When he left, Zhang Yiheng transferred a batch of spears from the guard to Liu Fan for emergency use, and told him that Zhang Yiheng would send people to work overtime to complete the weapons he needed as soon as possible, and would send them to Liu Fan in the near future.

After returning to Shihe, Liu Fan felt the pain of not having an arsenal, and ordered to start recruiting craftsmen in the whole Jiaozhou, whether it was a blacksmith, a carpenter, or a mason, as long as it was a skilled craftsman, Liu Fan wanted them all, anyway, now Liu Fan has money, even if he raises them in vain, it won't cost much food. Besides, now that the army is in ruins, there was no money to maintain the status quo before, and now he is no longer worried about money, Liu Fan decided to make a big deal and build Shihe into a military fortress.

Shihe Yanchang is located in the center of the two cities of Jiaozhou and Jimo, adjacent to Jiaozhou Bay, and there are no high mountains in terms of topography, just some hills and plains. In the event of a war, if Liu Fan wants to hold on to the Shihe base camp, he will first have to defend the two land gates of Jiaozhou and Jimo, but now these two places are not under Liu Fan's jurisdiction, even if he wants to defend, but the official position is too small, and he is basically powerless. Liu Fan could only retreat and arm Shihe first.

Liu Fan recruited a large number of construction craftsmen, and led the veteran craftsmen with experience in building cities to explore the terrain and discuss countermeasures, and finally found that with the existing conditions, only the dock fort could be built. Dock Fort, also known as Dock Wall, is a kind of civil defensive building, which was formed during the reign of Wang Mang Tianfeng, when there was a great hunger in the north and social turmoil. In order to protect themselves, the families of the rich built the walls of the dock forts. Wubao has always been an important means of defense in the northern region, and after thousands of years of development and evolution, it has become a very complete defensive military fortress. At present, most of the tun forts in the north of the Ming Dynasty and the nine sides are evolved from the dock forts, which are very effective in defending against the attacks of the northern nomads.

But Liu Fan is not optimistic about the dock fort, because the dock fort is not very good for the defense of artillery, with the defection of Kongyou, to the Houjin brought a large number of advanced artillery and craftsmen, it can be said that the current Houjin has a very advanced means of casting artillery, and even to a certain extent more than the Ming Dynasty, the ruler of the Houjin, whether it is the current Huangtai level or the later Dolgon, have attached great importance to the construction of firearms troops. Liu Fan had to think about how to prepare for more diversified offensive means in the future.

The advantage of Lingbao is that the city wall is changed from a convex polygon to a concave polygon, so that no matter what point is attacking the castle, the attacker will be exposed to more than one fortress surface, and the defender can use crossfire to carry out multiple strikes. Its defense system is also relatively independent, and even if one wall is breached, it will not have much impact on the other walls, so it undoubtedly has a great advantage in defending the city. The Battle of Lingbao was fought in 1552, when King Henry II of France captured the city of Metz in the Lorraine region. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V began to besiege Metz with an army of 45,000 in an attempt to recapture it. But in the intervening 5 months, 5,800 defenders, under the command of the Duke of Guise and the engineer Saint-Rémy, had rebuilt a new line of defense behind the old walls. On November 27, the attackers fired more than 7,000 shells in one day, destroying more than 70 meters of the city wall, but the fortress defense behind it was still intact. In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, where there was no high-power flowering bomb, such a strong fortress was undoubtedly a big killer, and Shihe was backed by Jiaozhou Bay, as long as a large area of Lingbao was built and the sea control power was not lost, then Shihe would never fall into the fortress, and the Houjin would pay an unimaginable price if they wanted to attack.

Although it has been decided to build Lingbao, Liu Fan still has a headache when he really wants to implement it. Liu Fan only saw the information of Lingbao from later generations, and he had not seen the real thing, and it was undoubtedly too difficult to copy Lingbao in Daming by relying on the scales and half-claws from the historical materials and relying on his otaku's manual ability. Fortunately, the most important thing in Daming is skilled craftsmen, relying on Liu Fan's narrative and his previous experience in building Tunbao, Daming's craftsmen still brought Liu Fan a huge surprise. After repeated research, the craftsmen decided to build with the fort as the core, the internal structure includes the barracks in the fort, the houses, the warehouse and other buildings follow the layout of the original fort, on the basis of the inner city to cancel part of the urn city, build another city wall on the periphery, the structure from the original tunpu side of the protruding city wall to the rhombic concave structure, although it is much worse than the imaginary rhombic fort, but in terms of usability, the difference is not very big. Although it cost a lot in this way, Liu Fan felt that it was still worth it.

Because the construction of the city required a large number of people's labor, Liu Fan issued an order to recruit people's husbands in the Jiaozhou area, announcing that as long as they came to Shihe to work, they would be paid 30 yuan a day and take care of two meals. Those who have a skill such as masonry or carpentry and other jobs that are helpful to the construction of the city, the price will be higher, and even reach two taels of silver per month, if ordinary people do not ask for leave within a month, then Liu Fan will pay 100 wen more, and one tael of silver a month.

It was the beginning of August, nearly a month before the autumn harvest, and there was still a large number of idle laborers in the countryside. And the price given by Liu Fan is too high, it is one tael of silver a month, according to the price at that time, you can buy more than one stone of wheat, and if you change it to miscellaneous grains, it can reach nearly three stones. According to the third volume of the "Hejian Chronicles": "A husband cultivates thirty or fifty acres of land, and harvests more than one stone of wheat per mu." "Summer wheat and autumn millet are still 2 stones together. The grain yield per mu in the south, the rice yield per mu of the rice and wheat double-cropping fields in the south of the Ming Dynasty, according to Gu Yanwu's "Daily Zhilu", quoted by Zhou Gan in the year of Hongxi, said: "For example, in Wujiang, Kunshan and other fields, the old tax per mu is five liters, and the small people rent rich room fields, and the mu rents one stone privately. "The rent of Shiwu should be 2 stones per mu. That is to say, it took more than half a year of hard work on one acre of fertile land to get a little more than one stone of grain, and there was still no tax paid, and there was not much left after removing the taxes and fifty percent of the rent handed over to the landlord.

The conditions given by Liu Fan are really a temptation that is difficult to refuse for tenants who are still struggling with food and clothing. As soon as this order was issued, it caused a major sensation in Jiaozhou, and the people around Jiaozhou applied one after another, and tens of thousands of laborers gathered in Shihe for a time.

There is a large number of labor Liu Fan mobilized funds to start building the city, under the temptation of money, a cart of stone, timber and other things needed for the construction arrived at the stone river under the transportation of merchants, Liu Fan also ordered people to build a brick kiln, burning paper to build the city needed to build the bricks, driven by a large amount of money in just ten days to complete the preliminary work of building the city. The Stone River turned into a giant magnet that attracted everyone around.