Late Ming Dynasty: Summoning players from Liaodong to support the Ming Dynasty

Chapter 78 A Symphony of Steel and Cement

The banquet in the private room ultimately failed to get any warmth from the food.

Or rather, from the very beginning, there was no joy at that dinner table, only a silent battle of cognition.

The last piece of venison was mechanically placed into the mouth of one of the guards, the chewing motion appearing unusually heavy. When the last wine glass was set down with a soft "clink," only a deathly silence remained in the private room.

Lu Jian didn't ask any more questions.

When the facts themselves are more absurd than any words, all questioning and interrogation become a joke. What he needs to do now is not to listen, but to see. To use his own eyes to measure just how insane this utterly upended world has become.

Chu Ze walked ahead, his pace neither hurried nor slow. Wang Erniu followed behind him, his burly figure like a moving wall, keeping the curious players who came closer at bay.

As soon as I stepped out of the reception building, an even more fervent wave of noise rushed towards me.

"Buying ore! Buying ore! Iron ore, copper ore, everything! Plenty to go around, and you'll be rewarded with merit points!"

"【Phoenix Chick】Logistics Team is recruiting casual players! Those who can grill meat, sew, and tell jokes will be given priority!"

Excellent benefits; new members receive a three-piece beginner's kit upon joining!

A player with the ID "Professional Screen Protector Applicator for Twenty Years" crept up to one of Lu Jian's men and lowered his voice.

"Brother, I think your sword is pretty good. Want me to enchant it? I just learned the 'Armor Penetration' inscription; it only costs fifty copper coins, and it'll cut people down super fast!"

The guard's eyelids twitched, and his hand was already on the hilt of his sword, emanating a chilling killing intent.

The player, however, was completely oblivious. Instead, their eyes lit up: "Oh, hostility has been triggered? Dude, you're quick on the uptake! Is there some special quest clue?"

"roll!"

Wang Erniu's large, fan-like hand reached out and grabbed the player by the back of the collar like a chick, then casually tossed him into the crowd. His movements were so practiced it was almost heartbreaking.

"Can't you see we're entertaining our distinguished guests? You all, if you're looking for trouble, don't choose today!" Wang Erniu cursed as he turned around, reverting to his usual taciturn doorman demeanor.

Chu Ze turned to the side and made a helpless gesture to Lu Jian, whose face was ashen.

"Lord Lu, please forgive us. The heavenly soldiers are lively and unruly, but fortunately they mean no harm."

Lu Jian gritted his teeth and squeezed out a few words: "It's alright, lead the way."

He's become numb.

Chu Ze led them not to the city's armory, nor to the wounded soldiers' camp, but straight towards the north city wall.

Lu Jian and his elite guards followed at the back, and the group passed through the orderly yet chaotic square, heading towards the very heart of the gray-white megacity—the city wall.

The horse path leading to the city wall has also been widened and repaired. When the horses' hooves step on the sloping ramp, the sound is no longer the dull thud of rammed earth, but a hard, crisp "clack, clack".

Lu Jian bent down and forcefully ran his gloved fingers across the grayish-white ground.

The touch from my fingertips was cold, rough, and incredibly hard, leaving only a faint white mark.

This is neither soil nor stone.

This was something he had never seen before.

When they finally reached the top of the city wall, wide enough for two carriages to travel side by side, a biting wind whipped up snowflakes and made their armor flutter loudly. But Lu Jian and his elite cavalry felt no cold at all.

Their hearts were already captivated by the scene before them, burning with intense emotion.

Beneath my feet lies a smooth, mirror-like gray-white ground. The crenellations, the walls themselves, and even the parapets of the city wall all possess a seamless, unified texture, with no visible trace of brickwork—as if the entire wall were carved from a single, massive gray rock.

Lu Jian walked to the wall, stretched out his hand, and pressed his entire palm against the cold wall.

hard!

smooth!

Heavy and substantial!

He tapped the wall hard with his knuckles, and the wall made a dull "thump, thump" sound. The sound was so deep and unsettling that it was unsettling, far beyond what a traditional rammed earth and brick structure could produce. The inside of this wall was probably solid, without a single gap!

"This substance is called cement by the heavenly soldiers," Chu Ze's voice rang out calmly from the side. "It is made by firing ordinary materials such as limestone and clay using a special method, and then mixing them with sand and water. Once solidified, it is harder than metal and stone."

Lu Jian's palm was still pressed against the wall. He could feel the cold, non-human aura seeping into his skin through his leather gloves.

Just then, a clear female voice came from not far away, carrying an undeniable sternness.

"Area Three! The mix proportions in Area Three are wrong! I've told you so many times, the compressive strength from this mix is ​​simply insufficient! Also, the spacing between the iron bars is too large! How can such a sparse mesh form an effective stress structure? Tear it down! Tear it all down and redo it!"

