At noon on the second day of November, Mooney held a banquet at the Xuan Pavilion to entertain Su Fangyi and Bai Liyan to celebrate the success of the first transaction, which lasted for more than four months, and Mooney sold almost all the goods, bought herbs in time, and recovered half of the gold and silver, and from the political level of the inner layer of Jin Xuedi, Mooney was the biggest beneficiary.

"Come, this cup, according to the customs of your Central Plains, I salute you Yongxing Hou with a cup!"

"Then I'll be respectful than obey my orders, and do it first." Bailiyan raised her glass to drink, then wiped the wine stains from the corners of her mouth and said: "It's not easy these past few months, and it's finally not in vain." ”

"Yes, now that I think about it, what you should say is really reasonable, why fight if you can do business, no one can get any benefit from killing and killing, it is better to do business steadily."

Mooney was full of emotion, his face was suddenly red with wine, he was a witness to the vicious battle of the year, and he is also a brilliant pioneer today, and the ups and downs all make it difficult for him to let go of the soldiers who died in the war.

Seeing his emotional ups and downs, Su Fangyi said in a different way:

"When is Your Excellency Mooney going to depart, or will he stay for some time?"

"The money is basically settled, but the goods are still backlogged in Chenling, and it will be loaded in the middle of the month at the earliest, so it should be able to leave before the end of the month.

"It's okay." Bailiyan said with relief, and then said: "There are more than 20,000 miles of road between the south and the north, and it is really not easy for the caravan to come and go. Moreover, this transaction is very large, and the north and south have obtained a lot of goods, which need to be sold to the market for consumption for a while, and there will not be much trade in a short time, and even if trade is opened all year round in the future, most of them will not have such a transaction of tens of millions of gold and silver in a few months.

However, if your Majesty has no objection to the matters that have been discussed with you, it is not too late to increase the number of caravans in the future, first of all, to organize the trade of luxury goods and high-priced small amounts, and to increase the number of caravans in the future. ”

"Well, that's a good idea. It seems to us that what you want is of little use, as long as the price is fair, presumably the Church and Your Majesty will not consider some useless things in exchange for your luxury goods. ”

Mooney agreed with Bailiyan's suggestion, and then added:

"Before leaving, I still want to go to the observatory of Myoktensan to see the moon, is it convenient?"

"You can do it at any time, as long as your people don't object, Ben Hou doesn't care. Eventually, however, your accompanying priest will tell the church what you are going to do with it. ”

"It's a mess in the country, and they won't do anything to me, at least not at this time."

"Okay then, I'll arrange it as soon as possible, you can go at any time."

While the two were talking, a royal guest pushed the door in, handed over a bamboo tube the thickness of a copper coin to Su Fangyi, and then retreated.

Bailiyan recognized at a glance that this kind of bamboo tube was commonly used by Yuke to transmit secret information, which contained one or more wax pills, and the spare part was filled with soft material to prevent the wax pills from sliding and shattering.

"I'm sorry everyone, Su will come when he goes."

Su Fangyi got up and pushed the door out, and Bai Liyan continued to talk to Mooney:

"There's something I didn't understand back then, and now you're about to return to China, so I just asked you."

"What's the matter?"

"When I captured your warships, I found that your warships were very strong and had a lot of loads, so why didn't you invade the Central Plains from the sea?"

Mooney shook his head and said:

"I know you've built a huge ship, and you want to take it from the sea, and you want to invade us from the sea in the future?"

"For now, the Central Plains does not have the ability to invade you from the sea, and in the distance, the other vassal states do not have the ability to build large ships, let alone invade you from the sea, and I have no will to continue to wage war with you, so the transaction is the main thing. As long as you don't send troops, I have no intention of attacking you. ”

"Let's put it this way, more than 300 years ago, we planned to bypass Sengaku Mountain from the sea, but it was simply impossible. I think you should know that there is a Luyi mountain range to the east of the city, which separates the Song Kingdom from the Qianyue Mountain to the east, and extends all the way to the sea. ”

"Well, I know, I've also heard that the Foothills Mountains have been flowing southeast since they left the East China Sea, and they haven't been sailing for two or three months, and since there are no supplies, no one has ever known the end of the Foothills Mountains in the sea. But the eastern route is not passable, and the western route should be able to reach your homeland by bypassing the Hengqian and Qiongling Mountains. ”

"No, either." Mooney shook his head again, and then said, "To the west of us is a desert with a maximum length of more than 1,800 miles from north to south and 1,100 miles from east to west. The summer is so hot and the winter is so cold that you can only take your rations and water at the turn of spring and summer, take your sled along the snow-covered area to the sea, and then return to our land before the summer comes, so you cannot come to our land by boat from the east and west sides of the sea. ”

"Oh......" Bai Liyan sighed, he finally figured out why the Jin Xuedi people didn't invade the Central Plains from the sea.

After years of investigation and calculation, the Central Plains Mingwen and the Luna civilization are now located in the southern hemisphere, and it is basically certain that the southern hemisphere continent is a scallop-shaped huge landmass, which has always connected the Antarctic continent, and the land area of the manned and unruled areas is conservatively more than 110 million square kilometers, which is much larger than the estimated results of the year.

