What Do Spider Eggs Taste Like?

It was called a dungeon, but it was really just a straight cave, and we had defeated the giant cave spider nesting there.

The first one we fought was the male, while an even larger female had been waiting in its lair deeper inside—but...

I pulverized it with the power of my new partner, Ko○tsu-san.

I put the spoils into my Item Box and returned to where the crystals were.

"I'm going to mine the crystals here, so you guys can head back first. This magic tool is noisy, so it must be tough on beastfolk."

It wasn't even noon yet, so I still had plenty of time.

"Then I'll head back first, nya."

"Myaree, tell Primula we're all safe. What about you, Nyamena?"

"Hmm."

"I'm staying here!"

Anemone seemed intent on staying with me.

"Are you sure, Anemone? All we're doing is digging rock."

"I am!"

When she sat down and removed her helmet, Bell, who had followed us, curled up beside her.

The drilling would be terribly loud, I thought, but would her large ears be all right?

I set out some water and cat food beside her.

"Then I'll head back first."

Nyamena seemed to have decided to return too. There was nothing they could do in this darkness, after all.

After parting with the beastfolk, I started the generator and began mining the crystals with the electric hammer.

No matter how noisily I dug, nothing else came from deeper inside. Of course not—we had defeated it.

I kept digging until around three, exposing about half the crystal. The plan was to extract the whole thing and get a high appraisal.

Doing this so painstakingly reminded me of the old festival game of carving out candy shapes.

"All right, I'll finish the rest tomorrow. Shall we head back?"

"Okay."

"It must be boring staying in a place like this, right?"

"I don't care! I want to stay with you, Kenichi!"

"Well, if Anemone says she's fine with it, I suppose it's okay."

I brought out the off-road motorcycle inside the cave, put Anemone on the rear seat, and started riding through the cave.

I wasn't looking back, but Forest Cat was probably following us too.

"Oh, I almost forgot."

I retrieved the main unit of the direction finder, which I had left at the cave entrance. In the end, it had been unnecessary, since the cave was a straight passage.

We exited the cave and headed straight for the lake, then rode along the shore all the way home.

If I dug all day tomorrow, I should be able to extract the crystal. Primula greeted us when we arrived home by motorcycle and threw her arms around me.

"Kenichi! Thank goodness you're safe!"

"You heard from Myaree and Nyamena that we were safe, didn't you?"

"But..."

I gently stroked Primula's soft blond hair. Her eyes were brimming with tears.

The female spider had certainly been dangerous, though. Perhaps the beastfolk had told her how hard the battle had been.

"Meow."

Bell came over to me.

"There, there. Thank you."

I stroked her silky fur.

"Oh, right. I'll show Primula the giant spider too."

"Huh?"

I took the giant female spider out of my Item Box and made it appear in front of Primula.

It had been too dark to tell inside the cave, but its white carapace seemed to be covered in something like glittering crystals.

Reflecting the sunlight, they made its overall appearance astonishingly beautiful despite what it was.

"...Eek..."

At the sight of the giant spider that had appeared before her, Primula's face rapidly drained of color, and she fainted on the spot.

I hurriedly caught her as she collapsed, but—

"Hey, Primula! Are you all right?"

I quickly put the giant spider back into my Item Box, then carried her home in my arms.

I brought out a bed in the room and laid Primula down on it.

"Whew... You startled me. I didn't expect you to be that shocked."

"Boss, ordinary people rarely enter a forest and encounter a monster that huge."

"Yeah. Could the reason there are so few huge monsters around here be that this spider ate them?"

"It's possible."

While I was talking with Nyamena after bringing chairs into the room, Primula, who had been lying on the bed, woke up.

"Mmm..."

"Primula, are you all right? Sorry for frightening you."

"D-did you really defeat a monster that enormous...?"

"Hahaha, yeah."

"Good grief—the Boss can control an iron monster like that? I never would have imagined it."

"Kenichi is a Tamer."

Nyamena slapped her knee when she heard that.

"Ah, so that's why the Forest Cat is so attached to you."

"Not every monster takes to me, though."

