Starting from 1618 of the Ming Dynasty

Chapter 25 The Foundation of Industry

The southwest corner of Lu Ji's camp was a restricted area surrounded by high walls and barbed wire (actually thorny brambles).

The place bears a sign that reads "Vehicle Repair Shop," but in reality, unauthorized personnel are strictly prohibited from approaching within a hundred paces. Even meals are delivered by Fan Fu himself. The guards standing at the entrance are Zhao Changying's most trusted personal soldiers.

At this moment, the air in this dimly lit workshop was suffocatingly hot, filled with the smells of coke, sulfur, and the acrid stench of metal cooling.

"Clang! Clang! Clang!"

The sound of hammers striking the metal was as dense as rain.

Bare-chested and muscular, Zhao Tie was frantically forging a red-hot iron bar on an anvil. Sweat streamed down his scarred back, sizzling and steaming as it fell onto the red-hot iron.

"It still doesn't work! It broke again!"

With a crisp "snap," Zhao Tie slumped down and threw down the pliers. The freshly quenched steel sheet had broken in two during the bending test.

"This iron from the Ming Dynasty has too many impurities! It's too brittle!" Zhao Tie plopped down on the ground, grabbed a nearby water ladle, and gulped down a mouthful. His eyes were bloodshot, and his hair was a mess. "Master, the kind of steel sheet (spring) you want that 'automatically springs back and doesn't deform even after thousands of snaps'—unless it's made of hundred-times-refined steel and forged by a master craftsman through countless hammer blows—mass production is... impossible!"

He pointed to the pile of scrap iron on the ground, his eyes filled with despair: "We've tried more than a dozen kinds of iron, even that 'Fujian iron' stuff, but it still doesn't work. Either it's too soft to bounce, or it's too hard and breaks when you press it."

Lu Yan stood at the door, holding several dark iron ingots and a packet of grayish-white powder. These were Fujian iron (a type of iron with low carbon content and fewer impurities) and purified saltpeter that he had obtained from Fan Yongfang.

Looking at Zhao Tie's dejected appearance, he wasn't angry; instead, he revealed a calmness typical of engineers.

"Master Zhao, it's not that the iron is bad, it's that the 'process' is wrong." Lu Yan walked into the workshop and placed the Fujian iron on the anvil. "We used water for quenching before. Water cooling is too fast. The steel is indeed hard, but it's also brittle. The internal stress—that is, the force—is too great and can't be locked in."

"This time, let's try a different approach." Lu Yan pointed to a bucket of rapeseed oil next to him.

"Oil?" Zhao Tie was taken aback. "Using oil for quenching?"

"That's right. Oil cools slowly, has less stress, and is more resilient," Lu Yan explained. "It's like trying to calm someone down. Do you throw them into an ice hole or let them feel the cool breeze? Throwing them into an ice hole will likely cause them to freeze to death, while a cool breeze will help them regain their senses."

This is the most basic knowledge of modern metallurgy, but in the Ming Dynasty, it was often a closely guarded secret of certain sword-making families.

"Oil?" Zhao Tie's eyes widened, his face showing distress. "That's so expensive! This barrel of oil would feed the entire camp for half a month!"

"Compared to guns, oil is worthless." Lu Yan didn't waste any words and immediately began to give instructions, "Heat this piece of Fujian iron until it's red-hot, fold and forge it thirty times—not three hundred times, that would be too costly. Then quench it in oil, and finally..."

Lu Yan paused, then stated the most crucial step, the one most easily overlooked by Ming Dynasty craftsmen: "Tempering. Place it in the embers of charcoal fire, keeping it slightly red for half an hour, allowing it to cool slowly. This is called 'eliminating internal stress'."

Although Zhao Tie didn't understand what "internal stress" meant, he was an old craftsman, and his intuition told him that there was a sense of "Tao" in what his young employer was saying.

A whole day.

Flames roared through the workshop. Lu Yan, like a true engineer, took off his long gown, rolled up his sleeves, and began recording data from each experiment on the wall with a charcoal pencil: heating time, oil temperature, tempering time…

This method of recording down to the minute left Zhao Tie, who was used to relying on "feel," dumbfounded.

Finally, after discarding more than a dozen steel plates.

As dusk fell, Zhao Tie, with trembling hands, picked out the last piece of steel. After oil quenching and low-temperature tempering, the steel piece had a captivating baked blue color, its surface gleaming with a faint luster.

He carefully inserted it into the already polished, simple gun bolt model.

"Click".

The trigger was pulled, the steel plate snapped back, and the hammer slammed heavily onto the flint and steel. Sparks flew everywhere.

"Again." Lu Yan calmly counted, his voice without any fluctuation.

"Click".

"Click".