It is estimated that the radius of the planet is converted into the metric system, which is about 6,87,000 kilometers, which is slightly larger than the Earth by 1,000 kilometers.

Of course, this data is the result of rough speculation and is not of practical significance.

However, if the Earth is used as a benchmark, the Earth's land area is only 29 percent of the surface area, and 110 million square kilometers of land area is distributed in the southern hemisphere, while the northern hemisphere has less than 40 million square kilometers of land area, and if there is land in the Arctic, the northern hemisphere will have much less land available for human habitation.

Theoretically, from the coast of the East China Sea of the Jin and Song Kingdoms to the shore of the Boling Sea in the West Sea, it was possible to cross the sea and go south to bypass the Qianyue Mountain Continent and go to the Jinxuedi mainland to land, but it has never been realized for more than a thousand years.

Two-thirds of the southern hemisphere continent has three uplifted mountain ranges in the east and west, the Luyi Mountain divides the southeast and north of the continent into two, and the two mountain ranges of the west and the Qiongling divide the southwest and north of the continent into two, and the city is located on the prairie between the Hengqi Mountains and the Luyi Mountain Range to guard the north-south passage, so two-thirds of the land in the southern hemisphere continent belongs to the Central Plains, and one-third of the land belongs to the Jinxuedi people.

The Foothills of the Wing Mountains stretch southeast to the sea, and there is no end to the voyage for three months, and according to Mooney, the mountains are winding and winding, and there are land along the way, all of which are hard and steep rocks, and even snow-capped mountains, which are impossible to cultivate.

Previously, the Jinxuedi people had repeatedly sent ocean-going fleets to find flat land, trying to transport the soil to the flat land to fill in a piece of land that could be cultivated and used to establish a supply port, but they had not been able to get what they wanted.

It can be inferred from this that this mountain range that extends to the sea is not only extending to the southeast, but extending to the southeast and then extending to the northwest, like a right hook, and should eventually appear in the northeast ocean on the east coast of the Song Kingdom, or the southeast sea of the East China Sea of the Jin Kingdom, or even beyond. Otherwise, from the analysis of the direction of the land, it is absolutely impossible to sail along the mountain range for three or two months without seeing the end.

The only explanation is that the voyage was made by sailing along the mountain range and continuing the voyage around the mountain range and sticking to the mountain, and the navigation trajectory could not be determined due to the backwardness of navigation technology and the limitation of the ship's ability to go to the sea.

As for the route to the south of the Boling Sea via the West Sea, the situation is not optimistic even if the fleet can reach it due to the desert. It's okay to sail in the past, but to come back, if there aren't enough large ocean-going vessels to carry supplies, is tantamount to a suicidal voyage. Especially at the moment, three or five thousand stone inland river ships are simply not enough to undertake the task of far-sea navigation, let alone a large fleet.

Previously, Bailiyan had been puzzled that the Jinxuedi people were located in the alpine zone, and it was said that they should not breed a population of 50 or 60 million, and their native environment was comparable to the three eastern provinces of China and the Far East of Russia, and then south was Siberia and the polar regions.

Now it seems that it is the huge alpine desert that regulates the cold climate, and Mooney's paraphrase undoubtedly confirms this, the closer the area is to the desert, the longer the warm season of the year, about far away from the desert, the shorter the warm season, as in Xinjiang.

However, it is also quite puzzling, there is almost no desert terrain in the cold zone, and the fundamental reason for the formation of deserts is that evaporation is greater than precipitation, which gradually forms desert Gobi and desert.

There is no shortage of rain in the southern high latitudes in all seasons, perennial low temperature, the higher the latitude, the lower the evaporation rate, the longer the snow cover time, even if the trees are cut down, the abundant water will stimulate the growth of herbaceous plants, forming a grassland landform, no matter how bad, it is also a moss swamp, forming an alpine desert is rare.

It is not impossible to say whether an alpine desert can be formed. Assuming that this desert was a shallow sea in the early years, and violent geological activities caused the underground uplift tide to recede, and finally exposed the submarine plain, due to the formation time period, one or two thousand years or even thousands of human beings formed a tribal group, before the emergence of social civilization, natural changes were not enough to change the landform, and finally formed the desert in the eyes of the Jinxuedi people.

In order to resist the vicious expansion of the desert, the Jinxuedi people built the Great Wall along the outer edge of the mainland from north to south, until the coldest snow field in the south, to block the desert from arable land, and took advantage of the winter wind and snow and low temperature environment to build sand castles in an organized manner.

Sand castle is a kind of use of snow and yellow sand, layer by layer of water to pile up the soil platform, layer by layer of sand layer by layer of snow, and then bury the seeds of forage, water through the hot water to make it quickly condense the city sandbag, the temperature rises in the next year, the ice and snow in the sand castle melt layer by layer, layer by layer of grass seeds take root and sprout. When the grass seeds in the lowest layer grow young leaves, the grass seeds accumulated in the upper stacks grow in large areas, and finally form a continuous grassland.

This kind of sand control method can only be effective in alpine deserts, because there is water replenishment in the local winter, and it is difficult to create miracles in tropical and middle temperate deserts with no precipitation all year round.