The Emperor and the Golden Crow

"Bitter almonds, silver fruit, drunken peaches, dried jasmine fruit, thousand-year-old ginseng, profound-reaching grass, ginseng fruit, exquisite fruit, and five-hundred-year-old Solomon's seal. With so many ingredients added, you're saying there are still plenty of wines in this world better than this one?"

In the Myriad Longevity Pavilion, the old man was filled with doubt.

But Zhang Xuezhou's expression couldn't be faked. He had spoken naturally, and there was no way he would lie about something like this.

The old man held up the wine pot and asked him, prompting Zhang Xuezhou to wave his hands repeatedly.

"You don't understand winemaking," Zhang Xuezhou said, waving a hand. "No matter how many ingredients you add to wine, or how precious they are, they only improve its effects. The taste has more to do with the process."

"Is that so?"

"One look tells me this fruit wine wasn't filtered thoroughly, and the sterilization wasn't done properly either. That caused it to ferment and spoil," Zhang Xuezhou said. "Leave it much longer, and I'm afraid it won't be drinkable."

"What is sterilization?"

"Sterilization is..."

Without realizing it, Zhang Xuezhou had drawn on knowledge from the real world in his explanation, but he couldn't help feeling that bacteria were hard to explain to someone from this world.

"You see, there are tiny little germs in many things. They cause things to rot and even breed maggots and insects," Zhang Xuezhou said. "Just like those rotting corpses."

"So that's what germs are," the old man said with a nod.

"Right." Zhang Xuezhou nodded. "But these germs are far, far too small for our eyes to see clearly. You'd have to magnify them at least several hundred times before you might be able to see even a tiny speck of one!"

"Magnify!" The old man nodded thoughtfully. "Then