Pan Shicheng smiled bitterly, feeling that he still had to wake up his confused nephew.

"This pistol looks good, it should be a batch that Li Xian seized from Macao before.

If it were normal times, the people on the official face would never allow people to sell guns, but now at this critical moment, those adults are afraid that we will buy all the firearms in Li Xian's hands. ”

"But..."

"Nothing more. These pistols, if we don't buy them, will be left in Li Xian's hands to equip his own team, and if we buy them, we will have two thousand more guns on our side, at least able to equip a team of two thousand people.

This coming and going, it is a gap in the military strength of 4,000 people, Yiliang and they are not fools, how can they not calculate this account?"

Pan Wu suddenly realized in his heart, sure enough, he thought badly, if he could buy all the firearms in Li Xian's hands with money, so that his team had no weapons to use, and those adults in Yiliang would probably wake up laughing from their dreams.

However, thinking of this, Pan Wu had new questions in his heart.

"Even children can understand this account, but why can't Li Xian understand it, and how can those adults be so angry?"

"You, you just don't learn and don't know how to do it, and you are usually reluctant to let you read more books, so it's timid.

You see, in the history books, there are armies besieged by enemy troops in isolated cities, and internal and external communications are cut off, and there is no way to get food and supplies.

As a result, the commander of the defenders dug a well, found a few large fish, and then put them in wooden barrels and gave them to the commander of the enemy army.

When the enemy general saw that there was well water in the city and could catch fish, he knew that it was not a way to continue the siege, so he broke the siege and left.

Li Xian is very smart, and he uses this strategy to show his military strength. Pan Shicheng explained carefully.

After hearing this, Pan Wu fully understood: "Uncle is saying that Li Xian's move is to tell the adults in the city that the Sanyuanli coalition army has sufficient armaments, and they can casually take out two thousand muskets and sell them, so that the defenders in the city don't think about resisting." ”

"Of course, don't you see that the adults are angry? Pan Shicheng nodded with a relieved expression, this elm pimple was finally enlightened.

"The business of these two thousand robberies can be done, and now everyone knows that the city of Guangzhou is in danger, and a gun on his body may be able to have an extra life, even if the city is broken and flees, it is also good to protect himself.

Moreover, this batch of guns was taken directly from Li Xian, which can more or less have a relationship, and when Li Xian really waved his army into the city, it was not necessary to look at this incense.

In short, the business of these guns will not be hindered by the officials, and most of the big families in the city will be interested, so we should think about it carefully. ”

The uncle and nephew of the Pan family are discussing the pistol business here, and Li Xian is also discussing with Xuan Zheng and others about meeting with Pan Wu.

"It is necessary to establish a dialogue channel with the people in Guangzhou, and the most important thing is to take this opportunity to sell some commercial pistols to make a fortune and relieve the financial pressure.

We now have about 10,000 regular troops and more than 20,000 strong men, and we have to give more than 100,000 yuan in monthly wages every month, plus the consumption of gunpowder, cloth, bullets, and various equipment, and the monthly cost is easily more than 200,000 yuan.

If you don't open up some financial resources, you can only support yourself for three or five months, and then you will have to eat the northwest wind. ”

Li Xian explained to everyone with a wry smile, I don't know if I don't train the army, but I don't know that the army is a giant beast that swallows gold in actual operation, don't look at the prestige of the Sanyuanli coalition army during this time, it is all piled up with money, from recruit training to weapons and equipment, actual combat and pensions, which one does not cost money.

Moreover, the money of this era was particularly valuable, the Qing government occupied a huge territory, and the central financial revenue was only about 40 million taels of silver a year, which was used to maintain nearly one million troops and a huge bureaucratic ranks.

The Sanyuanli coalition army had already consumed hundreds of thousands of taels worth of materials before, and it would cost about 200,000 yuan a month to maintain it, which would be 2.56 million yuan a year, which was much more expensive than the ordinary green battalion soldiers of the Qing army.

"Producing so many pistols won't delay the real military production, right?" asked Xuan Zheng uneasily.

"You can rest assured, pistols look more expensive than long guns, but they are all expensive in refinement, the technical difficulty of production is much lower than that of long guns, and mass production can be done with the simplest machine tools.

Our industrial production capacity is still very weak, but it is still no problem to separate such a simple machine tool, and it should be used to train workers.

The production cost of these pistols is only three or five taels of silver, but the selling price can reach fifty taels of silver, and the profit in the middle is very amazing.

This batch of 2,000 pistols has been sold, and if the market response is okay, I also want to appropriately expand the production of pistols.

If we can sell more than 4,000 pistols a month, we can reap a net profit of about 200,000 taels just by selling guns, and we can easily support the consumption of the army. ”

"It's good that you know what to do. Xuan Zheng nodded and stopped asking.

As for the problem of some people in Guangzhou City using these pistols to equip the army, these pistols are only single-shot pistols and not repeating pistols like revolvers, and their effective firing range barely reaches about 20 meters, and their role in real battle formations is extremely limited.

If this pistol can pose a certain threat to the professional army, the army might as well be disbanded as soon as possible, so as not to be embarrassed and lose one's own life.

The views of those who really understand modern warfare, such as Li Xian and Xuan Zheng, on the military value of these pistols are very different from those officials in Guangzhou who do not know how to do half a bottle of vinegar.

In any case, after the first round of the game, the negotiations between the two major forces of Guangzhou and Sanyuanli finally began.

Among those sent by the Guangzhou side to Sanyuanli to preside over the negotiations were Shen Baozhen, the general judge of Guangzhou, as well as several trusted officials and officials.

Shen Baozhen originally thought that it must be Li Xian himself who presided over the negotiations on the Sanyuanli side, but he didn't expect that the most important thing for Li Xian was the training of recruits, and he was not willing to waste time on endless nonsense, so he sent Wu Sanniang, the head disciple of Wumeiguan, to preside over the negotiations, and he stayed in the rear to continue to preside over military affairs.

This arrangement stabbed the hornet's nest, and the officials from Guangzhou were excited for a while, thinking that Li Xian's move was intended to humiliate them, so they directly refused to negotiate and went home.

This caught Li Xian off guard, and he thought for a while before he understood what the problem was.

After all, Li Xian grew up in a modern society, and he had no objection to women's participation in such important negotiations, but he didn't expect that in this old society, women's social status was very low, and ordinary large families had the saying that women could not sit at the right table, let alone participate in and preside over this kind of negotiation that was related to the lifeblood of a city.