"Could you control that spider too?"

"Who knows? Maybe if I took enough time... But we can't communicate, so perhaps not."

"Honestly, you're unbelievable."

However, even after asking Myaree and Nyamena, I still couldn't find out whether that spider would be worth any money.

"Monster shells are valuable, aren't they? Armor that repels magic, or so I've heard..."

"If we could process a monster that huge... It depends on the guild."

Primula seemed fine after fainting, so I went outside to conduct an experiment.

The experiment was about the spider eggs.

I took a large stainless-steel bowl out of my Item Box and put one of the fuzzy, ball-like spider eggs inside.

It was about the size of a soccer ball, so it was quite large.

"Boss, what are you doing?"

"I thought I'd take a look inside."

"Ughhh! Are you out of your mind?"

Nyamena made her disgust painfully obvious—but I was curious about what was inside.

"What are you doing, nya? Fgyah?!"

"What's going on?"

Anemone seemed fine, but the beastfolk looked a little confused.

"Anemone, you're okay with this?"

"I want to see what's inside too."

"A spider might come crawling out."

"Then I'll burn it with magic!"

She had grown remarkably fearless. I cut into the spider egg in the bowl with a kitchen knife—

A thick, cream-colored liquid flowed out.

"Too bad. It wasn't shaped like a spider inside. Maybe the female had just laid it."

The eggshell also seemed to be made of insect silk, so I decided to wash it in the river and dry it. I scrubbed it thoroughly in the river, then brought out the jet heater and dried it with warm air.

In the meantime, I decided to act as my own test subject.

"Boss, what in the world are you...?"

Nyamena asked hesitantly, but there was no point explaining—it wouldn't make sense to her.

First, I needed to test its pH. I bought a roll of pH test paper from Shangri-La for 200 yen.

When I pulled out a strip, it was orange, so I dipped it into the egg's contents... No change—which meant it was neutral.

It would change color if the substance were alkaline or acidic. The site sold things like this too, so I checked the reviews to see what they were used for—

Ah, I see. pH test paper was apparently needed to manage the water quality in tropical fish tanks.

If the egg's contents were neutral, that meant they weren't acidic enough to dissolve iron. I had used a stainless-steel bowl partly because I wanted corrosion resistance, though.

"All right, I'll try eating a little."

I took out a cassette stove and ladle from my Item Box, spread a tiny amount of the egg's contents on the ladle, and heated it.

The cream-colored contents immediately solidified into a thin sheet.

Hmm—the appearance was like an ordinary fried egg, but...

"Chomp."

"Eek!" "Fgyah?"

I ignored the noisy beastfolk and put just a little into my mouth. It had no strange taste, and it even seemed to have some umami.

In fact, it was pretty delicious.

If my stomach started hurting after a while, that would mean it contained poison, though.

The contents of an egg were undifferentiated, runny protein from before a body formed, so I didn't think they would be poisonous at this stage—but I wanted to be careful, just in case.

If I remained fine after waiting a while, I would try increasing the amount I ate.

"Boss, are you out of your mind?"

"Yeah, I am. Don't worry, I won't make you eat any. Hahaha."

The beastfolk covered their ears and tucked their tails between their legs. They looked utterly deflated.

Evening came, but my stomach still felt fine, so I decided to eat a little more tomorrow.

If I overdid it and ended up writhing in agony, I'd cause trouble for everyone. I had to proceed cautiously.

Still, I wondered whether I really needed to force myself to eat it, even though it was such a fantasy-world ingredient.

It had that game-meat, slow-life feel. More than anything, as a Japanese person, I couldn't help wondering whether it was edible—and whether it was delicious.

I prepared dinner outside. Primula said she would make the soup, so I left it to her. She had become a master of soup-making.

After we all ate, I brought a shed out of my Item Box a short distance from the house in the darkness.

Then I installed the liquid-separating magic tool inside it.

What I was doing was preparing fuel in large quantities, since I had bought that enormous, fuel-hungry piece of heavy machinery.

I had gotten carried away and bought something huge, but Ko○tsu-san's fuel tank held around 400 liters.