The crowd looked in the direction of the sound and saw a young woman dressed in gray overalls, her hair casually tied back with a wooden hairpin, standing with one hand on her hip and the other pointing at a section of newly poured wall, cursing loudly at a dozen or so burly "heavenly soldiers" around her.

It was Zhou Keke.

The players who were being scolded like chicks in front of her looked dejected, but instead of being resentful, they kept bowing and scraping.

"Yes, yes, Coco is right!"

"We'll fix it right now! We'll demolish it right now!"

"I can't promise next time! — Pshaw! I promise I won't next time!"

When Zhou Keke saw Chu Ze and Lu Jian's group approaching, she simply nodded from afar as a greeting. Then she turned back, picked up a blueprint covered with strange lines and symbols, and continued yelling at the players, "Look carefully! This is a structural diagram! The position of every iron bar, every stress point, calculate it accurately! This isn't playing with mud, this is science! Understand? Science!"

Lu Jian stood there, motionless.

He looked at the young woman giving orders, then at the "heavenly soldiers" who obeyed her every word and were even somewhat afraid of her, and his mind went blank.

Proportioning?

Label?

Compressive strength?

Iron bar?

Stress structure?

science?

He recognized each character individually, but when put together, they formed a completely incomprehensible cryptic text. He felt like an illiterate man standing at the gates of the Imperial Academy, utterly unable to read a single word. That absurd feeling of being utterly abandoned by the times, by a knowledge system he couldn't comprehend, made him, for the first time, doubt his own once-proud knowledge and judgment.

The phrase "ingenious skills and ingenious tricks" swirled in his mind, only to be shattered by the seemingly indestructible gray wall before him.

Chu Ze didn't explain, because the scene before him was the best explanation. He simply made a "please" gesture, leading the group of Jinyiwei guards, who were already in a daze, down the city wall and heading towards the south of the city.

Before they even got close, a tremendous roar and a wave of scorching heat made the warhorses under the imperial guards restless, snorting and unwilling to take another step forward.

Lu Jian and the others had no choice but to dismount and proceed on foot.

The further you go, the more intense the heat becomes, and the air is filled with a strong, pungent smell of sulfur and coke.

As they rounded a row of newly built shacks, a colossal, grotesquely ugly yet violently beautiful structure suddenly appeared before them.

It was a huge blast furnace haphazardly built of mud and bricks, two or three meters taller than ordinary houses. It looked like a clumsy, crouching steel behemoth, with its huge chimney constantly spewing billowing black smoke into the sky, turning half the sky gray-black.

Around the blast furnace were dozens of burly men, shirtless and wearing only shorts. Their faces and bodies were blackened by soot, revealing only their white teeth. They were shouting deafening chants as they frantically pumped air into the furnace using huge wooden bellows.

"Huff—!"

"Whoosh—!"

The sound of the bellows being pulled was as heavy as the panting of a giant beast.

"The general is here!"

Someone shouted, and a tall, slightly hunched figure, also dressed entirely in black, rushed out of the shed next to the blast furnace. Upon seeing Chu Ze, his face immediately lit up with an excited smile, and he ran over like he was showing off a treasure.

It was Gongshu Ban.

"General! You've come at the perfect time! This batch is fresh out of the oven! Look at the quality!"

Before he finished speaking, several players below the blast furnace used a huge iron spade to pry open a taphole that was blocked by refractory clay.

"boom--!"

A stream of molten iron, so bright it was almost blinding, gushed out of the taphole like surging lava, flowing along the pre-dug troughs and rushing toward the sand-cast molds beside it.

The intense light instantly turned everyone's faces bright red. The scorching heat caused Lu Jian and the others to instinctively take several steps back and cover their faces with their sleeves.

Lu Jian peeked through his fingers and felt a jolt to his soul.

The sheer volume of molten iron produced in just this one furnace is comparable to the output of the largest official ironworks in the capital, which takes a whole day of hard work to produce!

"This is a blast furnace, a technique bestowed upon us by the heavenly soldiers." Chu Ze's voice was exceptionally clear and cold amidst the enormous roar and the sizzling sound of molten iron flowing. "With this, every soldier of Guangning can don armor and wield a weapon."

Anyone can wear armor!

These six words, like six red-hot iron hammers, slammed into Lu Jian's heart.

He thought of the officials in the Ministry of War and the Ministry of Works in the capital, still arguing heatedly in court over the cost of military supplies and the ownership of a batch of armor, attacking each other relentlessly. He thought of the garrison soldiers who were heading to Liaodong, still wearing old cotton armor from decades ago, and many of them didn't even have a decent waist knife.

An indescribable sense of absurdity and sorrow welled up in his heart.

The molten iron quickly filled all the molds and began to cool slowly.

