In March, the imperial court sent the world's elite soldiers, and ordered Lu Zhi, the general of Beizhonglang, to lead the army to attack the Yellow Turban Army of Zhangjiaosuo in Jizhou, and the left Zhonglang general Huangfu Song. The right middle lang will be Zhu Jun. Cao Cao, the cavalry commander, led his troops to attack the Yingchuan Yellow Turban Army.

In the second half of the year, the elite troops of the various units were in place, and the sporadic battles were unsuccessful.

Yang Xi stood on the bank of the Caishi River, behind him was a 2,000-square-meter wooden factory, and on the hillside half a mile away, smoke rose from the curling cooking. Within a radius of one mile, there was no trace of half a jute, all of which were razed to the ground and became a training place for the leader of the guard battalion Cai Kao, with various wooden stakes lined up. The barrier wall is made of adobe bricks, and the top of it has been rounded.

Yang Xi looked at the rows of bamboo chips in the water, which had been soaked for nearly three months, which was enough, and workers were adding new bamboo every day.

The new bamboo that has been added now has just grown this year, and the branches and leaves have not grown. But that's what Yang Xi was waiting for.

However, the previous old bamboo must also be used, after all, time waits for no one, and the first batch of experimental products happens to be useful.

Yang Xi walked all the way over, inspecting every process, and there were four or five workers taking out the bamboo and beating it with wooden sticks.

Washing off the coarse shell and green skin is called "finishing". Someone has already brought a lotion made of high-quality lime to mix,

On the stove in the open air next to it, there is a large vat, and someone is filling the firewood, which is to be boiled for eight days and eight nights according to the requirements.

The pot for boiling bamboo, with a diameter of one meter, is sealed with clay and lime to seal the edge of the pot, so that the height and width can hold more than ten buckets of water. The top is covered with a barrel about three meters long and more than one meter in diameter.

After eight days of cooking, stop heating for a day, uncover the bucket, take out the bamboo, and rinse it in the Caishi River.

After the bamboo is washed, soak it in firewood ash water, then put it in a pot and press it flat, and spread about an inch thick straw ash. Once boiled, the bamboo is moved to another bucket and washed with ash water. After the ash water has cooled, it should be boiled and then rinsed. In this way, after more than ten days, the bamboo naturally rots and stinks.

At this time, the water mill prepared by Yang Xi is about to come in handy, and the bamboo is put into the water mill to form a muddy state and poured into the papermaking trough.

The paper groove is like a square bucket, and the size is determined by the paper curtain, which in turn is determined by the size of the paper. Clean water is placed in the papermaking trough, and the water surface is about six or seven centimeters higher than the bamboo pulp.

The paper curtain is made of extremely fine scraped bamboo wire, which is supported by a wooden frame underneath when unfolded. With both hands, hold the paper curtain and put it into the water, swing the bamboo pulp to let it enter the paper curtain. The thickness of the paper can be controlled and mastered by human hands: when the number of papers is enough, a wooden board is pressed, a rope is tied and inserted into a stick, twisted, the water is pressed dry, and then the paper is lifted one by one with small copper tweezers and dried.

When baking paper, two walls are built with adobe bricks to form a sandwich lane, and the fire path is covered with bricks at the bottom, and the bricks covered in the sandwich lane leave a vacant space every few bricks.

The fire burns from the furnace at the head of the alley, and the hot gas penetrates through the empty brick joints and fills the entire alley, and when the bricks on the outer wall of the alley are hot, the wet paper is put on and dried one by one, and then removed and put into a stack.

Now, Yang Xi is waiting for the first batch of paper to be produced in half a month. At this point, everything is ready to go.

"Now I can start boiling the bamboo, and when the paper is officially baked, it will take fourteen or five days, and I can start doing another thing now."

Returning to the office that Yang Xi had prepared for himself, and after sitting for a few minutes, Yang Xi ran over excitedly.

"Back to the eldest brother, Xiaoxi has taken twenty-seven little ones in the past two months, but he is tired, in addition to teaching them the fairy sound and fairy language, he also has to complete the task assigned by the eldest brother, at present, there are more than four hundred seals, which have been completed."

"Only more than 400? The progress is not enough, it has been more than two months, and 27 people have carved more than 400 words, that is to say, 27 of you have only carved 6 words every day. "It turned out that Yang Xi gave Yang Xi the task of being a teacher for twenty-seven children over six years old and under ten years old.

Another task was to give him thousands of square sticks of wood and let him train the children to carve letters on one end of the sticks. This wooden strip is made of boxwood, which was specially used for carving seals in later generations, and it is just right to use it here. Each strip of wood is more than ten centimeters long, square, and the area is about three square centimeters.

It is indeed a little difficult for children to engrave words on it, or the other way around, but it can also make their understanding of words more profound.

In more than two months, more than 400 were completed, and 90 percent of them did not meet the standard.

"Big brother! I can't blame me, and I can't blame them, the main thing is that you don't have enough files, and we can only operate a few people at the same time for the few files in carpentry. And what you ask is that everyone has to operate, those who can carve it, there are only a few opportunities a day, but most of them, are six or seven years old, and they often don't meet the requirements. ”

Yang Xi knew that what Yang Xi said was also true, so he had to ask him to divide the children into groups and select a few older children with a high success rate, which was dedicated to this for a short time. Other children continue to learn.

