"Goo-Goo......

At the beginning of June, as all the snow in the Tohoku land melts, the entire Tohoku land also becomes completely new under the washing of the rolling snow.

The originally bleak mountains and forests have become lush and green, and the water level of the Songhua River has also risen a lot after the spring rains.

When he was busy immigrating in Nanjing, Zhu Gaoxu also led the team to a place.

"Your Highness, everything is inside, and everything is arranged."

With Lin Su's voice appearing, Zhu Gaoxu also looked up at the building in front of him.

In just a few months, a stone castle made of cement and mountain stones stood in the middle of this mountain forest, and all the trees around the stone castle were cut down, and Zhu Gaoxu didn't care about this, just glanced at this stone fort.

It is not wide, the city wall is only a few feet, the east and west are only a hundred steps, and the population that can accommodate is very limited.

Zhu Gaoxu took a closer look at the situation of the city wall, and as he expected, the cement made by the handicraft workshop in Jilin City was very rough, but this was enough for the current Jilin.

"Your Highness, this stone fort is one hundred and fifty-seven steps long from east to west, one hundred and twenty-six steps deep from north to south, the city is one zhang five feet four high, there are three hundred and nine battlements, two arrow towers, two gates, and four corner towers."

"This fort can be built in two months, mainly because of the efforts of more than 1,000 brothers below, and the cement also dries quickly, making it easy to work."

Lin Su stepped forward to introduce this cement stone fort to Zhu Gaoxu, and Zhu Gaochu also looked around this stone fort, and after determining that the cement strength was okay, he rode into the fort with Lin Su.

After entering the castle, he turned over and got off the horse and went to the arrow tower of the stone fort, in this arrow tower nearly three zhang high from the ground, the entire stone castle was taken into his eyes.

The size of the stone fort is not large, and the dwellings inside are made up of two rows of wooden houses.

Dozens of families already lived in those two rows of wooden houses, and their husbands and fathers were the guards of the stone fort.

In addition to these two rows of wooden houses, in the northeast corner of the city is a huge workshop that occupies a quarter of the castle space, and at the moment smoke is constantly rising.

"Your Highness, there is an iron-making yard, and the thirty blacksmiths in the institute are all working there, and the iron ore from the Hundred Refining Mountains in the south is sent down by horses and camels every day to be smelted into iron ingots."

Lin Su introduced Zhu Gaoxu, and at the same time looked around vaguely, and only whispered after finding that no one was following:

"There is a courtyard for making gunpowder in the ironworks, and there are ten iron-making masters in it who specialize in making gunpowder."

Gunpowder and firearms, these two things Zhu Gaoxu had to get out, so Zhu Gaoxu built a public toilet in Jilin's urban construction.

Externally, he said that centralized management of manure is easy to make fertilizer, but in fact what he wants is urine nitrate.

He didn't write down where there were saltpeter mines in the Northeast, so he could only choose such a soil method.

Compared to saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur were more readily available to Zhu Gaoxu.

Needless to say, the former is almost full of dense forests in the northeast of this era, and there is no concern about the source of charcoal at all.

As for sulfur, the Changbai Mountain Volcanic Area in Jilin is the best place for Zhu Gaoxu to obtain sulfur.

In the Ming Dynasty, the Changbai Mountain volcanic area erupted many times, so Zhu Gaoxu was sure that there would be sulfur to the east of Jilin City from the beginning.

As he expected, Lin Su just went to Shandebao to ask the local leader, and soon learned about the closest volcanic site to Jilin City.

Although the team of twenty horses in his hand only went to the east once, they quickly brought back thousands of catties of natural sulfur to Zhu Gaoxu.

These thousands of catties of natural sulfur are enough for Zhu Gaoxu to use for a long time, because judging from the current progress, Jilin City can only collect more than 700 catties of nitrate every month.

The composition of black powder is 75% potassium nitrate, 10% sulfur, and 15% charcoal.

According to the current output of soil nitrate in Jilin City, this stone fort can produce about 1,000 catties of gunpowder per month.

However, half of this gunpowder will be used for mining, and Zhu Gaoxu does not have to worry.

The Liaodong Dusi would bring a batch of gunpowder to himself every year, and as long as Zhu Gaoxu forbade the soldiers to go to the iron and coal mines, it was impossible for the soldiers who occasionally went once or twice to know how many times a day the mines had to be blasted.

