The old man asked, but Kai immediately shook her head.
"Not at all! I actually like Dragon meat a lot~!" The Sea-Dragon explained, and Eisen just slowly nodded his head in response. "I see. Then I'll let you know when I'm done."
With a smile on his face, the old man figured it would be a good a time as ever to start working on some food, although it might actually be pretty late for dinner when he finished now that he thought about it.
Either way, for now, Eisen just quickly made his way over to the Kitchen where all the meat from the Dragon-type monsters that were hunted for him were laying around in the kitchen.
"Luckily we left the Sea-Monster meat at the central island, huh..?" Eisen muttered to himself with a smile. The sea monster that they encountered and took apar near the darkness-mana source gave them quite a lot of meat, after all.
Either way, there was only a little of that left now, because they didn't need as much of it for their trip and figured it would be of more use in the town for the townfolk of Prototype that actually needed to eat.
But for now, the old man quickly took a look at the different meats that he had. To his surprise, despite them all being technically amphibious in nature, some of them ended up having red meat instead of white meat like Eisen expected them to have. Eisen didn't really understand why that was, but as long as they weren't poisonous, the old man didn't really mind.
Meat was meat, and meat was delicious. Either way, first, Eisen quickly started by picking a nice piece of meat, and ended up finding a piece that seemed to be perfect to slice into some steaks. The raw meat itself seemed to have a pretty high quality in itself already, so Eisen was pretty excited about eating it later on.
So, after slicing it up into pieces that seemed to have an appropriate thickness, Eisen quickly started to season it by using a dry-rub made up of salt, pepper, cumin, thyme and a few other smaller amounts of spices that Eisen personally enjoyed quite a lot, and then set the meat to the side while letting the pans heat up properly while he started to work on some other small side-dishes.
For one, Eisen just figured he could make some simple pan-fried potato slices, which didn't really need that much seasoning beyond salt as long as they were properly prepared. While slicing them up properly, Eisen got some of his doubles to do other routine work like slice things up for some salads or simply mix other parts together, and soon enough, after preparing everything so that the meat had nice, thick crust, the old man brought the plates out of the kitchen toward the Dining hall.