Extreme Cold Era: Shelter Don't Keep Waste-Chapter 545 - 512: Creating Sugar from Air

Encountering a rare beautiful day, Perfikot broke her usual routine by setting up a table in her garden at the Lord’s mansion, partaking in afternoon tea.

She usually doesn’t have this habit. After all, for the nobility in Victory, afternoon tea is equivalent to social engagement; hardly anyone drinks afternoon tea alone. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

Although the formation of this habit is strongly related to dietary customs after Victory entered the industrial era, Perfikot herself doesn’t possess such a habit.

Previously, Victory typically had two meals a day: a hearty breakfast and a formal dinner, ensuring enough energy for the day.

However, with the advent of the industrial era, the abundance of material goods and an increase in production and life led to a long period of fasting between breakfast and dinner, which became an issue that nobles and even commoners found increasingly unbearable.

Commoners, without much extra money, could tolerate it, while those needing to work opted for quick meals like fish and chips.

Grabbing a couple of bites simply to fill the stomach, still allowing for good work conditions in the afternoon.

But this is somewhat lacking in elegance for the nobility. Although their ancestors were brutish barbarians wielding knives, as society progressed, the nobility prided themselves on civility, and many things began to be more refined.

Initially, it might have been just asking servants to prepare some ordinary snacks, but as this habit developed, and the nobility became more refined, it evolved into the custom of afternoon tea.

To this day, at the noble tables of Perfikot’s stature, afternoon tea has developed into specially crafted excessively sweet cakes and pastries, paired with imported premium black tea.

In the original world, due to the development of sugar production techniques, particularly the advent of high-fructose corn syrup, sweetness and sugar seem to have become very common and pervasive facets of daily life.

Yet, before the appearance of high-fructose corn syrup, sugar was undeniably a luxury and an important strategic material, even being tied to survival necessities in cold regions.

It might sound bizarre and hard to comprehend—it’s just sugar, isn’t it? Is it really that exaggerated?

In fact, before the invention of high-fructose corn syrup, the status of sugar was indeed that important and exaggerated. It was even a key reason for original world Europeans to engage in colonial campaigns: establishing plantations in colonies to cultivate sugarcane for sugar production.

Even in the late Edo period in Japan, the famous powerful southern domain, Sakai Domain, was able to settle a substantial debt of one million taels of gold through illegal sugar trading, accumulating the funds necessary for completing the modernization reforms and eventually achieving the political goal of overthrowing the shogunate.

Therefore, the value of sugar is self-evident.

Especially in eras lacking industrial development, cultivating sugar crops meant competing with food crops for land, making sugar the epitome of a luxury item.

And the role of sugar makes this sweet substance essential for humans.

Firstly, sweetness can enhance human mood, potentially due to some subconscious or neural specialization accumulated during the ancient biological evolution process, but consuming sweet foods indeed improves moods.

Secondly, sugar is an exceptionally high-energy food, providing effective energy supplementation, which is why those with a sweet tooth easily gain weight; excess energy that can’t be expended is stored as fat.

From this point of view, sugar becoming an important strategic material or even a survival necessity in cold regions is understandable.

Indeed, consuming sweet food can quickly replenish body energy in cold areas, countering the energy depletion caused by the cold.

Moreover, with modern industrial development, sugar also became a vital raw material for manufacturing various explosives; buying sugar necessitated proof not as a fuss but because sugar truly could be used to make explosives, and the power of sugar-utilizing explosives was not trivial.

Thus, in the original world, until the World War II period, sugar was a pivotal strategic resource.

It wasn’t until high-fructose syrup was invented—a sweet substance efficiently extracted industrially from corn starch—that it quickly supplanted cane sugar’s role as a food additive in the original world, enabling sweets to become widespread, transforming the desire for sweet food from a luxury.

Of course, there still exists some difference between high-fructose syrup and cane sugar, and these differences are why high-fructose syrup hasn’t truly replaced cane sugar entirely, but we will leave this discussion aside momentarily.

For Perfikot in this world, sugar isn’t something difficult to acquire, even in the current setting of a forthcoming apocalypse, her consumption won’t be hindered.

Not to mention a true Alchemist—if obtaining sugar proves troubling, then there’s indeed a significant problem.

Though Perfikot wouldn’t claim to use the Philosopher’s Stone in Imaginary Alchemy to whimsically manifest sugar, designing an alchemy ritual to transform carbon dioxide from air into starch and then produce sugar from starch is rather simple.

This is achievable with scientific technology already in the original world, and Perfikot merely replaced the catalyst and conversion enzymes parts with alchemy.

After all, if you don’t consider alchemy, the current level of technological development in this world is roughly equivalent to early in the first industrial revolution, with biology and chemistry newly gaining momentum as they start establishing a complete scientific framework.

Exploring technological topics that were solved entering the 21st century in the original world is somewhat challenging for scientists in this world.

But with alchemy, it’s wholly different, particularly with Imaginary Alchemy—snap fingers, whatever you call comes forth.

However, sugar-making technology hasn’t been widespread yet; this is a matter Perfikot just recalled a few days ago while enjoying a dessert, so she spent a day or two completing the entire alchemy ritual process of collecting carbon dioxide from air to make sugar, intending to proliferate it.

Today’s afternoon tea also serves as a way to promote this, at least conveying to others that she possesses sugar-making technology, which helps attract investment, doesn’t it?

Regarding this technology, Perfikot doesn’t plan to be entirely open; while sweet treats are delightful, excessive consumption also leads to various severe issues; Perfikot doesn’t wish for her subjects to become people so corpulent they drip oil while walking on roads.

Therefore, gathering some people within a limited circle to participate in the sugar production project, ensuring a sufficient amount of sugar flows into the market, suffices for her.

Additionally, this can consolidate relations with the aristocracy, right? Perfikot, although not overly concerned with these aspects, won’t deny the convenience of going with the flow.