Time flies, time flies, and it is a new year in the vast looking back.

This year's New Year, for Zhang Yan, is undoubtedly a happy year, this time last year, Xuzhou is still shrouded in Cao Cao's clouds, this year not only drove away Cao Cao, but also expanded the territory, Qingzhou, Yanzhou into the scope of Shili. In just one year, the changes are really fast.

During the Chinese New Year, Zhang Yan, as the overlord of one party, began to sacrifice to the sky, the earth, and the gods in accordance with local customs, praying for a smooth wind and rain next year and a bumper harvest in the coming year.

Although Zhang Yan is more disgusted with feudal superstition, he is in this backward era and can only follow the local customs. The sacrificial activity, under the auspices of Zhang Zhao, Zhang Yan was busy from morning to night, and when the event was over, Zhang Yan was relieved.

After finishing the sacrificial activities on the first day of the Lunar New Year, Zhang Yan began to walk the streets and alleys again, going to the homes of his subordinates to sit down, summing up this year, looking forward to the coming year, giving gifts to reward those who have made contributions this year, and giving some encouragement.

In addition, Zhang Yan also gave every incumbent official a heavy year-end bonus, no matter what the political performance of this year, everyone has a share anyway, and will never be disappointed, and encourages everyone to make persistent efforts.

The New Year was spent in extreme joy, and Zhang Yan also gave the officials a seven-day vacation for this purpose, so that they could spend a good year.

Of course, the more this time, the more we must pay attention to the rigor of defense, so the army is more difficult, and when others celebrate the New Year, they still have to stick to the front-line posts.

However, Zhang Yan did not let these troops hold on in vain, within seven days of the New Year. All the troops who stick to the front-line posts. Twice the salary. In addition, they are also given time off, and if they want to rest at any time after seven days, they can apply in advance, and after getting permission, they can take seven days off.

In the seven days of the New Year, the entire Central Plains is immersed in a New Year's flavor. Seven days later, Zhang Yan and officials at all levels began to return to their posts to work and begin to deal with the backlog of official duties that had been backlogged for seven days.

On the eighth day of the first lunar month, Tai Shici was once again instructed by Zhang Yan to lead the army, take a sea ship, bring a batch of goods again, and go to Liaoxi to exchange for another 5,000 war horses.

Half a month later, five thousand war horses. Once again, they were transported back to the seaport of Quxian County. This time, Li Cai came back with Tai Shici. Although the Wuhuan people are not short of horses, Zhang Yan doesn't want to get so many cavalry, after all, buying a horse is like buying a car, although you can buy it, but the maintenance cost in the later stage is very high, 10,000 horses, enough to form 10,000 cavalry, this number, in the Central Plains, just sound, is daunting enough.

In view of Li Cai's contributions, Zhang Yan deliberately opened up a new administrative department, called the Ministry of Commerce, with Li Cai as the director of the Ministry of Commerce, and his position was roughly the same as that of a school lieutenant. In addition, Zhang Yan also specially assigned some subordinate officials to Li Cai, and his administrative office was set up in Qu County, and he became a neighbor of Mi Qiang, the county commander of Qu County.

Zhang Yan returned to Pengcheng with Tai Shici and 5,000 war horses.

As soon as he arrived in Pengcheng, Zhang Yan asked Tai Shi Ci and Xu Chu to start selecting soldiers who were skilled in bows and horses, and then formed a cavalry team, which was trained by Tai Shi Ci and Xu Chu respectively.

As of the first day of February in the second year of Xingping, Zhang Yan had a total of 100,000 regular troops, including 30,000 in Yanzhou, 30,000 in Qingzhou, 30,000 in Xuzhou, and 5,000 in Chen Deng, Zhou Tai, and Jiang Qin.

In order to gather the equipment of the 100,000-strong army, Zhang Yan strictly ordered the smelters distributed in five places, Yingxian, Pengcheng, Quxian, Juxian, and Tangyi, to build weapons and armor day and night.

