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Xianyang's letter couldn't be clearer, the center is ready to launch a counterinsurgency war against the Central Plains, but the preparation of grain and grass is still a little insufficient, Zhao Gao reminded Lu Zhe that he needs to pay the taxes of Nanjun this year to the central government to make amends for the previous loss of points.

Lu Zhe, who lost points or something, is trying to make up for it, but he is very reluctant to let him transport grain, to be honest, after all, food is everything now.

There is no statistics on the tax paid by Nanjun this year, and the record of previous years is about 300,000 stones, considering that this year has been affected by the military disaster, the taxes paid by the people should be between 200,000 stones, which may be lower.

One stone is 30 catties, 200,000 stone is 6 million catties, the amount of food for each meal of a soldier in wartime is about 8 taels, and the troops of 100,000 people have to consume about 250,000 catties of grain every day, and 250,000 stone is actually enough for 20 days.

The grain seized from Qianzhong County in Nanjun is about 5 million stones, which is 150 million catties in terms of catties, and at present, the meat food in Nanjun is provided well, and the consumption of plant food is halved, and if it is only provided to the 180,000 troops in Nanjun for consumption, it can be eaten for two whole years.

However, Lu Zhe not only had to feed the army in Nanjun, but also those recruited people also needed to provide food, and the captured population would also consume food. There were 370,000 registered minyu, and the population captured from Qianzhong County was 240,000, and the food of the soldiers was five taels per meal, the minyu was three taels, and the prisoners were two taels, so that the grain of five million stone was only enough to last for one year.

The chaos in the southern counties is far more destructive to production than imagined, and the spies sent to the counties have recently given back a lot of information, and many counties are seriously short of grain despite the recent autumn harvest, and some counties have fallen into a grain shortage.

The plundering of Qianzhong County is a special event in a special period, and there will be no next time. So this year's total amount of food is simply not applicable next year. A major war is about to break out in the Central Plains, and Nanjun cannot march into Lingnan according to the original plan, at least in a short period of time, otherwise if he can defeat the Baiyue army assembled by Yihu Song, the farmland near Lingnan in Qianzhong County can continue to be sown. Now the possibility of marching towards Lingnan is minimized, and the only area that can be used is the area of Qianzhong County close to Nangun.

Lu Zhe carefully looked at the farmland statistics of Nanjun, if he relied on the production of Nanjun alone, he could not feed an army of more than 100,000 people, which was the most troublesome thing for him. Now that the Qin State wants to use troops against the Central Plains, and there is no way for the expansion of Nanjun and it cannot be expanded, he is already thinking about the possibility of purchasing grain from the people of Bashu. After all, South County is rich in minerals, and a large number of furs have been seized in the past.

Speaking of minerals, the explorers sent to Qianzhong later reported that they had found a large number of suspected mineral veins in the upper mountains of Lishui, and it is still impossible to determine what kind of minerals they are.

In Nam-gun, a large number of minerals suspected of being precious metals have also been newly discovered in the area near Hanshui, and it is preliminarily concluded that they will be iron ore and silver ore, and there are many minerals that cannot be understood. On the Padang side, that is, on the Wuxian side, three iron mines and six coal mines were again discovered.

Lu Zhe is aware that modern Hubei is very rich in minerals. If he remembers correctly, especially iron ore and coal mines, but the fact that modern times can be mined does not mean that Qin Shi has that technique, and the people below report that there are indeed mines in the strata, but they are not capable of mining at all.

Most of the minerals that can be used today are pits that are relatively close to the surface. Rao is like this, the minerals that Nanjun can put into mining are not small, but in the era when iron-making technology is not mature, iron ore seems to be just a kind of chicken ribs, far less precious than copper ore.

Yuecheng, a great city that governs gold, has received an order. Their research on iron tools made some progress after the addition of coal mines, and a large number of impurities in ironmaking were removed, and the temperature of coal burning was more than 1,000 degrees. It is not comparable to charcoal at all, and they even made a metal that appears to be steel during the research phase, but after experiments, more problems arise, and the weapons made are either too soft or too brittle.

Lu Zhe was quite surprised to hear that there was a soft metal, and ordered someone to bring it to see that it was clearly a steel with low carbon content, which seemed to be very useful in modern times, but what can it do now?

However, refining something suspected of steel is a big deal, and Lu Zhe simply put aside government affairs and rushed to Yuecheng with his own soldiers.