Fifteen days, if you can produce more than 100 words a day, you can basically use them, and the commonly used ones are only one or two thousand words, and you will continue to increase them in the future.

"The paper, the printed version, it's all ready, it's still the same, ink. This is simple, I already have coal in my hands, grinding coal into pulverized coal, this is a simple stone devil, to Niu Han to build a thick and short iron setback, find a worker can make it in a few days. When I had time later, I would also make a hydraulic stone mill, but now there is not enough carpentry. Cow glue, this one is easy to find, cowhide is cheap, soaked, boiled into cow gum. Let me take a look at the proportions. ”

"16 parts of bituminous pulverized, 5 parts of cow glue, and 5 parts of water."

"Good! Ink done! ”

As for papermaking and printing, Yang Xi has been thinking about it for a long time, but before first, there was a shortage of manpower, and then there was a lack of materials, but now that he has finally reached this step, he is finally relieved at this moment.

With papermaking and movable type printing, the speed of knowledge transmission will be rapid, and now this papermaking technology will reduce the cost to a minimum, and then paper will become very worthless, of course, this is limited to Yang Xi's territory. There is more movable type printing, and he can publish as many books as he wants, but what he wants to spread is not the words of this era, but the simplified men of later generations, who have not learned? Sorry, you don't understand.

What to do if you don't understand, you have to learn, what to learn, the culture of later generations, so imperceptibly, Yang Xi knows that not only culture is no longer unusual, no longer in the hands of the family, but also let some people of insight from the family also accept advanced ideas, so that from the ideology, the family can be differentiated, which is the ultimate goal.

What Yang Xi wants to fight is a silent war, and this war is a hundred times more powerful than getting a city on the battlefield.

As long as this war starts, even if Yang Xi sacrifices himself, it will be the progress of civilization and a spark.

Of course, Yang Xi will never let himself be sacrificed, so he must strengthen himself, and he must make his allies and supporters strong.

With the escort of force, this war is foolproof.

It is meaningless to think about it, Yang Xi shook his head, picked up the notepad, and the silver was only sixteen taels. In one word, poor.

But there is a lot of food, and the Luo family is also growing in this war, but the mind has not been assimilated by Yang Xi. Now in the past month, the Luo family has taken away seventy altars and forty-two degrees from Yang Xi, minus the five altars that were exchanged for Niu Han before, and sixty-five altars have been exchanged for money and grain.

Sixty-five taels of silver, plus the income of the water-powered spinning wheel, only sixteen taels remained. There are more than 300 stones of grain, and this one still has 227 stones, that is, 7,037 kilograms. This is still some of the sake brewing.

"Look at Dong Cai's side, he also brought over sixty-eight stones of grain, and there are a total of 9,145 kilograms of grain. It's not enough. ”

"More than 100 people, you can eat for more than three months, but this is too little, in case of increasing personnel, the key is that after three months at most, the price of food will definitely rise, and it is possible to double it, but it can only accumulate slowly."

Yang Xi knew that at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, since the beginning of the Yellow Turban Uprising, one or two million people were at war, there was a great drought in the north, there was no harvest in many places, inflation was extremely severe, there was money and no grain in some places, and the price of grain doubled, and in some places it even doubled.

By the end of March, Dong Cai's work had finally paid off. On the last day of March, Dong Cai brought seven people.

Of these seven people, there are three families, two of whom are thirteen or fourteen years old, and the other five people, who are in their twenties and thirties. Originally, these three families were all fishermen, living in a large lake near the river in the east, and they could barely survive by paying a fishing tax (fishing tax), but now they are forced to do fishing tenant farmers by the big tycoons of eastern Hubei Province.

Yang Xi understood as soon as he heard it, isn't the big landlord in eastern Hubei the Hu family, this kind of land snake, want to drive you away, or turn you into a vassal of their family, there are 10,000 ways. Isn't it just to grab some fields, forcibly rob some female dependents or something, in a big family, there are always some sons and brothers who are bored to do this kind of thing. But this kind of thing is plunder, not a loser, and the average family will not care too much, turning a blind eye.

Yang Xi took in these people, these people live on the lake and are familiar with the water, so they happened to hand over the boat to them to manage, and the task of escorting Dong Cai to Dongqixiang in the future was directly handed over to them. And Yang Xi even gave Dong Cai's commission directly this time, and the rule was set before because of lack of money, but now that he has money, there is naturally no need to think about the problem of capital turnover.

Dong Cai has been five months since November last year, and he has also accumulated a lot of money, in addition to his cousin Dong Maru, who is mixed with him, he has also recruited three other people. But Yang Xi felt that it was not enough, and tried his best to encourage him to recruit more, and made it clear that once the paper was made, it would give him a better platform, and Dong Cai had no choice but to accept Yang Xi's suggestion.

More than ten days have passed in a blink of an eye, and it has been raining again for more than ten days, but for Yang Xi's projects, there is no threat. The spring rain continued, but it was not big, Yang Xi transferred most of the papermaking process to the factory, and as for the boiler outside, he made a straw shed temporarily. The rain continued to fall today, but Yang Xi was very excited, because today, the first batch of paper finally came out, which will be an epoch-making day for the entire Chenhe factory.