Chen Xian felt that the most important thing for him at present was to buy a large number of horses while the Jin Kingdom had not completely lost the pastures on the grassland, and when the horses in the Jin Kingdom were still sufficient.

Once the Mengjin War broke out, the Jin Kingdom would lose the horse farms in the grassland and the hundreds of thousands of horses there, and at that time, even the Jin Imperial Court would be short of horses, let alone the people.

When there was the greatest shortage of horses, the Emperor of Jin exchanged officials for horses, and only exchanged for more than a thousand horses.

Although Chen Xian doesn't want to confront the legendary Mongolian iron cavalry one day, war is not something you can't help but do if you don't want to.

Since Chen Xian's biggest threat in the future is the Mongolian Iron Cavalry, then he must make all military preparations to confront the Mongolian Iron Cavalry, even if he can't use it, it is a hundred times better than not having to use it at that time.

To deal with a pure cavalry, only infantry, no matter how strong the infantry is, because no matter how powerful the infantry is, when facing the cavalry, it can only remain undefeated at most, and without the ability to pursue, there is no ability to reap the fruits of victory.

For cavalry, even if it is unfavorable in battle with infantry, it can be easily separated and regrouped.

In order to completely defeat a pure cavalry unit, a cavalry unit that can attack and reap the fruits of victory must be a cavalry unit dominated by infantry, and with the scale of three or four hundred cavalry at this time, it is definitely far from enough.

To build cavalry, for Chen Xian, war horses are more important than people.

Therefore, Chen Xian planned to buy horses desperately.

But to buy and feed horses, you need a lot of wealth.

Chen Xian doesn't have copper coins, even if he does, he will give priority to casting cannons, and thinking about the things in his hand, soap is a luxury product, mass production, it will only fall in price, the market for gunpowder has not yet opened, and the output of this thing is limited by the output of nitrate, and there is no way to exchange a lot of wealth by exploding production.

And the only product in Chen Xian's hands that has great potential to be tapped is only iron tools, more precisely, weapons, armor, and the arms business of this era.

At present, the Jin court is increasingly clearly feeling the pressure from the grassland, Wanyan Chengtao was recalled, was sent to the northern defense line, it is from this, although today's Jin Dynasty is rotten, but the hundred-legged insect is dead and not stiff, the Jin Dynasty will not be without people of insight, the country's rusty war machine has begun to slowly turn.

If the trade route with the Jin Imperial Court can be opened at this time, then it should not be impossible to exchange high-quality armor for war horses.

As for the channel...... Chen Xian believes that as long as he is willing to find and drill, there will always be one.

After several years of accumulation, Chen Xian has trained thousands of skilled workers, as long as there is enough iron supply, enough hydraulic forging hammers, and enough iron rolling machines, Chen Xian can organize the production of armor with the jaw-dropping efficiency of this era.

But in order to open up the production of armor, Chen Xian also needs to make some preparations, such as building more hydraulic workshops and replicating more iron-binding machines.

But it's more important to have more iron.

In this era, the shaft furnace smelts iron, a furnace can only practice one or two thousand catties of pig iron, all copied mature iron, but only about a thousand catties, folding and forging and then waste some, in the end can make iron armor is less than 800 catties, a heavy armor riding is often fifty or sixty catties, a furnace of iron can only forge more than a dozen pairs of armor.

In this era, the shaft furnace ironmaking could not be sustained, and it was often necessary to build a furnace and only produce one furnace of iron, from building a furnace, to tapping iron, and then to copying iron, it often took more than ten days to come down, with the efficiency of Chen Xian's hydraulic factory, I am afraid that it would take dozens or hundreds of furnaces to supply it, not to mention that Chen Xian also planned to further expand the number and scale of the hydraulic workshop.

A shaft furnace and an iron-copying furnace require at least a dozen people to serve them, and a hundred require thousands of iron-making workers.

There are only more than 200 people in the Huo family's iron field, not to mention that there are not enough people, even if it is enough, Chen Xian will not waste all his manpower on this.

Therefore, Chen Xian had to improve the existing iron-making technology in order to give full play to the advantages of his hydroelectric plant.

While improving ironmaking technology, Chen Xian also made some improvements to mining technology.

In the Song Dynasty, iron ore and copper ore were mined, and the water and fire method was mostly used, that is, the fire was used first, and then the cold water was violently excited, and under the sudden change of cold and heat, the ore would automatically crack due to thermal expansion and cold contraction.

Chen Xian tried to use black powder in mining, which greatly accelerated the speed of mining.

Chen Xian personally supervised and observed, and for more than half a month, he formulated a set of safety rules, such as the situation and roll call before the gun, and sent troops to supervise the mine, and used fines and whips to make the miners remember the safety rules.

It's a pity that Chen Xian is not an immortal after all, and the safety rules he formulated are actually full of mistakes, and there is still a disaster in gunpowder mining.

But Chen Xian could not stop using black powder to open mines because of the disaster, he could only comfort himself with "This is the price of the progress of the times, such a lame reason." "He can only write every bloody lesson into the safety code after every accident and disaster......

After gunpowder was used in mining, how to transport the blasted ore out of the pit became a problem.

In this era, most of the mines were open-pit mines, which relied on people to carry ore from the bottom of the pit, which was not only slow but also dangerous, and the loose and steep pit walls often injured miners.

Chen Xian had people make wooden rail minecarts and pull them with winch ropes, which suddenly accelerated the speed of ore transportation, and the bottleneck in mining was solved.

Improvements in ironmaking technology have not been smooth.

Chen Xian plans to use the simple modern blast furnace data in the mobile phone data of the Internet writer to restore the blast furnace that can be produced continuously in this era.

Originally, Chen Xian didn't think it was difficult, and he didn't want to restore the kind of large-scale blast furnace more than ten meters high, but he just planned to restore the earthen blast furnace about three meters high, as long as it could achieve continuous production.

But when he started experimenting, he found that there were problems one after another.

The first is the refractory material inside the blast furnace.

The disposable shaft furnace of this era is only used once, and the furnace wall only needs to be thickened a little, even if the inside is melted, as long as the outer layer can hold up, it doesn't matter, but to build a modern blast furnace that can be used continuously and the internal filler can flow, there must be high-strength refractory materials inside the furnace to support the flow of the filler.

In order to make refractory bricks, Chen Xian used the relationship of Yang Miaozhen's mother's family and sent people to Pingdu Town to find graphite.

At this time, Yang Miaozhen's elder brother Yang Anguo was serving as the assassin and defense historian in Laizhou, and held the military and political power of a state.

Laizhou is not far from Pingdu Town, in order to make Yang Anguo look for it carefully, Chen Xian promised Yang Anguo that if he could find graphite, he would exchange it with him at the price of thirty catties of a piece of armor.

In his letter to Yang Anguo, Chen Xian introduced the properties of graphite in great detail so that it was easy to find.

Fortunately, the graphite reserves in Pingdu are huge, the burial is very shallow, there are open-pit mines in many places, and the characteristics of graphite are relatively special, so there is real graphite in the Yang products sent by Yang Anguo for the first time.