On this day, the Yangzhai County Ya was brightly lit in the middle of the night, but there were no more noisy voices. There are more than 300 bright posts and secret posts in the county government, all of whom are wearing woolen coats, holding spears, hiding leather armor inside, carrying hooks on their backs, and carrying steel knives in their waists. This can be regarded as the current standard configuration of Guo Bin's trilogy in Fulong Villa.

Guo Bin has been hoarding cowhides in the arsenal of Fulong Villa since early in the morning, and now he takes it out and cuts it and makes it into leather armor, which is cheap. So hide it under the coat, mainly for fear of revealing your wealth. As for the steel knife in the waist, it is the famous ring-headed knife in the Han Dynasty.

Born in the Western Han Dynasty, the ring head knife is a straight-edged long knife made of steel after repeated folding and quenching, which is the most advanced and lethal close-quarters cold weapon in the world at this time, and it is also a weapon of extraordinary significance in human history. To some extent, it can be said that the Huanshou defeated the Xiongnu and indirectly contributed to the great migration of Eurasian peoples at that time.

There are many reasons why the sword can replace the sword and become the king of melee combat on the battlefield in the era of cold weapons.

First of all, the cost of casting a knife is much lower than that of a sword, why? A lot of this is because of the design.

The so-called "one inch long and one inch strong", if the sword is to be cast long, it must spend more effort on its appearance. The swords of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period were mostly short swords, and they could be considered long if they could be made to fifty or sixty centimeters, because the bronze was hard and brittle, so the bronze sword was easy to break. The solution was to widen the blade, narrow the upper part of the sword, and enhance the toughness of the sword by using different tin content on the ridge and blade.

Immediately, there was a major breakthrough in the casting of the sword, and it was found that the sword was made into multiple facets, which could enhance the thickness of the sword body, and effectively improve the toughness of the sword body, while preventing the sword body from breaking. The long swords of the Qin State are all eight-sided, and the sword body is relatively wide near the hilt, and the tip of the sword is slightly thinner. Thus, the bronze sword of the Qin State reached the peak of bronze sword casting, with a sword body length of more than 80 centimeters and the longest being nearly 95 centimeters.

In the Han Dynasty, with the increase of steel production and the promotion of ironware, the development of the iron smelting industry in the Han Dynasty broke through the length limit of the bronze sword, and the Han sword body became thinner and narrower and the blade was sharper. However, steel is not a magical metal that cannot be broken completely, so the Han sword is also multifaceted, so there are four Han swords, six Han swords, and eight Han swords. The four-sided Han sword only needs to be ground on four sides, and the eight-sided Han sword is also eight-sided grinding, and the amount of manual work and precision required make the cost of the eight-sided Han sword unimaginably high. In that era when grinding still needed to be carried out by hand, the eight-sided Han sword was undoubtedly a high-end and luxury item that only the nobles were equipped with.

The knife is different, the knife is a single-sided blade, the existence of the back of the knife is a good solution to the problem of toughness of the blade, the countless sword-casting masters have exhausted hundreds of years of research and pondering, and tried every means to solve the problem of the sword body is easy to break, to cancel the edge of one side of the whimsical idea to solve. Therefore, the world is truly wonderful, and if you look at the problem from a different angle, it may magically solve a century-old problem that has plagued mankind for hundreds of years.

It's like when the world is focusing on strengthening the guard force and strengthening the guard martial arts and training for the transportation and use of money, the Chengdu merchant has solved all the problems. It seems that in modern times, when the world's metropolises are worried about horse manure all over the city, who would have thought that there would be cars and bicycles in the world that do not need to pull dung, instead of riding horses or riding carriages, and become a means of transportation for human beings?

The sharpening of the knife is very simple, and it does not require much experience, and it does not need to be like a multi-faceted Han sword, which requires many years of experience to painstakingly calculate the width of each side in order to achieve the best ratio. A knife, even an iron bar, can be whipped to narrow one side and sharpened the blade. Therefore, knives are much cheaper to manufacture and maintain than swords.

Moreover, in terms of use, the longsword pays more attention to skill, and it takes the user to immerse himself in swordsmanship for many years before it can exert its due power. This is the so-called: "100 days to practice the knife, 1000 days to practice the gun, 10,000 days to practice the sword". Therefore, the long sword has high requirements for the battlefield environment, and in the chaotic and crowded battlefield, there is no room for the sword master to toss and turn.

In contrast, the simple and ruthless knife does not need to be as picky as the nobles in the arena, because it is a one-sided blade, and you can even hold the back of the knife with one hand to wrestle with the enemy in an emergency. Therefore, in the chaotic and complex battlefield where the dog's teeth are staggered, the knife hand who is suitable for slashing and slashing can often rely on his indomitable momentum and the courage to kill the master with random punches, and the swordsman will be so that even the old lady can not recognize it, and then no longer have an elegant and noble temperament.

The ring-headed knife is named after the fact that it has an almost circular ring on the handle, and the name can be given to the ring, indicating that the ring on the handle is not just for decoration.

In fact, the head of this ring does have a decorative effect, and the decoration on the knife ring is as follows: one is to carve flowers and plants, cloud patterns, turtle back patterns, etc.; the second is to carve cranes, deer, tigers, eagles, camels and other animal shapes; the third is the imaginary gods and monsters, such as dragons, phoenixes and evil spirits; Fourth, the three-leaf fern and the three-base ring pattern.

During the Three Kingdoms period, Cao Zhi's "Treasure Sword Fu" clearly mentioned that "in Jian'an, my father King Wei ordered Yousi to make five treasure knives, and it was three years to know, with dragons, tigers, bears, birds, and finches." The crown prince got one, and Yu and his younger brother Rao Yanghou each got one. The other two pieces are self-scepter. It is said that Cao Cao ordered Yousi to make five treasure knives during the Jian'an period, and cast dragons, tigers, bears, birds, and birds as marks at the head of the ring. The crown prince got one, Cao Zhi and Raoyang Hou Cao Lin (also known as Cao Leopard) each got one, and Cao Cao left the remaining two to play with.

However, it would be a mistake to say that the head of the ring knife only serves the purpose of decoration and marking.

The ring head has a high practical value, it can not only play the effect of balancing the counterweight, but also connect the rope sleeve, hang it in the hand, make the grip more stable, and can also hang ornaments and knife spikes.

The so-called balanced weight, simply put, is to adjust the weight of the front and back of the ring head. If there is no counterweight of the ring head, the cutter head will easily sag, and the user will have to spend a lot of effort to maintain the balance of the knife. With counterweights, it's much easier. The simplest experiment is to take a steel test and pinch the middle with two fingers to feel that the pen is very light, and if you only pinch one end, it will be much more difficult. In the use of modern machinery, tower cranes can well interpret this principle.

As for the attachment rope sleeve hanging on the hand, it is much easier to understand, this is to prevent the weapon from being shaken off in battle, and it is also to facilitate archery when holding a knife.

Why? Archers generally no longer carry long weapons, and their only melee weapon is usually a ring-headed sword. When fighting, if you put a knife on your wrist with a rope, you can release the handle of the knife to pick up the arrow when you switch to a bow and arrow, which is convenient and fast.