Chapter 213: Bee-vine Troubleshooting
Belissar paced around the room, humming and groaning to himself. He had checked, double checked, and then triple checked the burning honey mead jar, but he couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary compared to the others. By all accounts it should have worked.
What really drove him mad was that it hadn’t failed in any of the normal ways. The mead hadn’t gone bad or gotten contaminated or over-fermented or anything like that. It had failed to ferment at all. That was extremely rare, limited to only a few cases. Once where he filled a jar with barely any honey and a ton of water and a second time where he tried to ferment it during winter. But he had made sure he had a good ratio of honey to water and the temperature of the Tower never…
Belissar’s eyes widened. The temperature. If the temperature going too low could stop mead from fermenting, maybe the temperature going too high could do so as well. The burning honey itself generated enough heat to kill a person if they ate too much of it. The bees themselves, magical monster bees even, couldn’t make too much of it without threatening their own hives. It took burning bees evolved off the honey and the fireproof wax they made to make and store in any noticeable quantity.
Belissar groaned and held his head. If that was the problem…then what was he supposed to do? The point was to make mead from the burning honey, so he couldn’t not use it, and he wasn’t sure if diluting it with other honey types would count. The jar itself didn’t seem to be an issue as it had survived the heat without a problem. The only other ingredient in this mix was the water…was there a problem with the water?
He then tilted his head. Maybe…there was? Burning honey required wax made by burning bees to store…so maybe burning honey needed some sort of…fire water to ferment into mead? Maybe the lava? That was basically fire water…
Belissar shrugged and grabbed an empty jar. It was worth a shot. He headed over to the nearest Lava Field, walking over to one of the lava rivers. He bent down and carefully scooped some of the lava into the jar. The jar seemed to hold it. Belissar smiled.
Until the jar began to melt.
Belissar frowned and furrowed his brow. Ok, apparently the lava could melt pottery. In that case, how could he actually hold and store the lava? Not to mention that if the lava was hot enough to melt pottery…how could it ever be safe for anyone to ever drink?
…besides him, who was somehow protected from the heat by Tower magic, he guessed.