The Sour Smell of Reality
Mikhail found the whole thing annoying. After a brief but tiresome argument with Boris, who insisted on observing every scrap of imperial protocol, the two of them rode out alone. The saddle had no backrest and dug into his spine. The pastoral, dirt-poor scenery quickly grew dull. Come to think of it, even the capital was a backwater with neither electricity nor the internet—just another remote village in the middle of nowhere. Just as his complaints were rising in his throat, the air changed.
The clean scent of grass and soil began to curdle, mixing with something sour, musty, and outright foul. By the time they reached the distillery, Boris dismounted first. He straightened his uniform, cleared his throat, and bellowed toward the door.
“His Highness the Grand Duke has arrived! Is anyone inside?”
A short silence followed. Then came a loud crash, the sound of something toppling over, and finally the rattle of the door being yanked open. A gaunt worker in stained clothes stumbled out, face pale with shock.
“Y-yes? W-who did you say…?”
He took in Boris’s formal attendant uniform, then spotted Mikhail still mounted, gazing down with lazy indifference. The man sucked in a sharp breath. He might not recognize the face, but the expensive clothes, the fine horse, and the attendant made it obvious. This was the lord of the territory himself—the infamous, good-for-nothing Grand Duke.
“P-please, come in! Just a moment while I fetch the owner…!”
The worker didn’t even finish speaking before he spun around and bolted back inside. Mikhail swung down from his horse and stepped through the doorway. Inside, a handful of workers had been scurrying about; at the shout that the Grand Duke had come, the entire distillery fell deathly quiet, as if someone had thrown cold water over it. Every man froze, bowed his head, and stared at him with terrified eyes.
A wave of scorching heat rolled over him, carrying the sharp, sickly-sweet stench of boiling grain. Soon a middle-aged man—clearly the owner—appeared. His clothes were marginally cleaner than the workers’, but the exhaustion and fear etched into his face were impossible to hide. He practically crawled forward and dropped to his knees before Mikhail.
“Y-Your Highness! What could possibly bring you to this filthy place? For someone as exalted as yourself to set foot in such a wretched—”
“Show me around. We need to talk.”
“Ah, y-yes, of course! This way…!”
The man led Mikhail to a cramped corner of the warehouse that had been hastily cleared out and optimistically labeled a reception room. A creaky chair and a stained table were the only furniture. Mikhail jerked his chin at Boris.
“Wait outside and keep an eye on the horses.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
Once Boris withdrew, only Mikhail and the owner remained. The man stood there fidgeting, unable to keep still. Mikhail sat, crossed his legs, and cut straight to the point.
“What’s your name?”
“A-Anton, Your Highness.”
“Anton.” Mikhail tapped his fingers on the table. “You’re wondering why I bothered coming all the way to this dump? Simple. The alcohol tastes like garbage, so I came to see why.”
Anton’s face drained of all color. So it really was the inferior liquor. The terror of possibly losing his head washed over him.
“F-forgive this worthless one, Your Highness! How could liquor made by country bumpkins like us ever suit Your Highness’s refined palate? Please, execute me at once!”
“I didn’t come here to kill anyone. I came because I was curious.” Mikhail’s voice stayed flat. “Exactly how do you make something that tastes this bad?”
Pressed by the question, Anton hesitated. He stared at the floor, lips moving silently. At last, in the voice of a man who had given up on everything, he spoke.
“…I will be honest, Your Highness. The truth is, I know nothing about making alcohol.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, Your Highness. If I did, I never would have come to the Far East Maritime Province in the first place. I wouldn’t have gone into debt, either.”
Anton gave a bitter smile.
“The subsidy from the imperial government was spent almost entirely paying off my debts. All that remained was my body and this land. I had no choice but to farm. I’d never raised cattle or sheep before.”
He paused and let out a long sigh.
“But Your Highness may not realize how difficult it is to store the grain and potatoes we harvest here. Even if we build a warehouse, there’s never enough space. Look away for a moment and everything rots, or the rats and insects devour it.”
He shuddered.
“The rats here are practically monsters. Packs of them as thick as a man’s forearm roam everywhere. We released cats to hunt them, but the cats get killed instead.”
Anton laughed hollowly.
“I can make beer or kvass from what I learned back home, but as you know, those spoil almost immediately.”
Of course they do. No pasteurization, no proper sealing. Boil it and the taste goes straight to hell. Mikhail thought.
“So… before the leftover grain could rot completely, I had to do something with it. I started making distilled spirits based on what little I remembered from books.”
“…”
“The liquor Your Highness tasted earlier is the result of countless horrific failures—the best we could manage that was even ‘somewhat drinkable.’”
He pointed at his own eyes.
“Once I made a bad batch and drank it. Everything went pitch black. A traveling priest healed me and I barely regained my sight, but those few days were pure hell.”
Anton’s tone was calm, yet the pain and desperation behind it came through clearly.
“Even when we turn it into alcohol, it doesn’t sell. The farmers nearby are in the same situation. Everyone makes liquor from the grain rotting in their own homes. Mine is only slightly better, so a few neighbors buy it from time to time.”
Only after hearing the owner’s story did Mikhail finally understand.
I was expecting too much from them.
To these people, alcohol wasn’t a luxury to be savored for flavor and aroma. It was a survival tool—something to do with grain that would otherwise rot, a way to forget the brutal cold of this land and briefly numb the misery of their daily lives. Nothing more, nothing less.