As for the guards of the mine, they were also selected by Zhu Gaoxu himself.

His selection was very simple, that is, from the more than 100 people who dragged their families and mouths north with him.

Lao Zhu will definitely let Jinyiwei follow him north, but not every Jinyiwei can take his family north.

In doing so, he could minimize the fact that Lao Zhu knew that he was making gunpowder.

However, even if Lao Zhu knew, Zhu Gaoxu could also use mining ore and building roads to camouflage, after all, Lao Zhu only said at the beginning that he could not make firearms, but did not say that he could not make gunpowder.

Even if he was detected, Zhu Gaoxu estimated that he would be reprimanded at most, and at worst, he would just send the chief of the palace.

Thinking of the history of the palace governor, Zhu Gaoxu was also very curious, why Lao Zhu did not send the history of the palace and his subordinate officials to him.

However, he has too many things to do every day, and he doesn't care about these things, and he is more concerned about other problems in the stone castle at the moment.

He continued to scan his gaze, and soon a long, narrow white ground caught his attention.

That was the white land he asked Lin Su to leave behind, in order to facilitate the experiment of firearms in the future.

Zhu Gaoxu couldn't let outsiders know about the production of firearms, so he could only design the drawings himself, then let the blacksmith build them privately, and finally personally sent people to experiment.

Muskets and artillery were the killer weapons that Zhu Gaoxu could use to win the war as quickly as possible in the future.

For this reason, he had personally discussed the relevant content of firearms with many craftsmen who made firearms as early as Nanjing, so how the main muskets used in the Ming Dynasty were made, and what the manufacturing process was, was actually in his mind for a long time.

But really, the musket doesn't have a lot of technology.

From muskets to rifles, human individual tubular firearms have basically evolved gradually, but there are several important watersheds from the early simple assault rifles to the rifles of later generations.

The Hongwu bronze gun of the Ming Dynasty is a typical fire door gun, its structure is relatively simple, and it is completely a round tube with a lead hole at the end of the tail.

Like the artillery of this era, the Hongwu bronze gun only needs to be loaded with black powder, and then put in the projectile, insert the lead through the small hole in the back, ignite the lead when used, and wait until the gunpowder ignites, and launch the front projectile to complete a shooting process.

It fires slowly, is inconvenient to use, is very slow to reload, requires you to carry a fire with you to ignite, and its power is only less than ten steps to have lethality.

During the same period, many countries were using muskets like this one, and although they have been improved, they essentially require a manual firing process.

Because of the need for manual ignition, the musket gun is almost impossible to operate alone, so before Zhu Di established the Shenji Battalion, the musket will basically not be used as the main weapon of the army.

If nothing else, it was not until more than fifty years later that someone invented the butt and fixed an ignition device on it, using a trigger to control the ignition, and the arquebus was created.

However, when it came out, it was really discussed, but the improvement process after the invention of the arquebus went through half a century, and it was not until the end of the fifteenth century that it was studied, and gradually began to equip the army on a large scale.

Zhu Gaoxu didn't know much about this period, and he only needed to remember the shape of the arquebus he had seen on the Internet and in museums and design it.

As long as he can design it and shoot it successfully, it will be easier to improve the flintlock pistol in the future.

However, Zhu Gaoxu did not expect the flintlock pistol, because he remembered that the ignition rate of the flintlock pistol was very impressive, and it was not as stable as the arquebus.

Because of this, Qing officials were less interested when the British mission arrived in the late eighteenth century to introduce the flintlock pistol.

Zhu Gaoxu did not know how the ignition rate of the flintlock pistol became stable, so he could only hope that he would research the arquebus first to tide over the difficulties.

There were several difficult problems in front of him, and that were the two skills required for arquebuses.

The arquebus was able to become the starting point of the era of hot weapons, not simply because one person came up with its idea on a whim, but thanks to several technological breakthroughs in the arquebus era...... The first is metallurgical technology.

Advances in metal smelting technology have made the barrel of metal more strong, and the change in processing technology has also made it easier to manufacture the barrel, and the wall of the tube is thinner to ensure that it can withstand the force of gunpowder gases without exploding.

Muskets are not the same as artillery, which can be strengthened by increasing the thickness of the barrel, while guns need to be lightweight, otherwise they cannot be used.

