As for the remaining seven or eight men, after interrogation, Yu Xiaotian learned that most of them were merchants or children of wealthy families in villages or counties along the coast of Fuzhou, or simply merchants, and the reason why Zhou Cheng kept them from killing them was to wait for their families to buy them back with money.

So after Yu Xiaotian discussed with Liu Laoliu and others, he asked the Li family to send the news to his family, informing them that the original ransom would be halved and handed over to the Li family, and it could be redeemed.

Although the Li family was not very happy about this, but now they and Yu Xiaotian have formed a substantial relationship with the owner of the nest, and this kind of thing is also within their responsibility, so they secretly arranged for someone to do this, passed the news out, and did not come forward as the Li family to collect the ransom, so as not to incur someone to report to the official that their Li family was a bandit.

However, Yu Xiaotian became interested in one of the young men surnamed Feng, because according to the confession of this young man surnamed Feng, his father Feng Tianqing was a very famous businessman in Guangzhou Prefecture, and as long as Yu Xiaotian sent him back to Guangzhou Mansion, he could guarantee that his father was willing to pay three thousand taels of silver to redeem him.

Zhou Cheng captured him on a boat at their house before, and he had sent someone to send a letter to Guangzhou, asking his father to ransom him with silver, but his father estimated that he had not received the news yet, so he was brought here by Yu Xiaotian again, so Zhou Cheng had not had time to get the ransom, otherwise Zhou Cheng's vote would have been developed, enough for him and his subordinates to eat for two years, and Yu Xiaotian would be cheaper in vain.

Yu Xiaotian was really overjoyed after knowing the Tao, but he didn't expect that this time from Zhou Cheng's lair, the richest thing he got would be this meat ticket, just this young man surnamed Feng exceeded the value of all the goods he stole from Zhou Cheng's hands.

Knowing that this young man surnamed Feng was a strange commodity, Yu Xiaotian immediately ordered that this young man surnamed Feng be taken as a guest of honor, and he was kept alone, and only when there was a chance in the future, he sent someone to Guangdong to contact his family and redeem him.

With the end of the quarantine period of the newcomers, the arrival of various materials and the arrival of tools, the project of the Treasure Island Water Village was also launched, under the command of Li Gouzi, some people used pickaxes and shovels to dig a deep ditch along the periphery of the village, and then put the logs into the deep ditch side by side, and then backfill and tamp the sand and gravel, so that a wooden wall was gradually formed.

However, because the island is mostly stony, the excavation of deep ditches is very laborious, and as a last resort, Yu Xiaotian has no choice but to allocate a part of the limited gunpowder reserves for blasting operations in some of the rocky hard places.

And they had more gunpowder on hand recently, and after the saltpeter sulfur they had robbed in the early stage was carefully crushed, Yu Xiaotian used the fine charcoal he bought from the Li family to grind it into powder, and according to the ratio of the best gunpowder he knew, mixed it into usable gunpowder.

However, such powdered gunpowder still made Yu Xiaotian feel dissatisfied, because he knew that the specific gravity of saltpeter sulfur and charcoal is different, and when stored and transported, the components with a large proportion will sink, and the light specific gravity will float to it, which will eventually affect the ratio of gunpowder, resulting in insufficient gunpowder power, and may even cause it to fail to detonate, so before the development of new gunpowder, the best way to maintain the power of black gunpowder is to make it into granulated gunpowder.

The advantages of granular gunpowder are many, in addition to the convenience of storage and transportation, the most important thing is that the power is far more than ordinary powdered gunpowder, which is of great help to them to exert the power of artillery and gunpowder in the future.

Originally, when the Li family was looking for saltpeter sulfur in Xiaotian, they were still skeptical, thinking that even if Yu Xiaotian got these saltpeter sulfur, he would not necessarily be able to configure gunpowder, because in their opinion, preparing gunpowder is only a skill in the hands of a few people, and ordinary people will not know how to mix gunpowder.

But what they never imagined was that for a person like Xiaotian who came from later generations, it was pediatrics, and later generations were afraid that elementary school students would know how to configure the proportion of gunpowder, not to mention people like Yu Xiaotian, this matter would not be difficult for Yu Xiaotian at all.

