The second line is the craftsman.

After the Battle of Chenmu, Muhuali rebuilt the capital as his own nest, not to house his own Mongolian cavalry, but to house craftsmen, the Mongolian cavalry had tents and pastures, but the craftsmen of the Han people could not live in the wilderness.

Zhongdu has become the craftsman center of Mu Huali.

Mu Huali forcibly requisitioned all the craftsmen under the Han Haoqiang who had defected to Mongolia to Zhongdu, turning the ruined city into a boom and turning it into a large factory.

Knowing that Mu Huali was recruiting craftsmen everywhere, Chen Xian selected a group of spies, conducted a short-term blacksmithing training, and then sent them to various parts of North China to find a way to accept the recruitment of the powerful people in North China as blacksmiths.

Most of these blacksmiths who were recruited by the powerful people in North China were sent to Zhongdu to complete the tasks assigned by Mu Huali.

In order to transport information, Chen Xian even ordered people to form a pirate team, built a private port near Tianjin, and nominally sold the stolen goods obtained from the sea robbery of Shandong maritime merchants.

Using his status as a pirate, Chen Xian occupied a Zhuangzi on the coast, formed a team, mixed into one of the powerful forces in Hebei, and took refuge with the Mongols.

With the identity of Hebei Haoqiang, this pirate established a caravan openly, selling "thief stolen goods" from Shandong to the central capital, and collecting transportation information by the way.

Through these spies, Chen Xian can basically grasp what Mu Huali has done in the past year.

During this year, Mu Huali trained thousands of arquebusiers and artillery casting craftsmen from among the recruited craftsmen through a high-pressure policy.

These musketeers were able to produce hundreds of arquebuses for Mu Huali every day.

What worried Chen Xian even more was that Mu Huali's cannon casting craftsmen actually began to explore the use of bronze cannon casting.

Over the years, Chen Xian has covered the copper cannons in his hands in every way, and all the copper cannons have to be painted black regularly.

But after all, the paper can't contain the fire, the adhesion of the raw paint on the copper in this era is not good, and the cannon will heat up the barrel when the cannon is fired, so after an artillery battle, the raw paint on Chen Xian's copper cannon often falls off.

The news that Chen Xian's cannons were all cast in copper finally leaked out.

Of course, the Jin State and ordinary warlords were reluctant to use copper to cast cannons, but the Mongols were different, and this group of robbers had money in their hands, but they had nowhere to spend it.

According to the observation of the spies lurking in the camp of the craftsmen in the capital, the performance of the gunsmiths in the middle capital can reach seventy or eighty percent of the performance of the copper cannon cast by Chen Xian!

This news is simply bad news for Chen Xian, but he is helpless, unless he can kill all the people in Zhongdu, the secret of the copper cannon can no longer be kept.

After manufacturing qualified copper cannons, Mu Huali selected two kinds of cannons for field warfare.

One is a small cannon with a caliber of less than one catty, which weighs only more than 200 catties, and a camel can carry two cannons, which can move with the cavalry.

The second type of cannon that was fielded by Mu Huali was the five-jin cannon, because the gun carriage made by his craftsmen could only withstand such a large caliber cannon, and if the cannon caliber continued to increase, the recoil would quickly destroy the gun car.

After hearing the news, Chen Xian did not hesitate to start developing a ten-pound (about equal to twelve pounds) cannon and a ten-pound cannon cart, for artillery, range is the truth! Chen Xian knows very well that the only thing that can deal with artillery is the cannon with a longer range!

Mu Huali formed two artillery units, one was a camel artillery team coordinated with the Mongol cavalry, and the other was a gun carriage artillery team led by the Mongols and operated by the Han army.

The artillery wagon artillery team is a separate formation, equipped with a part of the Mongolian cavalry protection, they are under the direct jurisdiction of Muhuali in peacetime, and in wartime, according to the situation, they will follow the Han army foot soldiers.

These were all messages sent back by spies who had infiltrated the Han army.

After a year's accumulation, Mu Huali already had more than 30,000 arquebuses, hundreds of large and small cannons, and accumulated a lot of gunpowder.

Like Chen Xian's practice, Mu Huali used bulky cast iron cannons to defend the city, and used relatively light copper cannons as field cannons.

Therefore, at this time, Chen Xian will not be easy to attack the capital, not to mention, with the mobility of the Mongolian cavalry, there will not be much time left for her to attack the capital, at most ten days, Mu Huali will be able to rush back from the Shanxi battlefield, and Chen Xian wants to attack the capital, just the time spent on the road march is probably more than four days. It was impossible for him to capture a large city defended by a large number of artillery in five days.

Therefore, Chen Xian could only give up this tempting idea, and watched Mu Huali quickly clean up the situation in Shanxi, and drove the Jin people out of Shanxi in just half a year.

This is much faster than the speed at which Mu Huali conquered Shanxi in history.

It's all thanks to the artillery.

Such a change made Chen Xian worried, the Mongols with cannons were definitely like tigers, and after having cannons, Chen Xian's castle was no longer so safe!

Helpless, Chen Xian could only transform the outer castle into a fortress.

In fact, if a large amount of straw bags of sand were used to build the castle walls, the construction cost of the fortress would be much lower than that of the castle.

But Chen Xian has always been reluctant to take out this thing, because this thing is mainly used to deal with cannons, and who is the person who has the most cannons in this era? Of course, it's Chen Xian himself.

There is no technical difficulty in this thing, once other forces understand the usefulness of the fortress, then Chen Xian is likely to face this kind of hard bone in the future, and if he makes this thing too early, he will definitely shoot himself in the foot.

Now the Mongols have their own five-pound (nearly seven-pound) field cannon, which is a great threat to this castle built by Chen Xian with brick and earth walls.

Such castles had to be fortified and equipped with heavy cannons in order to withstand the bombardment of five-pound guns.

The fortification does not require the demolition of the original castle walls, but only the construction of four strong turrets with cement and stone outside the castle walls, and then the prismatic anti-artillery wall made of straw bags and sand to connect the four turrets so that the four turrets can form crossfire that can sweep the city wall.

The innermost part of the old city wall can also be modified by adding protruding turrets to form cross-fire across the walls to increase the defensive power.

For most of the next half a year, I slipped quietly in a strange situation where you hit yours and I hit me.

In this half a year, Mu Huali successfully took Shanxi, and the number of Han people under his command increased a lot, and when he returned to Zhongdu, the troops he brought not only did not decrease, but increased significantly.

In this half year, Chen Xian seems to have only advanced the fortress line to the north for less than 100 miles.

Of course, Chen Xian's income is not only that, but his main harvest is in the Goryeo Peninsula.

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