Yuecheng is actually not a local place name, before Lu Zhe thought that the Yuecheng of Nanjun was the city of the Yue King Goujian period investigated by later generations, and later learned that the so-called "Yuecheng" of Lu Dao is a general name for the city of gold.

Yuecheng in Nanjun is not very large, there are about 4,000 people in it, the number of registered craftsmen is only 36, the number of craftsmen is 734, and the rest are family members.

Jiangling is only twenty-eight miles away from Yuecheng, Lu Zhe did not inform anyone before he arrived, their cavalry of more than 500 people approached Yuecheng less than five miles, and the military camp next to Yuecheng immediately sounded the horn of the alarm, waiting from a distance to see that it was the banner of their own army and a trumpet, from the preparation for war into the guard.

The number of garrisons stationed in Yuecheng was 6,000, and they were divided into three groups and stationed next to Yuecheng to form a three-dimensional triangle, that is, to form a corner.

Most of the weapons of the Nanjun army were produced in Yuecheng, and when Lu Zhe approached, he was deeply satisfied to see the army entering a state of meeting the enemy, and such a gesture showed that the garrison here was loyal to its duties.

When entering Yuecheng, the first thing I saw was a coal pile like a hill, many shirtless laborers pushed two-wheeled vehicles back and forth, Lu Zhe did not have much concept of ancient gold, specifically checked the alchemy site, and found that the so-called alchemy was actually a cylindrical furnace connected to the boxy stove, they were not the only individuals, next to a very large bellows against the burning furnace, there seemed to be a set of invisible pipes and the like underground.

"Is this golden juice?" The steaming heat had already made Lu Zhe sweat all over, and he pointed to a fiery red stove and asked.

The hunched craftsman seemed to be nervous, nodding frequently but not daring to speak.

Lu Zhe walked to another site and found that there were many ingot-shaped objects on the ground, and if I understood correctly, these should be the most preliminary iron ingots.

Not far from the iron ingot pile, many craftsmen were carving some templates, Lu Zhe walked over and picked up a template and looked at it, these things were clearly some lead blocks.

There are a lot of styles of templates, and you can tell a lot from the shape alone, some are strips and some are hooks. The large lead blocks, with some dense triangular shapes, look like templates for making arrows.

Seeing the uncooled gold juice being poured into a large groove, and then the gold juice flowed into the area where the template was placed, Lu Zhe's eyes widened more and more.

During the Qin Dynasty, the metallurgical technique did have an infusion method, but it seemed to be more of a block alchemy method.

The so-called perfusion method is to pour the template before the gold juice has cooled, and after cooling, the shape has been fixed, at that time, it is only necessary to polish and sharpen, and then add objects such as the handle of the weapon, and the whole weapon is formed.

The block refining method is an alchemy method that requires continuous heating and hammering, and the hundred steels in the Eastern Han Dynasty were forged by this method.

"The temperature of heating with coal and stone is enough, and the hardness of the weapon after removing those impurities is enough." Lu Zhe turned back to the side of the furnace, "Is there something wrong with the cooling procedures?" ”

Cooling is divided into cold air and water cooling, and the craftsmen tremble and explain with their lips trembling, and their method of iron-making is imitation of copper.

Lu Zhe seems to have read a certain novel, in which the iron-making technique is a casting method, as if he mentioned whether to use horse urine or some kind of liquid for water cooling, he ordered the craftsman to use such a process to test it on the spot.

The test was done, but the cooled iron bar still broke under the constant knocking, and it turned out that the difficulty of iron-making techniques could not be perfected by hearsay.

Alchemy has a corresponding recipe. How could it be that it could be done simply by removing impurities and cooling them with the urine of livestock, Lu Zhe didn't know anything about the formula for treating metals, so he simply stopped leading laymen and insiders to come up with any ideas.

"Isn't it a soft iron?" Lu Zhe ordered the craftsman to try to refine more soft steel, but the feedback was that it was made by chance during the experiment. I want to refine it again, but I don't have a clue at all.

Many products were inadvertently made, and Lu Zhe immediately asked them if they had any records or other documents, and when asked, these craftsmen had no records at all when they were researching, and they completely relied on memory.

"That's not going to work. You should keep a record of every step of the process during your experiments! Lu Zhe's tone was not very good: "Isn't it a fool's play if you don't make a record?" ”

After saying that, the refiners present were so frightened that they knelt on the ground.