Gongshu Ban excitedly carried a piece of iron ingot that had already cooled and solidified, as if it were a rare treasure, and ran to Chu Ze and Lu Jian.

"General! Sir! Look!" He handed over the still-warm iron ingot. "Using the latest coke-refining method, the steel produced is all top-quality! I've tested it; its toughness and hardness are both optimal! A sword forged from this will cut through the armor of those Jurchen Tartars like cutting tofu!"

Lu Jian subconsciously reached out and took the heavy iron ingot.

It's extremely heavy!

He had been handling weapons for many years and was very knowledgeable about various materials. But the iron ingot in his hand was far heavier than any Ming Dynasty official ironware he had ever seen, and its texture was also much denser. There were almost no impurities or pores on its surface, and it presented a uniform, deep dark gray color.

He scratched it hard with his fingernail, leaving only a barely visible white mark.

This—this isn't iron at all!

This is steel! It's high-quality steel refined through hundreds of refinements!

In the imperial court, steel of this quality would be enough to forge the imperial sword bestowed by the emperor! But here, in this remote border town, it is produced like a roadside stone by an ugly earthen furnace!

Lu Jian held the iron ingot, feeling that it was burning hot.

He wasn't an ignorant layman; as a deputy commander of the Embroidered Uniform Guard, he had personally witnessed how the master craftsmen of the Capital's Arsenal spent months, hammering and refining steel, to obtain a palm-sized piece of good steel. The process was tedious and...

Expensive, the finished products were given priority to palace guards and border generals.

But what about right now?

This ugly lump of earth, spewing black smoke and roaring, produces a furnace of refined iron that is equivalent to half a year's hard work in a workshop of the Ordnance Bureau!

What's the logic behind this?

"My lord, look here!" Seeing that Lu Jian didn't speak, Gongshu Ban assumed that he didn't believe him, so he picked up a newly forged blade from the side and handed it to a player next to him, "Go, try it out with the Houjin waist knife we ​​captured earlier."

The player chuckled, took the blade blank, and picked up a genuine Later Jin-style waist knife with his other hand.

"Keep an eye on yourselves!"

He roared, gripped the knife with both hands, and slashed fiercely!

"when!"

A piercing clang of metal clashing!

Sparks flew everywhere!

The Later Jin waist sword, which had drunk the blood of countless Ming soldiers on the Liaodong battlefield, snapped in two with a snap! The break was as smooth as a mirror.

On that unremarkable-looking blade blank, there was only a faint white mark.

The guards behind Lu Jian swallowed hard, their Adam's apples bobbing.

"How was it, sir?" Gongshu Ban asked smugly, like a child showing off a toy. "I call this a performance test! This batch of material has just the right carbon content; its toughness and hardness are both optimal! A knife forged from this will cut through the armor of those Jurchen Tartars like slicing tofu!"

Carbon content? Optimal solution?

Lu Jian couldn't understand this nonsense, but he could see the broken knife.

"Holy crap! Loot dropped?" A passing player's eyes widened at the sight. He rushed forward and reached for the broken sword. "Does this count as a world boss drop? Dude, can I rogue this gear?"

"Get lost!" Wang Erniu kicked the player in the butt, making him stumble. "Can't you see we're busy? Go play somewhere else!"

The player wasn't angry. He got up, dusted himself off, and muttered, "So stingy. It's not like touching him will make me pregnant—"

Lu Jian ignored the farce and just stared intently at the iron ingot, his mind racing with calculations.

A single blast furnace can produce thousands of kilograms of molten iron per day.

What if there were ten? Or a hundred?

Everyone is armored, everyone is armed—Chu Ze's words just now were not an exaggeration at all!

That's what's happening now, a terrifying reality!

The Ming Dynasty spent millions of taels of silver annually to support the hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Liaodong, with the bulk of that expenditure going towards the purchase and repair of military equipment and armor. Yet, even with all that, after layers of exploitation, what reached the ordinary soldiers was still mostly scrap metal.

Here, Chu Ze, almost in an unreasonable way, created enough capital out of thin air to arm a large army!

Now, it's time to show him what truly terrifies the Later Jin Tartars.

Chu Ze's gaze passed over the colossal blast furnace spewing black smoke, over the busy players, and finally landed on the towering, gray-white city wall in the distance.

He stretched out his hand and pointed towards a bastion on the city wall that had been specially raised and reinforced.

"Lord Lu."

Chu Ze's voice snapped Lu Jian out of his daze.

"Steel and city walls are merely the foundation of defense. They can provide soldiers with a safe haven, but they are insufficient to defeat the enemy."

His voice paused, and his deep eyes, illuminated by the firelight, gleamed with a light that made Lu Jian's heart tremble.

"What truly caused those two thousand elite Jin soldiers in white armor to be annihilated beneath the walls of Guangning City was—"

"This is what it is."

Please come with me.