Advances in metallurgy and manufacturing processes have resulted in thinner barrels and lower overall weight.

For metallurgical technology, Zhu Gaoxu is not worried, because the metallurgical technology of the Ming Dynasty has always been ahead of Europe, even at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the craftsmen of the Ming Dynasty only failed to catch up with the Europeans in the design concept, but they still maintained a leading position in metallurgical technology.

What really worries Zhu Gaoxu is mainly gunpowder technology.

The reason why arquebuses can dominate the battlefield with spears is that granular gunpowder is indispensable.

As a mixture, powdered gunpowder is easy to stratify, easy to get damp, and its combustion efficiency is unstable, which also leads to the early musket charge is more or less arbitrary, adding less may be weak and weak, and more can easily lead to direct explosion.

With the invention of gunpowder granulation technology, the performance of granular gunpowder is more stable and powerful, which also ensures the power of the musket.

Even if it's just basic black powder, if it's in the right proportions, it can still kill a soldier wearing heavy armor.

For heavy armor, the musket after the arquebus was a complete inexorable way.

Of course, the replacement of cold weapons is gradual, and in addition to technological progress, more importantly, tactical progress.

The Spanish phalanx can be said to be an important model for hot weapons to replace cold weapons in the arquebus era.

The combination of spearmen and musketeers reduces the risk of musketeers being easily defeated by enemy cavalry, and also increases the dominance of this combination on the battlefield.

Zhu Gaoxu didn't know what the Spanish phalanx looked like, but he knew what the current Ming army looked like.

In terms of spears, except for Lao Zhu, no one knows how to train better than Zhu Gaoxu.

It is difficult to match the spear and the musket, because in order to successfully defend against the cavalry, the spear must form an airtight gun formation, and in this kind of lineup, the musketeer has a hard chance to shoot.

Therefore, what Zhu Gaoxu needed to do was to train the musketeers and pikemen to cooperate, use a three-section platoon of guns against the enemy's front vanguard, and then quickly change formations, with the musketeers retreating to the rear and the pikemen on top.

As long as the musketeers can withstand the pressure of twenty paces to shoot, then whether it is the Mongol cavalry or the Ming cavalry, their front will be frustrated after three rounds of guns, and this is the time when the Jilin Wei pikemen charge.

It sounds simple, but the psychological endurance required of the front-row soldiers is extremely demanding.

The Mongols' bows and arrows were very vicious, but with the advent of the era of heavy armor, mounted archery has evolved into approaching the plane, and then turning back to the main formation, accumulating horsepower and then encountering again.

Under the normal standard, it is twenty steps to retreat after the face burst, and some elites can reach fifteen or even ten steps, but in reality, most of the Mongolian cavalry only dare to face the sudden at a distance of thirty steps, and only the most well-equipped dare to enter twenty steps.

Zhu Gaoxu was very unlucky, if nothing else, the Ming cavalry he encountered in the future would be the elite who could reach more than ten paces.

In addition, the armor-piercing ability of the musket gun in this era was only more than ten steps, so the musketeers of the Ming army could not defeat the Mongolian cavalry well during the Northern Expedition, and could only fight behind the pikemen.

The fire guns in the Hongwu period were still the same against the Mongol cavalry, let alone against the Ming cavalry.

Therefore, Zhu Gaoxu had to make an arquebus and build a barrage within thirty paces of the army.

The effective range of the arquebus against the heavily armored soldiers is very impressive, but it is not touching enough to be able to knock down the enemy within thirty steps, not to mention that Zhu Gaoxu's requirements are still extremely harsh twenty steps.

Thinking of this, Zhu Gaoxu's gaze swept towards the city.

There, the soldiers waiting for him were each holding a long spear, but it was a pity that they did not have arquebuses on their shoulders, otherwise they would be the best 'Jing Nanbo Navy' in Zhu Gaoxu's heart.

"We need to solve the problem of arquebuses and artillery quickly......"

Zhu Gaoxu sighed secretly, then turned to Lin Su and said, "What is the current output of coal and iron ingots?" ”

Although Yi Shuha is the chief steward of Jilin City, Lin Su is in charge of the horse team and escort work of the three workshops, and he is also very clear about the situation of these workshops.

