In addition to the passengers who have purchased fifth-class berth tickets, there are also a large number of passengers who have bought through-the-boat tickets carrying straw mats and quilts received from the attendants into the fifth-class cabin, which is located in the bottom cabin, and the unventilated fifth-class cabin is crowded and the air is turbid, fortunately in winter, if it is summer, it will be unbearable hot.

The Jiangyu No. 3 had a passenger capacity of only more than 800 people, but it was overloaded by more than 1,500 people, which means that more than 700 people bought cabins without bunks. Some of the cabin passengers were accommodated in the cargo hold below the bow, while some were placed in the fifth class cabin, and the remaining part was placed in the aisle of the fourth class deck.

"Woo-" The whistle sounded, and the two chimneys in the middle of the ship spewed out thick smoke, and the steamer slowly left the dock, and the two steam engines in tandem drove the propellers to spray water to the back, and the steamer sailed in the direction of Wusongkou.

The steamer sailed on the Huangpu River, Liu Muchen's bed was by the window, through the porthole, he saw the high-rise buildings and factories on both sides of the river, the rows of neat wharves on the shore, the masts on the river like a forest, and all kinds of merchant ships and warships moored on the wharf, and he couldn't help but sigh at the rapid changes in the city. When he first came, it was only a small city, but now it has become a big city that surpasses Nanjing, and I don't know if it has surpassed the capital in the north.

The steamer sailed out of Wusongkou, and built a strong castle fortress on both sides of Wusongkou, all of which were made of boulders and cement, and the fortress was densely packed with shooting holes, and the powerful heavy artillery was hidden in the top of the fort, and the muzzles of the black hole blocked the river, and any enemy ships with bad intentions would be sunk.

In Wusongkou, there are all kinds of warships moored on the river, including sail warships, new steam ironclad ships, and wooden-hulled warships with sail and steam dual power.

Jiangyu No. 3 went upstream, berthed in Nanjing, Anqing, Jiujiang and other places on the way, and berthed at each port for two hours, and then continued to pull anchor and set sail. The steamer sailed at a speed of eleven knots, and after a long journey of three days and three nights, the steamer stopped at Wuchang.

Liu Muchen took his wife and daughter and went straight to Wuchang Railway Station. After arriving at the train station, I found that it was also crowded with people, and a large number of people returning home for the Spring Festival were queuing up to buy tickets. Liu Muchen waited in line for a whole afternoon, and finally bought a ticket to leave the next morning in the evening.

The hotel accommodation around Wuchang Railway Station was very expensive, and Liu Muchen was reluctant to spend this money, so he took his wife and daughter to sit at the door of the waiting room for the night. At the entrance of the waiting room and ticket hall, there are a large number of people like him who go home, who are reluctant to spend accommodation fees, so they squat at the door.

The day dawned, the sun shone on the Wuchang Railway Station, which is the starting point of the Wuhan-Guangzhou Railway, and trains stopped on the platform and were ready to go.

The waiting room is crowded with people, and people who have been busy for a year are waiting here with large bags and small bags, ready to embark on the journey home. In fact, this is also driven by social development, with the development of capital, the capitalists need more industrial workers, which needs to drive the peasants off the land. In order to drive the peasants out of the land, Wang Yu adopted the methods of paying taxes as a whole of the officials and gentry, allocating meritorious fields, and unifying the system of renting manors, and also used the method of silkworm cannibalism to force a large number of peasants to leave the land and go to the city to become industrial workers.

Liu Muchen's family finally got on the train home, which is a long-distance ordinary passenger train from Wuchang to Guangzhou, which departs from Wuchang Railway Station at 8 o'clock in the morning every day, only needs to run for 36 hours, and arrives in Guangzhou at 8 o'clock the next night. However, on single-track railways, delays are commonplace, and under normal circumstances, they are delayed by one or two hours, and in case of bad weather, it may be difficult to say that they will be late for a whole day.

Originally, from Wuchang to Guangzhou, ordinary people had to walk for more than ten days, or even a month, but now it only takes two days and one night to arrive, which is unimaginable in the past.

Liu Muchen took a third-class car, no seat ticket, the carriage was crowded with people, and he couldn't even walk through the aisle. Fortunately, he and his wife and daughter were short-haul passengers and were standing by the door.

Since it is an ordinary bus, it stops and goes all the way, and almost every small station stops. It took less than 300 kilometers and about ten hours to reach Yuezhou Station when it was dark. After Liu Muchen and his family got off the train, they could only stay at a hotel near the station for one night, and then take a boat sailing in the local river to go home the next morning.

After a long journey of five days and four nights, Liu Muchen's family finally rushed back to their home before the Spring Festival.

……

Thousands of miles away, the Ingeda Castle near the Chita River Valley, which later became known as the city of Chita, was still a small wooden castle at this time, where 160 Russian soldiers, 150 Cossack cavalry, and more than 200 local indigenous soldiers were captured as slaves by the Russians.

Russian officer Pod Bektov stands on the top of the castle and looks out over the frozen snowfields ahead. Originally, the Russians sent an expedition to the Far East to explore, and the opponents encountered were all local natives, and those rabble were not opponents of the Russian army at all, and the local small tribes either surrendered to the Russians or were exterminated. The only fly in the ointment is that the Russians, desperate to find an outlet to the sea, found that the ice period of the eastern outlet to the sea was too long, and it was not a good outlet at all.

The Russians did not give up when the search for an outlet to the sea failed, and after arriving in the Far East, they continued their exploration to the south, knowing that if they went all the way south, they would definitely find a natural ice-free port.

The Russians' expedition can be said to be thrilling, the locals who resisted were slaughtered by them, and the rest were natives who honestly surrendered to them, used them as cannon fodder, and slaves.

However, since a few years ago, the Russian expedition encountered trouble, first at the mouth of the Heilongjiang River, and then a Cossack officer actually gave up the expedition and did business with the Ming army entrenched in the lower reaches of the Heilongjiang River, and sold all the fine war horses used by the Cossacks to the Ming people.

In fact, Zheng Xi himself was also cultivating war horses, he crossed Mongolian horses and Arabian horses, as well as European war horses sent back from the Americas by Zheng Jing, and also cultivated his own Don hippopotamus.

In the midst of thousands of miles of frozen snow, a large team of sledders appeared. The team was all dressed in white capes and white cotton armor, and the soldiers held muskets in their hands, some of them using mini-rifles and paper-loaded rifled guns, and some of the sleds carried new field guns and howitzers.

"Dashuai, there are still fifty miles to go, and in front of you is the Rakshasa Ingada Castle!" A scout reported to Zheng.