A few days passed without fuss and Rino checked on the new stone hut by the river. Deezer and Bink managed to get the waterwheel prototype functioning, so they started working on the actual waterwheel just in time for Rino's new daily quest.

Checking his quests, Rino looked at the side quest and wondered if he wanted to claim the reward now. Maybe not quite yet. He wasn't in the mood to look at more side quests, in all honesty. Eventually, Rino decided to claim it.

===

Side Quest #20 (complete)

Objective: Breed Animals

1/1 Rabbits

1/1 Birds

1/1 Boars

Reward: Animal Taming Skill

Claim your reward here.

===

The animal taming skill wasn't anything impressive. Quasimodo could tame them even without this skill, and Rino wondered why the gods thought he would want such a thing. Sheer domination was a way to deal with many things, and if all failed, Rino could always kill them and make them his shadow army. Taming was such an unnecessary skill by his standards.

His new daily quest lacked creativity, but Rino found the new deadline somewhat manageable compared to the windmill project now that he already established the Nightless Underpass.

===

Daily Quest #22

Objective: Build a Water Wheel

Time Limit: 14 Days

Tutorial here.

Reward: Pickaxe Crafting Recipe

Penalty: Deduct 24 hours of sleep upon failure and [Curse of Overtime] until quest is forcefully completed.

===

More importantly, Rino liked how the next reward was going to be very useful. The earth gnomes and pygmy dwarves were taking a while to study the goodies Rino took back from the dwarven caves. It didn't matter what they did. None of them could figure out how to properly smelt ores and shape them. The detailed instructions on the thin stone plates remained a mystery and offered no help because nobody could read dwarven tongue. Kragami took it upon himself to make sense of the language, and Rino wished his teacher luck.

While Bink led the water wheel building project, Deezer was working with the trolls to dig out a river and construct the dam Rino wanted by the river. At the same time, the shadow spectres helped out with building Rino's stone cottage by the riverside.

Referring to the windmill's model, the earth gnomes quickly figured out how to connect and disconnect the waterwheel to the main axle inside the stone cottage that Rino wanted. They still had no idea how to make the grindstones work, but at the very least, they knew how to connect it.

In the meantime, Rino was down at the luxurious ranch. To be more precise, he was at the milking house with Zes. With so many barrels of milk, Rino decided to turn them into delectable dairy goodies. After he got his butter and cheese, he might make a speedy trip to Cypress County and have a chat with Rina. That conversation was long overdue, but the lazy lich couldn't find enough motivation or reason to travel over.

Even with the underpass built, Rino would still take over an hour to get there. He was simply too lazy to go there for a talk that might last twenty minutes at most. There had to be better incentives than that.

"Observe," he told Zes as he set the butter churn up. 

The earth gnomes decided to modify that spinning top churn design into something similar that would use inertia and gravity to constantly turn the barrel. The waterwheel wasn't ready yet. So, they had to do this the manual way. Fortunately, Zes was a supernatural existence, and Rino did not need to worry about him breaking his spine doing this.

Butter preparation took a while, and Rino instructed the fairies to help over the last few days while he shut himself in the study. The prior preparation to store the milk barrel intended to make butter in the chilled underground storage overnight helped them shorten the butter-making process. Then, the cream at the top of the barrel was scooped out and placed in special churn vats.

The process to let the cream mixture rest at regular temperature took about half a day, and when that was done, the cream had to be transferred out again. This time, it went back to the underground chilled storage for an hour before they were taken out for actual butter churning.

Rino loaded the special vats onto the machine and started the demonstration. He had no idea how to explain the concept of centrifugal force to Zes, but he convinced the spectre that by the time they were done, there would be something called butter that was solid and a whole bunch of liquid called buttermilk. Both things were useful in different ways.

Following Rino's lead at spinning that three-sitter milk vat merry-go-round, Zes worked without a break for about fifteen minutes, stopping every five minutes or so for RIno to check the inside of the vats to see if they were done.

Honestly, the preparation process for making butter took longer than the actual butter churning. Rino prepared the salt in the meanwhile as Zes worked. Salted butter went well with most things, but unsalted butter was required when making sweets. Rino decided to make both kinds of butter with this batch. He would give them to Kragami for experimenting while the last vat of butter remained in Town Zera. He wanted to make thinly fried taro chips because it went very well with the taro beer Kragami sent him the last time.

Once Rino confirmed that the butter and buttermilk were completely separated inside the special vats, he ordered a fairy to bring over the special bucket covered by large pieces of cotton cloth.

Following Rino's example, as the lich slowly poured the contents of the special vat over the cotton cloths, Zes repeated it for the next two vats. The solid butter remained on the cloth while the slightly transparent white liquid Rino called buttermilk fell through the cloth, dripping into the clean bucket below.

Once the buttermilk stopped dripping, Rino bundled the cotton cloth together and ordered a basin of chilled fresh water to be brought over. Zes observed how Rino rinsed the butter solids in the bundled cloth over and over in chilled water until the water was no longer cloudy after the wash.

"Remember, it has to be chilled water like bathing in a river during winter. Butter melts easily, so never use warm water. Keep it chilled at all times."

The amount of 'butter' Zes saw from all that cream in that barrel of milk was extremely little! So much work for such a little portion, he wondered why the lich went through the trouble of doing it. Then again, his lord was brilliant, and there were many things that Rino did the normal folks wouldn't understand.

Rino dumped the butter clumps onto a smaller clay mixing bowl and showed Zes how to mix them. A few curious genesis fairies stuck around watching Rino spread the butter clumps and combined them repeatedly with a wooden spoon. He continued to pour away excess water squeezed from the butter clumps until there was none left, and the butter appeared to be a very smooth mixture.

"Get me the butter boxes," Rino told a fairy as he split the butter mixture into two portions.

Dumping the first half of the butter mixture into the specially designed butter boxes, Rino told the fairies to put one away in the chilled underground storage while he kept the other in his shadow sack.

For the remaining half of the butter in the bowl, Rino added some salt to it. He mixed the butter well until no salt crystals were left. Then, it was split into two portions and dumped into the butter boxes. One of the butter boxes was to remain in the underground storage while the other was to be delivered to Kragami.

Butter boxes were actually magically enchanted portable refrigerators. Like the dimensional storage accessories that the courier rabbits wore, the butter boxes could constantly keep the butter chilled. The runes that Rino used remained activated as long as the butter boxes remained in the vicinity of the mana web array. It wasn't very difficult to design, but the butter boxes couldn't work once they left Rino's territory.

Although Rino doubted anyone would try to steal his butter boxes, he was too lazy to maintain the runes himself. There should not be any issues as long as the butter boxes remained in Town Zera and Noir Province.

Ping!

Oh, Rino knew this sound. Packing the butter boxes and giving Zes instructions to make more butter with the milk, the lich excused himself. He might have to make cheese later, but he should check what the gods are up to first.

===

Side Quest #21

Objective: Craft statute of God

0/1 Statue

Reward: Offering Station

===

Freezing, Rino read the description of what an offering station did. Then, a huge grin erupted on his face. Now, he had more reason to return to Noir Province. This was going to be huge, and he just knew it!

The Gods will probably regret making the offering process so convenient for him.