"And what are you doing now?" Bree asked curiously while Eisen was still searching through the burnt down hive for something, burrowing through the ashes and shards of what was just here a few hours ago.
"Right now, I'm looking for honey. I saw that they are stored in something like containers before, but my priority was the honey crystal, so I wanted to look for that first." The old man explained before smiling brightly when he finally found what seemed to be the honey. It was still stored in the hexagonal openings of the hive, but rather than just being liquid honey inside, they were encased in a thin, glass-like layer and could simply be pulled out of the openings as long of no part of the honey-capsule was broken. That glass-like layer seemed to by some kind of crystal structure, somewhat similar to the honey-crystal but at the same time still different. It was weird to explain, but at the very least it seemed to be pretty durable.
Eisen kept looking and handed these capsules to his doubles which then stacked them up next to the honey crystal, while Bree was waiting outside of the mountain of ashes together with Caria and Aulu. The reason for that was that the parts of the hive were still considerably hot and could burn you quite badly if you weren't careful, and due to the newest effect of his dwarven racial skill, his hands could now deal with that heat as if it was nonexistent. Of course there was still quite some heat all around him, not only his hands, but it was nothing that Eisen couldn't handle as long as he didn't touch any of those parts with anything but his hands.
In the end, Eisen ended up with about two dozen capsules filled with about two liters of honey each. This was definitely a huge amount, and if you could properly control bees the size of the ones that made this hive, you would probably have unlimited honey. And it seemed to be quite high quality as well, considering it's golden color and perfect consistency.
But this honey wasn't the only thing that Eisen found, there were also five capsules filled with Royal Jelly! This was a substance used to feed Queen Bee candidates to have them properly mature into their role. Considering that he found a Queen Bee egg, maybe that meant he could tame it in the same way as he did with Caria, and then feed it the Royal Jelly to make sure it really became a queen bee! At the very least, that would be a good start toward producing his own honey.
But before then, the egg would actually need to hatch, and that might take a while on its own. The royal jelly was basically vacuum sealed like this, so it was hard to imagine that it could really spoil easily.
Before returning to the cariage with the capsules, Eisen grabbed quite a large amount of empty capsules from the hive as well. These were actually still completely sealed, although Eisen expected them to be broken and simply have spilled their contents when he first saw them, but this wasn't the case in the slightest. Although Eisen had no idea why there were such empty capsules there, Eisen didn't mind too much either, since he could use these for something later.
Eisen, Bree, and the two Doubles now brought all of those honey and royal jelly capsules back to the carriage, that was only about a ten minute walk away, and then Bree stayed with the carriage to properly sort everything in and make space for the large honey crystal which Eisen went to retrieve together with his doubles.
This Crystal was then neatly placed down in the corner of the carriage, before the group decided to depart again, with only Bree sitting in the front this time around, since Eisen had some other plans.
First, he wanted to make something to hold the perfectly round queen bee egg, just to make sure that it couldn't roll around somewhere. For that, Eisen simply grabbed a small piece of wood and began carving a shallow bowl with just the right curvature for the egg and a completely flat bottom to create something like a small wooden pedestal. Afterward, he quickly sanded its surfaces and finished it with the same solution that he used on all the wood this carriage was made with.
While that was drying, Eisen simply placed the egg on a small piece of rolled up cloth and got to the next part that he was working toward for a while now.
He grabbed a large metal pot that Eisen bought for this purpose! In addition to that, he also grabbed a few other smaller items, simple bubbler airlocks that would be filled with water to let the gases emitted through the fermentation escape.
Now, all that he needed to do was add the ingredients! First, Eisen added about a three and a half liters of the water coming from the distillation process of making health piotions and set the pot above a flame-enchanted mana crystal, carefully watching everything to make sure the wood wouldn't suddenly start burning. But at the same time, Eisen also prepared a few small cloth bags, some filled with Amran while others were filled with Byron petals.
Once the water came to a boiling point, Eisen turned off the mana crystal and let the water slightly cool down again, before carefully removing one of the flat hexagonal sides of two of the honey capsules, pouring three and a half more liters of honey into the water, then began stirring the two liquids together before adding all of the bags filled with Amran into it.
While it was still hot, Eisen poured in another seven liters of water from the large barrel filled with the leftover potion-water and waited for the right temperature to add the yeast.
Luckily, that temperature was simply room temperature, so it was quite easy to get this part right. Once Eisen stirred the mixture some more, he placed a slight bit of yeast that he needed for the whole amount of mead to ferment properly into the pot, and then continued to stir it in.