Therefore, he did not disappoint Zhu Gaoxu, but said without thinking: "Iron ingots produce more than 200 catties per day, and coal produces 2,000 catties per day. ”

Two months of reading and writing made Lin Su more calm, and seeing this, Zhu Gaoxu also went down the city wall and walked a few laps with him in the fort.

He pointed out the shortages in some places, and then looked at the granary to see if there was enough food in the granary.

After making sure that everything was fine, he beckoned Lin Su to prepare to return to Jilin City.

When they went back, Lin Su and the others carried the armor, helmets and iron pots that they had built for a while, and Zhu Gaoxu took over the account book from the blacksmith master, only to find that they had built more than 80,000 armor pieces, 150 hat-shaped helmets, and 500 iron pots in just half a month.

These armor pieces were brought back to Jilin City and stored in the winter to be compiled by the healthy women, and at least one hundred and fifty sets of armor could be made.

In total, the ironworks can produce ten sets of armor pieces per day.

According to this rate, by the beginning of September, they will be able to create at least 900 sets of armor, although Zhu Gaoxu will not use so much, but he will be prepared, and after the autumn harvest raid on Xiyangha, there will definitely be a lot of armor damaged, and it is easy to repair the armor in Jilin City.

After wiping his hands briefly, Zhu Gaoxu returned to Jilin City with Lin Su and the loaded horse team.

It is not as far as the mine from Shibao to Jilin City, only fifteen miles away, and it can be reached in almost two hours.

Along the way, Zhu Gaoxu admired the northeast mountains and forests of this era, and almost everywhere you can see the kind of trees that can only be hugged by several people.

In the forest, many stupid roe deer looked at Zhu Gaoxu and them stupidly, and the soldiers who were in a hurry did not dislike it, and they all stretched out their bows and arrows.

In just two hours, they harvested two stupid roe deer.

When I walked out of the woods, the scene in front of me suddenly opened up......

On either side of the dirt road ahead, the muddy mud of the past is gone, replaced by gray-white canals and rice paddies adjacent to them.

These paddy fields are full of japonica rice from the south of the Yangtze River, which is also a new product of Jilin City.

In the Ming Dynasty, the yield of japonica rice in Jiangnan was about three stones, but the maturity cycle was the same as that of rice in Northeast China in later generations, which was about five months.

In the northeast of this era, the months of the year that belong to the warm period are only from the beginning of May to the middle of September, less than four and a half months, so whether the japonica rice in the south of the Yangtze River can grow into Zhu Gaoxu is very curious, so he specially opened a test field of ten acres.

In Zhu Gaoxu's view, even if only one acre of rice in these ten acres of land adapts to the environment of the northeast, it is worth it for him.

During the Tang and Song dynasties, rice could be grown in Jilin, and even if the average temperature in the Ming Dynasty was two degrees lower than that of the Tang and Song dynasties, it is impossible to say that rice could not be grown at all.

From what he learned from the agricultural unit next door in his previous life, a drop in average temperature once caused a decrease in grain production by one to one and a half, but as long as it was taken care of by man, the crops could still survive.

So he wanted to see if he could grow rice in Jilin today, and even if he couldn't, he didn't believe that he couldn't breed hardy varieties.

There is no reason why Japanese and Koreans can do what they can't do.

If he can't eat it by mid-September, he will follow the example of "raising seedlings first and then planting seedlings" in later generations.

He had already had experimental fields open up in the city, and although there were no plastic sheets to build greenhouses for him in this era, the Han Chinese had similar greenhouse methods.

During the Western Han Dynasty, Taiguanyuan had mastered the technique of using "greenhouses" to cultivate out-of-season vegetables in winter.

They built a closed "greenhouse" and used the "Yunhuo" to raise the indoor temperature throughout the day, cultivating the earliest "greenhouse vegetables", including leeks.

By the Northern Wei Dynasty, this technique was improved, and people began to use the method of heating up the cellar fire to grow off-season vegetables in winter.

After the Tang Dynasty, people used hot spring water to create the right temperature to grow a variety of off-season fruits and vegetables.

In the Song Dynasty, in addition to planting out-of-season vegetables, people would also use greenhouses to cultivate out-of-season flowers, but in the Yuan Dynasty, it was further improved, and the Han people began to use the heat generated by the reproduction, decomposition, and fermentation of microorganisms in "horse manure" to heat the greenhouse.