The biggest difference between Yu○bo and Ko○tsu-san was their size.

Ko○tsu-san's arm reached more than nine meters high when raised, compared with Yu○bo's four meters—over twice as high.

Yu○bo weighed only about three tons, light enough to load onto a four-ton truck, while Ko○tsu-san was a super-heavy machine weighing around twenty tons, from what I had heard.

Shangri-La sold even larger heavy machinery, but judging by the dimensions, it seemed I could manage something about one and a half times the size of this machine.

I built a setup for producing the large amount of fuel that giant machine consumed.

I attached a water-level sensor to the container atop the magic tool and set up a mechanism to pump in more oil with an electric pump whenever the oil level dropped.

This would let me continuously produce large quantities of biodiesel fuel.

Now, what should I use as the oil container? A bathtub, perhaps? When I searched Shangri-La for bathtubs, I found a blue jumbo basin.

It held 120 liters. That would be plenty.

I searched for the cheapest vegetable oil on Shangri-La and found 1.5 liters of canola oil for 400 yen.

Since 120 liters meant I needed eighty bottles of this, right?

If this were gasoline, doing things this way would be extremely dangerous, but vegetable oil and diesel fuel should be safe—or so I thought.

I went outside the shed and bought eighty bottles of canola oil. One 1.5-liter plastic bottle after another came tumbling down.

"Ha ha, that's an incredible amount. And it's still only about a third of Ko○tsu-san's tank?"

I was cutting open the plastic bottles and pouring the oil in when Nyamena came over.

"Boss, are you doing something strange again?"

"Yeah. I'm making food for that iron summoned beast."

"This is oil, right? Its food is oil?"

"Yeah. But it won't obey if I give it ordinary oil, so it takes a lot of work."

"This is alchemy, isn't it? You really are a mage, Boss."

But Nyamena seemed a little different from usual. She appeared to be wary of me.

"I'm a little different from an ordinary mage—but why are you so scared? Even a bold woman like you gets frightened?"

"Of course I have things I'm afraid of. There's no way I could fight and beat an iron monster like that, right?"

"I'm the one controlling it, so it'll disappear if you defeat me, you know?"

"I know that, but still."

Nyamena had become so meek and fidgety that I found her adorable. When I petted her, she began purring.

"I'll give you some attention later, so pour this oil into the blue basin."

"Got it."

But Myaree arrived soon afterward, so we no longer had time for that.

In any case, I poured in all the oil. I also checked the operation and confirmed that the electric pump would start when the oil level dropped.

I would add alkali and alcohol to it and esterify it.

Passing that through the magic tool would produce biodiesel fuel.

If everything went smoothly, there would be plenty of fuel for Ko○tsu-san ready by the time I woke up.

------◇◇◇------

――The next day.

When I looked inside the shed, a large quantity of biodiesel fuel had been produced just as planned. The apparatus seemed to have worked properly.

I put the entire plastic jumbo basin into my Item Box. I disposed of the unwanted glycerin and impurities in the trash can on my status screen.

Good, good. Now I could make biodiesel fuel in bulk.

Buying that huge machine couldn't be helped, and there was no point in leaving it unused.

Primula said she was going to visit a noble, so I planned to take her to the city, but Nyamena offered to carry her there on her back.

Her shop would be closed for a while anyway, and she had no luggage today. I decided to leave it to Nyamena.

I had work to do too—following up on yesterday, I cooked a somewhat larger amount of spider egg and tried eating it with soy sauce.

It had a strange flavor, somewhere between egg white and egg yolk. Maybe I could make mayonnaise with it.

If nothing unusual happened to my body by noon, I figured it was probably safe.

Now, what I needed to do was—

Dig out the crystals in the cave, of course.

The spider could stay in my Item Box without spoiling, so that could wait.

When I was about to head to the cave by motorcycle, Anemone said she wanted to come too, so I put a helmet on her and seated her on the rear.

"Won't it be boring inside the cave?"

"I want to be with you, Kenichi!"

I had no reason to refuse. Since we knew there were no enemies, I rode the motorcycle straight into the cave and continued mining.