In order to keep improving, but also to pursue speed, Zhang Yan deliberately gave these five smelters a death order, and at the end of July this year, they must each create 100,000 pairs of weapons and battle armor.

To this end, Zhang Yan deliberately made a division of labor, so that the smelter in Yingxian County was responsible for building battle armor, the smelter in Pengcheng was responsible for building steel knives, the smelter in Qu County was responsible for building steel guns, the smelter in Ju County was responsible for building arrows, and the smelter in Tangyi County was mainly responsible for building agricultural tools and cooking utensils.

In order to complete the task, the five smelters do not like to recruit blacksmiths, but blacksmiths are limited after all, and if they forge little by little like this, it will be impossible to complete the task by July this year.

To this end, Zhang Yan thought of a way, he met the blacksmiths to make molds, boiled the iron ore into molten iron at high temperature, and then poured the molten iron into the mold, and then the blacksmiths guarded the side, beating, forging, and forming an assembly line.

However, in order to establish an assembly line, it is necessary to have a transmission force. Zhang Yan asked the carpenter to carve out several large gears according to his wishes, and then used the gears as molds, and let the blacksmiths draw scoops according to the gourd to forge iron gears.

When the gear forging was successful, Zhang Yan made it into a rollover that relied on hydraulic impact and supplemented by manpower, and then drove the chain attached to the gear, pulled the iron sheet connected to the chain, and completely pulled the model made of stones.

In this way, the blacksmith only needs to stand on a line, when to strike, and as long as he knows the time, he can quickly forge what he wants.

Zhang Yan's invention, once Shiyan succeeded, immediately promoted to all smelters, the original entire forging process needs a blacksmith to repeatedly beat many times to succeed, now a blacksmith only needs to repeat an action, can be forged successfully, such a simple action, even if not a blacksmith person, only need to pick the hammer, stand on the production line to learn a few times, can also be proficient. Its productivity has also been greatly improved.

The five major smelters have successively set up several production lines, and the productivity of each smelter, according to this method, has been greatly increased by several times compared with the previous productivity, and the task of forging 100,000 finished products may be completed ahead of schedule.

In addition to improving the production of jishu in the smelter, Zhang Yan also applied the advanced knowledge he had mastered to other fields.

When he was a child, Zhang Yan always wanted to be an inventor, so he was very interested in the things around him, such as what Yujian had, he had to ask the roots, and he had to know how this thing was made.

In order to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. Zhang Yan often went to consult his grandfather. His grandfather was a watchmaker. I also like inventions and creations, and when I saw that Zhang Yan had such a strong desire for knowledge, I took the trouble to tell Zhang Yan about inventions and creations, as long as he knew something, he would explain it to Zhang Yan without reservation.

It's a pity that Zhang Yan didn't become an inventor later, because everything he wanted to invent had already been invented. Serendipitously. Zhang Yan went to be a mercenary. But in his heart, he always wanted to be an inventor.

At this time, in ancient times, Zhang Yan had so much knowledge of the future, and he could live an addiction to invention and creation at this time, as long as the conditions permitted, he could make anything.

As a result, paper became Zhang Yan's first goal to improve.

Because, Zhang Yan, who is used to living a modern life, has always been. They are all worried about the lack of toilet paper, and they have to scrape with bamboo chips to. His anus hurt when he scraped. Fortunately, he is powerful and rich, so every time he wipes his buttocks, he always uses a lot of money to buy paper.

This kind of paper is specially written paper, which is very hard, and it is really not very cool to wipe your buttocks. Zuihou, Zhang Yan switched to using cloth, cutting the cloth into small pieces with scissors, and then used it to wipe his buttocks.

Therefore, in the past year or so, Zhang Yan has used the most expensive thing is cloth.

In order to be able to live a better life, it is urgent to improve the paper, in Zhang Yan's view.