"It doesn't matter if it's successful or not." Lu Zhe pointed finger by finger: "Learning from success and referring to failure, this is the attitude that research should have." ”

"But......" the old craftsman's face was full of fear: "Most of the people of the clan are illiterate. How to record? ”

"I'll bring in literate people, and you will dictate them, and they will take notes." Lu Zhe saw that the face of the craftsman had deteriorated, and couldn't help asking, "What?" ”

There is no one who is not entangled, the alchemy technique is originally a secret, it is basically passed down from generation to generation, the craftsmen in Yuecheng are all a clan, and now not only have outsiders come in but also record their craftsmanship, how can this work?

"So that's it?" Lu Zhe was a little speechless, the progress of the technique could not be narrow, but it was not easy to force it: "Then you will choose literate clansmen to record." ”

Seeing that Lu Zhe would not change his mind, they had no choice but to accept it.

"You all know the bounty, and now I'm going to increase it. If anyone can make a suitable iron weapon, I will not only reward him with food and wealth, but I will also make him an official. Lu Zhe felt a little annoyed, according to their progress, he didn't know that the year of the monkey and the month of the horse could only experiment with qualified iron.

Out of Yuecheng, Lu Zhe turned his head to take another look, and drove the mount to run with a shout of "driving".

Yuecheng's thinking of the Jinzhi clan is too rigid, and with the army's continuous orders, there is no sense of crisis at all, and they don't pay attention to the investment in new things at all.

"Maybe we should gather the craftsmen of the people, and then make a new source of gold......" Lu Zhe, who was galloping, became more and more determined: "Just build another 'Yuecheng' on the side of Padang!" ”

Lu Zhe still doesn't believe it, there must be brave men under the so-called heavy money, and now Nanjun is not short of money at all, and under the large-scale investment, as long as repeated experiments can definitely produce qualified iron.

"Knowledge takes time to know less," Zhu Ma looked at the construction site in front of him from a distance, which was the area of the Xinchengchi city wall, Lu Zhe squinted his eyes: "Except for civil engineering, I really don't have any knowledge of technical content." ”

In the planning, the width of the first wall on the periphery of the new city will be 8 meters, the height of the wall will reach 15 meters, and the total planned length will be nearly 50 kilometers due to the shape of a six-pointed star, with a total area estimated at 90 square kilometers.

Now that the outlines of some sections of the city wall have been built, as long as the sections of the city wall are connected one after another, then the first wall on the periphery is regarded as the opening of the city, and what is missing is the masonry of the female wall and the tower.

The brick-making technique of the Qin period has become mature, for example, some new sections of the Great Wall in the north are made of masonry, and the outline of the new city will also adopt the brick-laying mode, and the female wall and city tower are naturally the same.

What Lu Zhe saw now was that Min Yu was digging the foundation of the second city wall of Xinchengchi, and the distance between the first and second walls would be less than 100 steps, and the width of the second city wall was designed to be ten meters and the height would reach 18 meters, so the foundation dug was naturally wider and deeper than the second one.

The reason why the two sections of the wall are the first low and the second high is because of the defense, and the sections between them will be designed to resemble the urn city. At that time, if there was an enemy attacking the city, the soldiers on the first and second walls could threaten the enemy troops outside the city with bows and arrows.

At the same time, even if the first section of the wall is captured, the enemy soldiers will climb the first wall and face a steady stream of long-range attacks from the defenders on the second wall.

The ground between the two walls is designed to be slightly sloping, which is intended to drain water, and the second is intended to be ......

After the first gate was lost, it was impossible for the enemy troops attacking the city to enter too much due to space problems, and the sloping ground was conducive to the second wall to cast the rolling stone and wood rolling, and it was conceivable what would happen at that time.

Lu Zhe has only designed two walls at present, and the rest of the walls are still being conceived, but the width and height of the remaining walls will certainly not be wider and taller than the second wall.

In ancient times, there was always an inner city and an outer city, this new city covers an area of 90 square kilometers, is located between Yiling and Jiangling, and its scale is wider than Xianyang.

It is certainly impossible for the new city to be completed within ten years, and Lu Zhe's idea is to complete the basic defense works within one year, and the water and drainage in the city will also be completed within two years, and there is only a preliminary plan for residential areas and so on. For his mansion, he had the intention of building it grandiosely, and it was still being conceived.

Lu Zhe is still considering the order for Xinchengchi, and there are only two alternative names at present: Chang'an and Jinling. Needless to say, there must be some kind of bad taste for such a name...... (To be continued......)

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