The idea of cooking a meal for the barrels was met with profound, stunned silence by the brewers of Shiosai. It went against every principle of their rigid, ascetic tradition. Food was for people. Barrels were tools. To waste precious ingredients on a piece of wood, no matter how sacred, was unthinkable.
"That is… madness," Brew-mistress Tomi finally managed to say, her voice tight with disbelief. "What would we even 'feed' it?"
"Something new," Izen said, his eyes scanning the ancient town beyond the compound walls. "The barrel is tired of soy. It's tired of wheat. Its palate is narrow. We need to wake it up. We need to remind it of all the other stories it could be telling."
For the next two days, Izen did not touch their soy sauce operation. Instead, he took to the town of Shiosai itself, with a curious Tomi, a watchful Grit, and a constantly filming Ciela in tow. He did not go to the markets or farms. He went, as he always did, to the places of waste.
His first stop was the fishing docks, just as the day's catch was being cleaned. He didn't ask for the prime cuts of tuna or mackerel. He waited until the fishermen were done, and then he asked for the things they were about to throw back into the sea: the fish heads and skeletons of sea bream, the shells of freshly harvested shrimp, the tough, rubbery ends of squid tentacles.
The fishermen looked at him as if he were insane, but gave him the "garbage" for free. Tomi watched, her brow furrowed in confusion, as Izen treated the bucket of fishy, bloody scraps with the reverence of a king's ransom.
Next, he went to the edge of the surrounding forest, where a small, family-run mushroom farm operated. He didn't want their perfect, market-ready shiitake. He asked for the tough, woody mushroom stems they trimmed off, the bruised and broken ones they couldn't sell, and even the spent, compacted blocks of sawdust from which the mushrooms had already fruited.
He was harvesting the forgotten flavors of Shiosai. The very essence of the sea and the forest that the town's focus on soy and wheat had led them to ignore.
He brought his bizarre harvest back to the compound. In the main hall's fire pit, with the help of Grit's brute strength, he set up a massive cast-iron cauldron that hadn't been used in generations.
"The barrel wants a new memory," he explained to Tomi and a handful of younger, curious brewers who had gathered to watch the strange spectacle. "We will give it the strongest, most complex memory we can create."
He began to cook. First, he roasted the fish heads, bones, and shrimp shells in the cauldron until they were fragrant and caramelized, creating a deep, savory foundation of pure oceanic umami. The rich, roasty, seafood smell that filled the compound was utterly alien to a place that had only smelled of soybeans for centuries.
Then, he added the mushroom scraps, the woody stems and sawdust blocks, adding a profound, earthy, forest-floor funk to the aroma. He added heaps of leftover vegetable peels he'd collected from the town's small noodle shop. Finally, he filled the cauldron with the pure, mineral-rich water from their well and let it simmer over the fire.
For a full day and night, the cauldron bubbled away. The entire compound was filled with this new, wild, and incredibly delicious aroma. It was the scent of Shiosai's entire ecosystem—the sea and the land—reunited in a single pot. It was a primordial soup of forgotten flavors.
As the second dawn broke, Izen declared the feast ready. He didn't strain the broth. He let it remain a thick, sludgy, incredibly potent soup, teeming with all the solids.
"Now," he said to the gathered brewers, "we serve the guests of honor."
He took a bucket of the hot, fragrant, sludgy feast. Tomi watched, her heart in her throat, as he approached their most ancient and revered fermentation barrel—the two-hundred-year-old 'Elder Barrel' from which their 'mother mash' was propagated.
Instead of pouring the mixture in, Izen dipped a clean cloth into the hot broth and began to wash the outside of the barrel. He gently scrubbed the ancient wood, letting the hot, nutrient-rich liquid soak into the tired grain. He was feeding it through its skin.
Then, he did the unthinkable. "Open it," he said. The brewers, on Tomi's hesitant command, removed the heavy wooden lid. The barrel was, for the first time in its living memory, empty and awaiting a new batch.
Izen took a ladle full of the thick, fish-and-mushroom stew. "We give it a taste," he said, and poured the sludge into the great, empty barrel. It wasn't enough to fill it; it was just enough to coat the bottom, a single, offering-like meal. He then poured the rest of the bucket on the heavy lid before it was sealed again.
He repeated the process with a dozen of their most exhausted barrels. Washing their outsides with the 'memory broth' and leaving a small offering inside. The rest of the incredible-smelling feast was ladled out for the shocked, but secretly delighted, brewers and their families.
When the strange, ritualistic work was done, Izen turned to the bewildered Tomi and Elder Kai.
"Let them rest," he said. "Let them feast on this new memory for a full week. Don't put any soy or wheat inside them. Let them dream of the sea and the forest. Let them remember who they are and where they come from."
Tomi looked at the now-gleaming barrels, their ancient wood dark and saturated with the rich broth. She could almost feel a new, vibrant energy radiating from them. They did not seem like tired, old tools anymore. They seemed like sleeping dragons, feasting on a long-forgotten power.
"A week," she whispered, her voice full of a nervous, fragile hope. "We will do as you say."
It was a profound act of faith, a willingness to abandon five hundred years of unbroken tradition on the word of a strange boy with mismatched clogs and an uncanny palate. The fate of their legacy now rested on a single, audacious idea: that to save a tradition, you must first be willing to break it.