Paper, although it has been invented in this era, has not been widely promoted, and the jishu of papermaking is relatively backward, and the paper produced is relatively rough.

To this end, Zhang Yan used the papermaking jishu he was familiar with to improve the papermaking process, and set up a paper mill outside Pengcheng, recruited a group of workers, and finally succeeded in making paper after repeated shiyan.

The paper produced is not only beautiful, but also easy to use, and much more durable than the original paper.

In addition, Zhang Yan also specially manufactured a kind of toilet paper, which has a very low hardness, almost reaching the level of softness, and it is the most suitable to wipe the buttocks.

To this end, Zhang Yan ordered the paper mill to produce toilet paper in large quantities, and encouraged the people to wipe their butts with toilet paper. In this way, he can sell toilet paper as a commodity.

In addition to improving the paper-making jishu, Zhang Yan also stole the wisdom of the ancients, set up another printing house outside Pengcheng, flexibly applied his life's movable type printing skills to the printing house, and then began to print books, encouraging school-age children to go to school, so as to improve the overall cultural literacy of the people.

In addition, Zhang Yan also specially hired many teachers to go into the barracks to teach those illiterate soldiers to learn to read and write.

The success of papermaking directly gave Zhang Yan a new way to get rich, and the application of printing technology also saved the unnecessary trouble of manually copying books.

The combination of the two jishu was quickly promoted by Zhang Yan, and after the first batch of toilet paper was made, Zhang Yan personally endorsed the toilet paper.

At first, people just bought with the mindset of trying it out, so they didn't take it seriously.

Who knows, on the second day, thousands of people in Pengcheng were empty, and all of them went to the paper mill outside the city to line up to buy toilet paper.

Because toilet paper is a daily consumable, the price of toilet paper is low, and almost everyone can afford to buy it, so the backlog of toilet paper produced in the paper mill is full of a large warehouse, and it is sold out within a day.

Seeing a huge business opportunity, Zhang Yan expanded the size of the paper mill and continued to produce toilet paper in large quantities to meet the per capita needs.

Printing books also requires a lot of paper, and Zhang Yan first promoted the printed books in a small area in Pengcheng. Contrary to the big sales of toilet paper, no one wants to give away printed books for free, because people in this era generally have a low level of education and basically don't read books.

Therefore, Zhang Yan had no choice but to improve his strategy, first giving a batch of books to the scholar family for free, first seeing the response, and then making another plan.

As a result, this kind of printed book was very popular with the scholars, and they all rushed to ask where they could buy it. With such books, there is no need to copy them by hand, which saves a lot of time and effort.

So, after learning that Zhang Yan was selling books, the students came to buy them one after another.

Zhang Yan deliberately raised the price, taking the high-end and high-grade luxury route, as long as it is a scholar, few families are poor, buying a book to read back is easier than copying. This value, the students of the scholar clan will still calculate.

The hot sale of toilet paper and books earned Zhang Yan a lot of money, and in just one month, Zhang Yan's treasury was filled a lot.

With such a good amount of money, Zhang Yan really regretted that he didn't do it before, otherwise, he would have been developed by now.

On the first day of the first month of March, a secret letter from Guanzhong once again broke Zhang Yan's calm heart, and at the same time made him wake up from the enthusiasm for invention and creation.

The letter said that Li Dao and Guo Yan turned their faces, one kidnapped the emperor and the other kidnapped hundreds of civil and military officials, and met each other in Chang'an City and attacked each other every day.

Although there are only a few words, Zhang Yan, who is familiar with history, knows very well that the time he is waiting for is about to come, and his next move is to take advantage of the time when Li Dao and Guo Yan are attacking each other, lead the army westward, snatch the current emperor, bring it back to Pengcheng, and coerce the Son of Heaven to order the princes!

Note: All the inventions and creations in the article are pure fiction, please do not take it seriously! (To be continued......)