Eisen let it sit like that for a little while with the lid on top closed, while he cleaned up the containers that he would use to store the soon-to-be mead in. The empty capsules that Eisen picked up at the hive! Not only were they aesthetically pleasing, but due to their neat and basically perfect geometric shape, they were quite easy to store as well. So, with simple transmutation, Eisen opened up a hole in the top of the crystal-like structures and one after another filled them with the mead mixture, making sure that each of them had the same amount of amran-petal filled bags inside.
Then, Eisen filled the bubbler airlocks with a little bit of water and closed the top of the capsules so that each airlock was firmly attached and couldn't budge. Once Eisen had filled about seven of these empty capsules, Eisen moved on to repeat this exact same process once more, just using the water coming from the mana potion distillation as well as the byron petals instead.
And just to use it as a base to compare both types of mead with, Eisen made another two capsules worth of regular mead, using water from the self filling water cups, not adding any herbs or fruits to it at all to get the purest possible taste and version of mead out of it.
"Alright, done!" Eisen exclaimed excitedly, happy that he managed to make this much mead at once, and that he found the perfect natural containers for it at the same time!
But the next step was cleaning up. Eisen made sure to properly remove the rest of the honey still stuck in the just-opened containers, even scrubbing them out as much as possible.
After doing the same for the large pot, he poured the water he used to clean everything down onto the street through the back door, and then sat down on the bench, at night the bed, next to his worktable. He had previously opened up some space for Caria to continue practicing her newest skill, and to Eisen's surprise, she actually managed to rank the plant control skill up! And all of these actions seemed to have given her enough actual experience to be able to rank up herself, and with that evolve, soon again, as she was currently at Rank 1, level 99. Why she managed to level up so immensely quickly was completely unknown to Eisen, but it was probably because she has been doing nothing but practice her plant control for multiple days.
"Oh, wow! You're so amazing, aren't you, Caria?" Eisen smiled while looking at the result of her practice, the small yellow flower that was just short of completely blooming. With a smile, Eisen watched while the small myconid continued pouring her mana into the flower, finally making its petals unfold and revealing the beautiful shape of nature.
In tandem with this, Caria's body began to glow faintly in a white light as her figure grew and slightly changed. She was now about 40cm tall, and had a much, much more humanoid body.
Before, she was simply a tube with a cap and more tubes attached to act as limbs, but now she actually had slight curves anybody had, as well as somewhat well-defined limbs. Caria had something resembling actual joints now, like elbows and knees, as well as proper hands and feet, although her feet were simply in the rough shape while her fingers were still just mostly tubes, and didn't really look like fingers too much.
Her whole body was quite thin, especially her arms and legs, giving her a quite frail look.
And on top of that, her cap also changed. Instead of simply looking like a dome that was placed on her body, its shape began resembling that of a which or wizard's hat, although just roughly.
Overall, her skin remained the same white it has always been, while her cap was still a bright red with white circles everywhere.
[Congratulations! Caria Evolved into a Myconid Druid Disciple!]
"A Druid Disciple, I see. So that means this really is the path for her to become a druid, then!" Eisen exclaimed excitedly, placing his hand on Caria's cap to praise her. "Good job, sweetheart. Come on, let's stop practicing for a bit, and come to the front with me, okay?" Eisen asked, and it seemed as if Caria was panicking for a second. She looked around, and when she saw the wooden flower pot standing a bit lower than she was used to, calmed down.
This made a lot of sense, to be fair. She suddenly grew quite a lot, so it must be hard to get used to such a new perspective all of a sudden. But when she saw that the flower pot was still there, Caria picked it up with her new fingers and held it in front of Eisen, her dot-like eyes glittering in excitement.
"Haha, yeah, I saw what you did! You're really amazing!" Eisen chuckled and kept praising her since he thought that's what she wanted to hear, but instead of being happy about it, she shook her head and pushed the flower pot directly onto Eisen's chest, making the old man realize what she meant. "Oh, this is for me?" He asked happily, and Caria nodded her head a slight bit.
"I see, thank you for such a beautiful gift, Caria. I'll cherish it." With a smile, Eisen took the flower into his hands and placed it on a spot on the shelf where it could be seen from everywhere. Maybe he would even encase it in something like resin if he found something like that here. Happily, Caria then jumped into Eisen's arms before he stepped through the opening in the front, joining Bree on the bench while the Myconid was sitting on his lap, excitedly looking through the forest around them.