Compared with the previous "fire warming", the "horse manure warming" method is simpler and easier.

However, no matter which of the above methods is, their cost is not low, so Zhu Gaoxu came up with a simplified version of the greenhouse seedling method, but this will have to wait until March next year to experiment.

Thinking of this, he turned over and dismounted, and personally went to the rice field to check the rice situation.

Since it was the height of summer, the rice was growing quite well, and the only flaw was that they were too small compared to the Jiangnan rice in the same season.

"Your Highness, if you look at it this way, I'm afraid you will have to harvest it early if it doesn't mature."

Lin Su had his own land in Nanjing, and although he rented it to others to cultivate and collected the rent himself, he also knew how to farm the land himself.

Now the rice in the ten acres of experimental fields seems to him to have a feeling of sickness.

"Try first, if it doesn't work, then try my other methods."

Zhu Gaoxu looked at the ten acres of rice, frowned and replied, and then reluctantly returned to the dirt road and set his eyes on the surrounding fields.

In the ripe fields around it, wheat and millet grow gratifyingly, although not as strong as in the Central Plains, but at least much stronger than these ten acres of rice.

Looking into the distance, Zhu Gaoxu could see that in the distance, at the foot of Fort Mountain, thousands of healthy women were driving ploughing oxen and horses to plough the wasteland, clearing the stones hidden in the wasteland one by one.

In less than four months, the amount of cultivated land in Jilin City has almost tripled.

Perhaps only by witnessing this scene with your own eyes can you truly appreciate the difference between having animal power to open up land and not having animal power to open up land.

"Your Highness......"

"Your Highness......"

Zhu Gaochu rode forward, and the people passing by stopped to wave at him, and Zhu Gaochu also nodded in response.

The kind of gaze they look at themselves is what Zhu Gaoxu has always wanted to pursue.

He wants to survive and use his insights to change everything in the Ming Dynasty.

"Your Highness!" In the distance, he also lost his horse, and behind him were two officials.

Yishiha was holding a book in his hand, with a smile on his face, obviously coming to report good news to him.

"What's wrong?" Zhu Gaoxu turned his head sideways and motioned for Lin Su to hurry, he didn't have to care about himself, and he himself was stationed in the same place.

Lin Su left with the horse team, and Yishaha also came to Zhu Gaoxu and made a gesture on horseback:

"Your Highness, the speed of clearing the wasteland is faster than we thought, but there are also many more stones on this Jilin Wei wasteland than we thought."

Yisha pointed to the bottom of the fortress mountain in the distance, and Zhu Gaoxu looked at it, only to find that there were already two or three feet of stones piled up over there, covering several acres.

"Those are the stones you left behind, and more than 200 farm tools have been damaged in the hands of the people, so the slave maid is here to ask if you can keep some iron ingots to make farm tools."

"In addition, Ta Shi of Fu Ti Jin City and Ezhen of Shanchu Fort also sent people at the hour and noon respectively to ask us how much grain, tea, and iron pots we were going to take after the autumn harvest to do business."

Although there are still nearly four months before the beginning of winter, winter is really a disaster for a fishing and hunting people like the Jurchens, but whenever the winter is extended for ten days and half a month, they will have to face the risk of running out of food, so it is something they are eager to know in advance to determine the amount of grain that can be traded.

In this regard, Zhu Gaoxu already had an amount in his heart, after all, he asked Yang Bin to go south to buy more than 20,000 yuan of grain, in order to do the last business of the year before the winter.

"Tell them that I have 20,000 stone of grain here to sell to them, but how much they can take depends on how much fur and livestock they can take out to trade."

Zhu Gaoxu was backed by the Liaodong Metropolitan Division and the Ming Dynasty, and the scale of Ephotijin City and Shanchu Fort could not do business with him alone for a long time.

The amount of livestock and furs that Jilin City bought back from Futijin City last time was already half of the inventory of Futijin City, not to mention the good out of the fort.

If they wanted to continue trading with Zhu, they would have to buy furs and livestock from other Jurchen tribes, which is why Zhu Gaochu set his trade after the beginning of spring and before the autumn harvest.

Only by giving them enough time will they have time to prepare the goods they need for the next trade.

"It's a pity that I have more than that......

Looking at the scene of the hot wilderness in the distance, Zhu Gaoxu's eyes also sank.

(End of chapter)