It's just that whether it is Xuanzheng or Qin Rigang, or even the officers in the Leizhou system, they all strongly oppose such a strange strategy as ceding Guangzhou, which is incomprehensible at all, and most of the soldiers and officers' families and relatives in the Huaxia military system are in the area of Guangzhou, and if the Qing army wants to reoccupy Guangzhou and engage in massacres such as returning to the hometown, Li Xian's prestige in the army will be seriously damaged, and Li Xian reluctantly agreed to temporarily occupy Guangzhou to accumulate strength.

In short, after the occupation of Guangzhou, the historical line has been greatly changed, and Li Xian's previous advantage of knowing the trend of historical development has been lost, and even the proven and correct strategy of encircling the city with the countryside cannot be carried out under the opposition of his subordinates, and Li Xian can only find a way to climb the black technology and occupy the world with urban warfare.

It was in this context that Li Xian led a large number of his subordinates to enter the Sanyuan blessed land and establish an industry-university-research base headed by the Steelmaking Research Institute.

The climate of Sanyuan Blessed Land is close to the tropical rainforest of the Jurassic era, and metal resources such as gold, silver, copper, and iron are scarce, and resources such as oil and coal have not been found, but various non-metallic assets are quite abundant, and there are many animal and plant resources and fishery resources, and the territory is very vast, and it is very close to big cities such as Guangzhou, and it has great development value, which is much stronger than when Britain went around half the world to the Americas.

Moreover, the most important thing is that it is easy to communicate with the innate avenue in the blessed land, and many special means that cannot be used in the main world can be used in the blessed land to assist industrial production, which can greatly accelerate the speed of development and reach higher heights.

In the case of the "Guangdong No. 1 Steelmaking Research Institute", which Li Xian attaches the most importance to, there are 3,000 skilled workers, 500 engineers, 50 associate professors and professors, 10 academicians and honorary academicians, and 1 university academician.

These 3,000 workers are blacksmiths recruited by Li Xian in Leizhou, Macao, Foshan, Guangzhou and other places over the years, most of them have been blacksmiths for generations, and they themselves have five to ten years of blacksmith experience, and even have masters who have been blacksmithing for fifty or sixty years, and their own technical ability is very strong.

After Li Xian recruited these people, he also taught them to read and write, found someone to translate books on the Western iron-smelting industry and let them study, and deliberately implemented the nine-level craftsman system among the workers, according to the technical ability of the workers, and the monthly salary and treatment were linked to this technical level.

In short, after honing on Li Xian's side and learning a lot of knowledge, these workers became the first batch of industrial workers in the Qing Dynasty, and they were also skilled workers in the smelting industry.

As for the five hundred engineers, most of them were selected from these skilled workers, and there were also martial artists who were interested in industry who changed careers, and the characteristic was that they were either given Chaos Dao Seed or other Dao Seed by Li Xian, or they themselves had their own Dao Seed refining, and they could use some unconventional means.

Most of the engineers were ordinary workers who were given Dao seeds by Li Xian and transformed into monks, and their own cultivation was very low, and most of them did not even cultivate their internal strength, but they could cultivate six or seven innate true qi every day by taking Dao seeds and using Dao seeds.

Don't underestimate this innate true qi, although this bit of true qi is almost useless for hurting enemies or refining the body, it can give the monk another sensing ability in addition to the five senses, which is equivalent to adding a new sense in addition to the sensory abilities such as vision and touch.

For example, these engineers with Dao skills use true qi to connect to crucibles and other objects during smelting, and can judge the temperature of the object according to the feeling of true qi feedback, and many people who are particularly sensitive and experienced can even control the error within one degree, that is, they can judge whether the temperature of the object is 1,537 degrees or 1,538 degrees.

In addition, by infiltrating the innate true qi into the object, the monk can determine the material composition, granularity, and other physical and chemical properties in it, and after a period of training, he can even identify the material composition of thousands of minerals and objects by the penetration of the true qi alone.

In addition, Li Xian also deliberately collected a large number of secret methods of pupil arts, so that these engineers would give priority to cultivation.

These pupil techniques themselves allow the innate true qi to run around the eyes according to the specific acupuncture point route, which can greatly improve the eyesight, some can make people see things at night, some can make people see more clearly, and some can make people observe the color changes more carefully, which are very useful for watching the fire and even observing the color changes of objects when quenching and striking iron.

In the 21st century, the experienced workers who can see the fire in many large steelmaking plants are the treasures of various factories and are known as national treasures.

In short, these 500 engineers with Dao seeds can be regarded as the backbone of the research institute.

Li Xian is now wealthy, so he has equipped some positions that need to consume a large amount of innate true qi with spirit stones, which means that these engineers can use spirit stones such as Qiankun stones to supplement their true qi when their true qi in their bodies is insufficient, and they don't necessarily have to use the essence to transform their true qi the next day.

The price of this kind of spirit stone is two hundred oceans per piece, and each piece can restore about 10,000 innate true qi, and it is acceptable to regard it as a necessary consumption for research.

On top of these five hundred engineers, there are also researchers with the titles of associate professor and professor, who are actually third-order grandmaster realm martial artists, and there are fifty permanent ones, but when there is a shortage of manpower, they can also borrow more than a hundred more grandmasters from various channels to help.