……

It was pulled a hundred times in succession. The steel plate remained firm, rebounding strongly, without any sign of deformation or breakage.

"It's done! It's done!" Zhao Tie jumped up and hugged Lu Yan, who was covered in coal dust. Tears welled up in his eyes with excitement. "Master! This thing is really done! No need for a match, just pull a trigger and you can fire! This...this is a divine weapon!"

This is truly a divine artifact.

This is the core of the flintlock musket—the flintlock mechanism. Although in Lu Yan's previous life this was just the most primitive mechanical structure, in the Ming Dynasty, it meant that soldiers no longer needed to protect that damned matchlock in the wind and rain, and no longer needed that cumbersome ignition process.

"Don't get too excited." Lu Yan broke free from Zhao Tie's bear hug, picked up the gun model, and dusted himself off. "This is just the first step. The real trouble is yet to come."

"What trouble?" Zhao Tie asked, puzzled. "With this trigger mechanism, we can build a divine gun!"

"Air tightness." Lu Yan pointed to the barrel interface. "Our drilling machine is too outdated, the inner wall of the barrel is not smooth enough, and the clearance between the bullet and the barrel is too large. This will cause two problems: first, short range; second, easy to explode in the barrel."

In an era without precision machine tools, producing qualified seamless steel pipes by hand was practically a dream. The reason why the arquebuses of the Ming Dynasty were not very powerful was because they dared not load too much powder for fear of the barrel exploding.

"Then... what do we do?" Zhao Tie was like a deflated balloon. "We don't have any divine drills from heaven."

"Two options." Lu Yan held up two fingers, his eyes gleaming with rationality.

"First, use the brute force method. Thicken the barrel with multiple layers of wrought iron welded together. It's heavier, but safer. Just have the soldiers practice their arm strength."

"Second, and most importantly, is tactical compensation techniques."

Lu Yan walked outside the workshop and looked at the five hundred servants who were training in formation in the distance.

"Master Zhao, you have to understand. If we can't build a sniper rifle that can hit the bullseye from 100 paces, then we won't build it. What we want to build is a 'shotgun' that can turn the enemy into a sieve with a dense hail of bullets within 50 paces."

He turned around and gave Zhao Tie a startling order:

"I want you to manufacture this gun to a '60% yield rate' standard."

"Huh?" Zhao Tie was dumbfounded. "Six...sixty percent? Boss, you mean, even if four out of ten guns are broken, it's acceptable?"

"Yes. As long as it fires and can kill someone within fifty paces, it's considered合格 (qualified). Occasionally it misfires, that's fine, as long as it doesn't explode." Lu Yan's words were astonishing. "Because what I want isn't just one divine gun, I want a thousand."

"When a thousand guns fire at the same time, the accuracy and misfire rate of a single gun are smoothed out by the law of large numbers. If forty out of a hundred guns misfire, the remaining sixty are enough to tear the enemy in front of you to shreds."

"This is the truth of being shot in a line."

Zhao Tie stared blankly at Lu Yan. He had been a craftsman all his life, and all he had ever heard was "strive for perfection," never "good enough." But for some reason, this seemingly crude theory gave him an unprecedented sense of shock.

That was a devastating blow from industrialized production to small-scale farming and handicrafts.

Over the next two weeks, Lu Ji's blacksmith shop began a frenzied expansion.

Lu Yan introduced the "assembly line" to the gun manufacturing industry.

Some people were specifically responsible for rolling iron pipes, some for polishing gun bolts, and some for forging gunstocks. Zhao Tie became the chief engineer, in charge of the final assembly and quality inspection.

The first batch of twenty "Lu's No. 1" flintlock muskets (actually heavy smoothbore muskets) were quickly distributed to the most core servants.

On the drill ground.

"First rank, raise your guns!"

Zhao Changying, holding a finely crafted flintlock pistol, shouted orders.

Twenty servants awkwardly raised the heavy iron pipe, the dark muzzle of their guns pointing at the scarecrow fifty paces away.

"Ready—Fire!"

"Bang! Bang! Bang!"

A burst of gunfire, like popping beans, rang out. White smoke billowed, and the pungent smell of sulfur instantly enveloped the training ground.

Two guns misfired, and the hammer of one gun jammed. But the remaining seventeen lead bullets whistled out, sending the row of scarecrows flying, and even breaking two scarecrows in half.

Lu Yan stood on the reviewing stand, smelling the intoxicating scent of gunpowder, and nodded in satisfaction.

"This sound," he murmured to himself, "is the most beautiful music in a chaotic world."

With horses and guns, Lu's Horse and Carriage Company, this war machine, finally acquired real fangs. Meanwhile, the political storm in the capital was about to reach Shandong.