It was worse than he had imagined. This might be the world of a romance fantasy novel, but that only applied to the capital and the nobility. Out here in the borderlands, reality was this miserable.
Mikhail really was a hothouse flower.
The memories he had inherited offered no help in understanding this kind of life. Mikhail stood up.
“This has gotten annoying.”
He muttered it like a passing thought, then looked at Anton.
“Show me the distillery. I want to see it for myself.”
“Y-yes, Your Highness! This way…!”
He needed to see with his own eyes exactly what needed fixing. Following Anton inside, Mikhail found pure chaos.
The moment the door opened, a wall of heat slammed into him. It wasn’t just the firewood blazing beneath the massive copper still. The fermentation vats filled the air with a sour-sweet stench—whether the grain was rotting or fermenting, it was impossible to tell. Every breath drove those foul molecules deep into his lungs.
Mikhail frowned without realizing it. The floor was nothing but packed mud. Spiderwebs and unidentifiable stains covered every surface. Potatoes and grain on the verge of spoiling lay scattered everywhere.
Wow…
A sigh escaped him. They made alcohol out of this? In 21st-century Korea this place would have been slapped with massive fines and an immediate business suspension.
“This is the still we use, Your Highness.”
What Anton pointed to was a crude copper pot—a single-stage still, the most primitive distillation device imaginable. The cooling system was nothing more than a copper tube dipped in a stream. It was obvious that every impurity would come tumbling out alongside the alcohol.
They only distill it once, of course.
Fuel cost money. They had no luxury to run it multiple times. The root of the problem was clear: half-rotten ingredients and a single distillation. Everything ultimately came down to one word—poverty.
For a moment he felt the urge to fix everything for them. Use clean ingredients. Distill at least three times. Discard the heads and tails without hesitation. Simply following the basics would produce something far better than this.
What if I just ordered them to “use clean ingredients and distill three times”?
He could see the outcome without even trying. Costs would rise. Even if quality improved, no one would buy it. The numbers wouldn’t add up, leading to bankruptcy—or they would secretly revert to the old method. If caught, he would have to punish them, set up surveillance, demand reports… Just thinking about it was exhausting.
He had learned the hard way in the Korean military how inefficient it was to issue orders without solving the fundamental problem.
In the end, it’s all about money.
To build proper warehouses that could actually store grain and potatoes without letting them rot, they needed money. That money came from the taxes paid by the territory’s residents. And the largest share of tax revenue in this remote backwater naturally came from the liquor tax.
Damn. It’s a perfect circle.
If he wanted to drink good alcohol, these people had to produce a lot of good alcohol and sell it outside. To sell it, they had to improve quality. To improve quality, they had to sell it. A flawless circular argument.
Wait. There is one way.
A single word flashed through his mind like lightning.
Jack Daniel’s. And the process that made that whiskey special.
Charcoal Mellowing.
A simple method that required neither extra distillations nor high-quality ingredients. The cost was dirt cheap.
Mikhail cleared his throat once and put on an expression that said a decent idea had occurred to him but it was so ordinary he barely cared. Then, in the most indifferent, lazy drawl he could manage, he asked Anton.
“Anton.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Is charcoal common and cheap around here?”
Anton’s eyes widened. Why charcoal all of a sudden? He tilted his head, then answered.
“Well… yes. Trees are everywhere, so charcoal is abundant. It’s produced in such quantity that it’s practically worthless…”
Jackpot! Mikhail cheered inwardly. As expected, the golden rule of isekai stories held true. Modern common sense became revolutionary technology in another world.
Now all he had to do was toss them one simple piece of knowledge, and these ignorant fantasy natives would kneel in awe and worship him like a god. Just imagining it made the corner of his mouth twitch upward.
“Crush that charcoal finely and run the distilled alcohol through it. Slowly, many times. At the very least it won’t taste like dirty water anymore. Hell, it’ll be purer than the holy water they use in church.”
Now was the time for admiration. Ohhh, Your Highness! Such profound wisdom! He waited for the praise.
But Anton’s reaction was the complete opposite of what Mikhail expected. Far from being impressed, the man looked like he was carefully choosing his words so as not to offend his superior. After a moment, Anton spoke as if steeling himself.
“…Your Highness.”
“What? Is there a problem?”
“Where would we sell alcohol made that way?”
“…What?”
The smile vanished from Mikhail’s face. It was an answer he had not anticipated.
He realized once again that he had been looking at the world far too simply. Reality was a gutter. Reality was nothing like the cheap isekai novels he had read. Filtering with charcoal still cost money. No matter how cheap, these people had no reason to spend it. The problem wasn’t quality. The problem wasn’t technology.
Demand. Sales channels. Customers.
The problem was the market.
What was the point of supply when there was no market? It would only create malicious inventory that strangled the producers.
Damn. Looks like I’ll have to do the marketing myself.
No internet, no nothing. Celebrity marketing, maybe? But who would advertise for them? Who in the Far East Maritime Province had that kind of reach?
Only after sweating a few drops in the distillery’s stifling heat did Mikhail—no, Kim Jae-han, the man who had possessed Mikhail’s body—finally realize the answer.
I’m the celebrity.
And not just any celebrity. One of the most famous in the entire empire. The empire’s infamous trash 7th Prince. The Grand Duke of the Far East Maritime Province.
Mikhail himself.