These professor-title researchers themselves are highly cultivated, and they also have the necessary Dao species, and all kinds of sensing abilities are richer, more accurate and sensitive, and they also have divine sense, and they can rely on their divine sense to grasp the temperature changes in the smelting process, the internal and external physical properties of iron, and even rely on the relatively strong true qi to improve or control temperature changes, etc., which can be regarded as the real main force in research.

Academician-level researchers above the professor level are fourth-order monks, and their martial arts cultivation is much stronger than that of third-order monks, and their ability to interfere with reality is also much stronger.

For example, when the furnace fire is burning, the third-order master uses his own cultivation to drive the fire element and strengthen the combustion of fuel, thereby increasing the furnace temperature by about 50 degrees, while the fourth-order master can directly increase the temperature by about 500 degrees, which is of obvious significance in smelting.

In addition, the fourth-order master can also drive the earth element protective crucible, control the cooling rate during the quenching process, etc., so as to improve the quality of the steel smelted.

Although the fourth-order masters are powerful and useful, they are not the cabbage that can be seen everywhere, and the academician-level masters resident in the research institute are also the four elders led by Elder Yuanfang of the Sanyuan Temple and the five people such as the Exterminating Master Tai of the Five Yuan Views, and when they need help, they can also invite Qin Rigang and other five honorary academicians who are equivalent to part-time jobs, and barely make up ten academicians.

As for the great academician, he is Xuan Zheng alone, after being promoted to an innate master, he can build a portal in his body to communicate the innate avenue, as long as the divine soul power is still there, he will continue to absorb the innate true qi, and his ability is much stronger than that of the fourth-order master, and he can increase the furnace temperature by more than 1,000 degrees on the original basis, and he can also rely on his cultivation to intervene in all aspects of smelting, such as controlling the quenching speed and cooling rate, etc., in short, it is quite a strong ability.

Li Xian had always wanted to recruit a few more fourth- and fifth-order masters to join the research cause, but unfortunately there were too few such masters and had little effect.

In addition to these professions, there is actually a special profession, that is, the "experiment host", according to the technical data and their own knowledge to draw up experimental plans, control the direction of research, etc., belongs to a relatively pure mental worker, but considering that the research in the blessed land involves a lot of black technology, that is, the participation of the special ability of the monk, to really do this work well, you also need to have a certain amount of cultivation.

This kind of experiment host seems to be insignificant, but in fact it is very important, taking the proportion of iron and scrap input in the crucible as an example, the average traditional craftsman lacks the understanding of scientific experiments, and will only grasp the material casually for experiments, and may not be able to come up with a reasonable formula after hundreds of times.

With the presiding officer who is familiar with the scientific experiment, the input ratio of iron and scrap steel will be adjusted from 10 to 0, 9 to 1, 8 to 2 to 1 to 9, 0 to 10, etc., and the approximate ratio can be judged only ten times, and then after a series of careful adjustments, the best formula of 72 to 28 is obtained, and the whole process only needs to burn the furnace twenty or thirty times, and the time and materials can be saved a lot.

However, most of the directors of such experiments are concurrently served by the above-mentioned personnel, so there is no need to repeat them.

From Li Xian's point of view, the consumption required to maintain such steelmaking research is quite amazing, not to mention the various raw materials and consumables such as spirit stones required for the experiment, even in terms of the salary of personnel, the engineer level should provide more than 20 Jing Yuan Pills every month, the professor-level grandmaster should provide more than 200 Jing Yuan Pills per month, and the fourth and fifth orders may have to add Dao Seeds and so on in addition to the Jing Yuan Pill, otherwise there will not be enough attraction to these monks.

In this way, the Steelmaking Research Institute has to provide the monks with cultivation resources worth 45,000 Jing Yuan Dan every month, plus the consumption of 50 spirit stones worth 10,000 Jing Yuan Dan, the total cost is quite amazing.

In addition, Li Xian had to pay the salaries and food and lodging of 3,000 workers, and engineers to professors and academicians had to provide corresponding monetary remuneration in addition to the resources for cultivation, and the funds required for graphite, iron, ore, kaolin, technical books and their translations were also quite amazing.

Li Xian had calculated the general ledger before, and calculated that a grain of Jingyuan Pill was worth one tael of silver, and the value of the resources needed to maintain the steelmaking research in the blessed land was about 100,000 taels per month, and the output was mainly a variety of formulas and production processes.

At present, the institute has mastered more than a dozen special properties of steel production methods, and there are four or five pots of molten steel available every day, that is, about 200 kilograms of tool steel can be obtained, which is equivalent to 6,000 kilograms of tool steel a month, which is a completely loss-making business from the perspective of investment.

From a practical point of view, the price of pig iron in the Qing Dynasty was 6 cents per catty, which is equivalent to 100 catties of hexagonals and 1 yuan and 2 jiao per 100 kilograms; the price of unwrought iron, that is, crude iron, was twice that of pig iron, that is, 2 yuan and 4 jiao per 100 kilograms; the export price of steel in Britain was 26 yuan per ton, that is, 2 yuan and 6 jiao per 100 kilograms; and the transportation cost from Britain to Guangzhou was 30 to 35 yuan per ton.