Get more iron - it's lightweight, but it's definitely not easy to do.

Luo Ming sits on the whole of Karlo Mountain, in fact, he has found two iron mines, one of which is even of good quality, but he now has a limited population to invest in mining on a large scale.

Even with the help of gunpowder, a qualified one will not collapse and enter the water casually, and it will take a long time to build a pit that buries the workers.

Luo Ming doesn't have an iron-making furnace to extract iron from iron ore now, and this thing has to be built from scratch.

These two projects could not have been completed without hundreds of workers in a few months.

Even if both were built, the manpower required would be enormous—not only the miners, but also the people who helped carry them, the people who crushed the ore, the people who transported the long distances, the people who made iron, and the people who cut down trees to provide fuel...... A few hundred again.

Luo Ming doesn't have much food left now, and it is the limit to bear hundreds of regular troops and dozens of craftsmen to cut off production, even if he cuts a wave of troops ruthlessly, there is no food supply for so many workers to invest in the great cause of ironmaking for the time being.

The requisition of the mountain people for compulsory labor should not be too frequent, and there were already a lot of complaints after the road through the mountain was completed last time, so if they were allowed to work again, they would have to wait to escape and rebel.

The repression can of course be suppressed, but Luo Ming never thought of using them as slaves - the population under his command was small, and if he squeezed them too hard, he would be himself.

The fundamental problem of grain will not be solved until the autumn harvest of this year at the earliest, and until then, he must endure the basic national condition that his territory cannot produce even half a pound of iron.

In a certain holy book on the earth, the miracle of constantly breaking fish and cakes, and finally feeding thousands of people, made Luo Ming very greedy, he asked Aya as early as a year ago, and got a sure answer:

If you just take the food stored in a certain warehouse, it is better to say, if you create food out of thin air, its consumption is very huge, even if all the priests in the territory, including Arianna, are gathered, you can only make enough food to feed less than a hundred people, and this trick will consume a lot of divine power, which is very wasteful, and cannot be used continuously.

Perhaps this trick can be used as an emergency at a critical moment, but it cannot be counted on now.

And buying iron from outside is not an easy task.

Generally, the scale of iron mines owned by the nobles is very small, almost only enough to meet their own needs, and the extra little will be sold to others.

Although Luo Ming wrote to the earl and offered to buy more iron at a high price, he replied that it would be difficult to expand the scale of mining for a while.

Although some iron materials can be obtained from other channels, those channels are not stable and reliable.

There are naturally several large iron mines in the principality, but first, they are far away, and secondly, if they are purchased from there on a large scale, it is easy to be exposed.

He also scavenged all kinds of iron tools in his own territory, and as long as he could replace it with steel, he would directly recycle it back and make it into steel and return it - although the process of steelmaking itself will have a certain amount of loss, but the steel produced will have higher performance, and the next part can be saved, but this is only better than nothing.

The three hundred kilograms of iron now hoarded in his warehouse seemed like a lot, but it was only enough for the furnace to run at full strength for a few days, and the steel produced was used to forge armor and weapons, and it was only enough to arm thirty men—a dozen if the heavy infantry demanded it.

Thinking about it, Luo Ming turned his gaze to the other end of the Karlo Mountains.

Although the trade route was called the "Silk Tea Road", the goods that passed from there were not only silk and tea, but also iron pots, iron farming tools, and even ordnance could appear on the wagons of the caravans, and it was perfectly fine for them to help carry some iron ingots.

And Luo Ming can also directly send people to other countries to purchase iron materials from the trade route, although the large-scale purchase of iron materials is easy to attract suspicion in any country, but no matter how suspicious it is, it is not painful for Luo Ming who is in a foreign country.

Originally, he planned to benefit from this trade route, but now the two purposes just coincide, and it is not beautiful that he can accomplish two things with one force.

However, this kind of thing has to be done gradually, due to the lack of food, Luo Ming can now call on not many manpower, although the regular army he maintains eats military rations every day, some people feel that it is better to do something else by the way than let them train every day.

But Luo Ming felt that he still couldn't make this bad start, occasionally helping the old man fetch water, helping the farmers harvest rice, and it can be said that it was a situation of the military and civilians, and being an escort for the caravan could barely be regarded as an armed escort. But if you go directly to work for a long time or do business yourself, then there will definitely be problems.

Luo Ming cautiously drew a small number of men from all over the place, built a small warehouse on the north side of the Carlo Mountain, and organized a small caravan to explore the road node closest to the northern foot of the Carlow Mountain.

However, only three days later, the caravan returned.

Not enough news was found, and when they returned to Mount Carlo, they were all dejected and disgraced, several of them were wounded, and even two of them were cold corpses and carried back on stretchers.

The wagons sent to the caravans and the goods they carried were gone.

The moment he heard the news, Luo Ming almost smashed his table.

"What happened, what attacked you?" he immediately suppressed his anger and asked the embarrassed caravan in the gentlest tone possible.

Soon, Luo Ming understood the ins and outs of the matter.

It is not uncommon to say that the caravan was attacked by bandits, but to be more specific, it was a group of nomads.

Although the climate in the north of Kalo Mountain is relatively arid, and some areas are even desert Gobi, although many places are relatively dry, at least grass can still grow on the ground, and it can be called grassland.

It is difficult to farm there, but if you herd herd, you can still feed some people, which gives the nomads room to survive.

Truth be told, there are some herders in Luo Ming's territory, but they are completely different breeds from those in the northern steppes.

The former lived in the civilized world, and had long been included in the ruling order of the aristocratic lords, knowing how to pay taxes on time, and also knowing that if they broke the law, they would be beaten by the iron fist of the feudal dictatorship, while the latter roamed freely on the grassland, without much cultural and moral constraints, and the law was a new word that they would not necessarily hear once in their lives.