As for granular gunpowder, in this era is actually nothing new, someone has already discovered the benefits of granular black powder, and mastered the production method of granular gunpowder, the Ming Dynasty army, in this era has also begun to use granular gunpowder, but it has not been widely popularized, Europeans have also mastered the production method of granular gunpowder at this time, but no one thought that people like Yu Xiaotian would actually make granular black powder.

For the matter of making granular black powder, Yu Xiaotian's solution is very simple, he just spreads the powdered black powder that has been mixed with a good mixture, and sprays some glutinous rice syrup evenly on it.

The glutinous rice milk itself has a certain viscosity, and after shaking, it will stick the surrounding powder into granules, and then dry it to form hard particles, and then sieve to obtain gunpowder of different sizes.

Yu Xiaotian just used this very primitive, but very effective method, he easily got the granular gunpowder, after it was made, he tried it, and found that the performance of this granular gunpowder is stable, the power greatly exceeds the powdered gunpowder, and there is very little black smoke, the combustion is very full after deflagration, and the smoke is also in a state of green smoke.

For this reason, Yu Xiaotian asked people to use this granular gunpowder to load the cannon and fire a few rounds, and it was found that this granular gunpowder increased the chamber pressure of the cannon chamber a lot under the same charge, and the firing range and power increased by nearly thirty percent.

He specially selected three careful and steady subordinates among his subordinates, and entrusted them with the responsibility of gunpowder production, and in consideration of safety issues, at the southern end of the island, several houses were specially built, and let them make gunpowder outside the village, and set up their first gunpowder workshop, and ordered that fireworks were strictly prohibited around the gunpowder workshop, and only allowed to be produced during the day, and no lamp production was allowed at night. It is transported to a special underground warehouse and stored for use.

After solving the problem of gunpowder, the progress of the construction of the village began to improve rapidly, and for a time there would be a rumbling sound on Treasure Island every day, and some hard rocks were blown up in the blasting sound of gunpowder, which greatly increased the speed of construction.

At this time, Yu Xiaotian suddenly missed the ordinary cement that he was used to in the old time and space, if he had this thing in hand now, where would he use so much effort, only need to mix cement and sand and gravel, he can easily build a strong fortress, and he doesn't have to use these logs to build his stockade.

It is a pity that although the production of cement is not a difficult thing for him, the small Treasure Island does not have any conditions for firing cement by himself, even if it is simpler soil cement, they do not have the conditions for production, so they can only use the most primitive method to carry out construction.

Fortunately, what they built this time was just a simple small village, and the amount of construction was not very large, otherwise, with only their dozens of laborers, God knows when they would finish these things.

Even so, it took them nearly twenty days to build the wall of this stockade, and at this time, it was also the end of the second year of the Apocalypse.

Yu Xiaotian looked at the one-foot-tall log wall in front of him, and couldn't help but feel emotional, pinching his fingers, he came to this world, and in the blink of an eye, half a year passed.

In the past six months, he has turned from a person in distress to the extreme, and turned into the leader of a group of pirates with dozens of troops, if it was in the old time and space where he lived, he would not have dreamed of this kind of thing, and after doing this business, he found that even if he was a pirate, it was not as simple as he originally thought, acting at sea, it can be said that every step is risky, and the slightest carelessness will be wasted.

And he didn't understand this truth until he had been in this business for so long, and now he just had a place to settle, and even he himself couldn't tell what the future was.

But on the other hand, in the past few months, he has done a good job, from the initial twenty or so people, one large and one small two boats, in a few months the strength has doubled, and the number of ships has also expanded to four, compared to many peers who went to sea for piracy, his speed is also quite fast.

Thinking of this, Yu Xiaotian couldn't help but feel arrogant in his heart, no matter what, his first kick was kicked out, as long as he controlled his subordinates in the future, he believed that the road in the future would be wider and wider, and sooner or later one day he would no longer have to worry about precariousness.

A burst of firecrackers suddenly sounded at the gate of the wall, followed by the cheers of a group of people, Yu Xiaotian turned around and walked towards the gate.

(Please leave your precious red ticket after reading it!) Thank you very much! ）