The deafening drilling echoed through the cave. I suddenly stopped working and looked behind me.

In the LED light, Anemone was reading a Japanese book. She had learned quite a lot of Japanese and could now read simple kanji too.

I didn't think studying Japanese would be useful in this world. But with her eager to learn, it would be unwise to discourage her.

Besides, I had heard that learning multiple languages at the same time could improve efficiency.

I resumed drilling, and by early afternoon, I succeeded in extracting the giant crystal.

It was dorayaki-shaped, about one meter long and fifty centimeters high—the rock was the outer shell, and the crystal was the filling.

Stripes like layers of thin skins continued through the rough rock, enclosing beautiful, faintly blue-glowing crystal.

"It's beautiful!"

"It sure is."

I immediately submitted it to Shangri-La for a buyback appraisal.

【Large Rough Crystal　Appraised Value: 22 million yen】

"Whoa! I've recouped what Ko○tsu-san cost!"

"Ko○tsu-san?"

"That's the name of the yellow iron summoned beast."

"The smaller one is Yu○bo-san, right?"

"That's right. Hahaha."

Apparently, she had remembered because I kept repeating "Yu○bo."

"Then what about the cart that moves without a horse?"

"That's K○nter-san."

"Wow."

Now that we had dug out the crystal, there was nothing left for us here.

When Anemone and I returned home by motorcycle, Primula and the others had come back too.

"Primula, how did the noblewoman seem?"

"She was delighted with the cameo."

The sale price was thirty-five gold coins (7,000,000 yen), and my share for wholesaling the cameo was seventeen gold coins.

It was more expensive than usual, but apparently the fact that the profile resembled the viscountess had helped.

If someone told her, "This is a one-of-a-kind piece specially crafted just for Your Ladyship," she would probably fall for it.

Selling precious metals really was more profitable. But I wanted to avoid putting this country's gold coins into Shangri-La whenever possible.

However, even during the sales negotiations with the noble, Primula hadn't heard anything about the thugs harassing her shop.

I really needed to do her a bigger favor—or find better leverage—before asking her for a favor.

Since Primula was back, we decided to eat.

Everyone else had the usual soup and bread, but I decided to try something a little adventurous.

Mayonnaise made with spider eggs. I had increased the amount I ate during yesterday's taste test and felt fine, so it was probably safe.

I bought apple vinegar and olive oil from Shangri-La.

I put the two ingredients into a bowl and whisked them with a hand mixer—but naturally, they didn't blend. Water and oil don't mix, after all.

"Boss, what are you making?"

"You guys just eat your meal."

But when I added spider egg and mixed it in, the contents turned white, emulsified, and set. This was mayonnaise.

"Lick."

"Ugh, it's eating something."

"Unyaa~"

The beastfolk were noisy, but I ignored them. Hmm, it was a little bland. I added some dashi stock powder and sugar.

"Lick again—whoa! This is delicious!"

This was even tastier than the store-bought mayonnaise sold by Shangri-La. It was whitish and didn't look much like mayo, though.

Now, what should I make with it...? How about something simple, like sandwiches?

I took out some of the bargain bread we usually ate from my Item Box and cut it in half. Then I added lettuce, ham, mayonnaise, and ketchup.

Oh, right—wouldn't pickles make it tastier too? I added a little.

"It's done! One bite—chomp! Delicious! It's unbelievably good! This is the taste of another world!"

"Another world?"

It was just something I muttered while stuffing my face with the sandwich, but Anemone had heard me and looked puzzled.

"Never mind."

"Kenichi... I want to try that too..."

"Want to give it a try, Anemone? Here."

Anemone cautiously put the sandwich in her mouth, then cried out after taking one bite.

"It's delicious! This is so good! There are all sorts of things inside the bread!"

"See?"

I glanced over at the beastfolk, but they turned their faces away and waved their hands.

Primula, meanwhile, had turned her back to me as well. Well, there was no need to force them to eat it.

This was a delicacy unique to another world.

It might be delicious if I made ordinary rolled omelets or steamed egg custard too.

This was an interesting ingredient to have acquired.