Chapter 179- 400 Thousand
Translator: TeamTWO
Editor: Nora
In reality, everyone's personal assets had been tabulated and turned into a bunch of numbers. As for the use of these numbers, the federal government didn't reveal.
In the morning, Ouyang Shuo called Sun Xiaoyue to ask about her Grandfather recruiting Scientists.
Based on her summary, her Grandfather had contacted 20 odd scientist in this half a month. They were all in the Dali region and Sun Xiaoyue brought them around to get used to the game environment.
Apart from that, Ouyang Shuo asked Sun Xiaoyue to do another thing—investigate the Cui family in the Dali region, especially what kind of reaction they had to Cui Yingyu disappearing.
After upgrading to a city, Ouyang Shuo finally had the ability to make contact with the Cui family. Since Sun Xiaoyue was in the Dali Region, he wanted her to help join both parties.
In the afternoon, Song Jia made a call to Ouyang Shuo.
Ouyang Shuo's soldier token and message had succeeded as expected. Song Jia and Yuanping's marriage had been indefinitely delayed.
After Song Jia learned of the news, she totally admired Ouyang Shuo and would often call him.
At night, Ouyang Shuo got online on time.
After completing his cultivation, Ouyang Shuo didn't remain in the lord's manor. Instead, headed toward the east region. In a large part of half a month, although they hadn’t completed the city walls, the Organization of the city was already in place.
The bow and crossbow workshop, armory division workshop, weapons workshop and alchemy workshop were located in the east region.
Ouyang Shuo walked into the Bow And Crossbow Division workshop, the secretary-cum-manager, advanced bow maker Wu Peng went up to welcome him and said respectfully," Sire!"
In olden society, such people were called artisans and their societal status were very low. Hence, they all had very low self esteem and treated their lords with a lot of respect. Maybe only the only exception was the secretary of the Armoury Division, advanced blacksmith Wang Tao.
Ouyang Shuo nodded and asked,"Secretary Wu, how many crossbow machines has the division made?"
The structure of the crossbow can be split into three parts: arm, bow and machine. The arm was mostly made of wood, the bow was placed across the front portion of the arm, and the machine was fixed around the back of the arm.
The crossbow machine that Ouyang Shuo asked about was the most important portion of the crossbow, the machine.
It was mainly made up of copper, but it could also be made of iron. The front was the ‘teeth’ used to hang the string and behind that was a connecting link. Engraved on it was the angle and the distance. This was similar to the scope of a modern gun, and based on the distance of the target, the user adjusted the shooting angle to increase accuracy.
At the bottom of the casing was the input link used to fire the bolts.
When the user fired the crossbow, they pulled the string and hooked onto the ;teeth’, which placed a bolt onto the bolt channels. After aiming through the connecting link, the user squeezed the input link to cause the ‘teeth’ to sink downward. This released the string from the hook and shoot the bolt out at high speeds.
20 days ago, not long after the upgrade of Shanhai city, Ouyang Shuo suddenly visited the Bow And Crossbow Division workshop. He asked them to focus on rushing a batch of crossbow machines and create a quantity not less than 100 thousand.
They naturally had doubts about their lord’s weird request, but as they felt inferior, Wu Peng didn't ask and just followed the orders.
The crossbow machine wasn't like bows and the materials were easy to find. Moreover, they were also very easy to make and only required stone and iron ore. Unlike the production of bows and crossbows that were affected by the factors of the materials such as the bow strings, horns and leathers, hence, their production rate was limited and couldn’t increase much anymore.
As the Bow And Crossbow Division still had to care about crafting bows and crossbows, they could only make an extra 500 crossbow machines a day. To date, they made just exactly 10,000 sets.
After Ouyang Shuo listened to this report, he wasn't pleased, “Secretary, you need to increase the speed. You can reduce the amount of finished products for bows and crossbows anyways, as we don't have a requirement for those in this period of time."
"Understood!" Wu Peng nodded.
Ouyang Shuo walked out of the Bow And Crossbow Division and went into the Armoury Division workshop at the side.
To date, they had built the the Armoury Division for three and a half months. During the 5th month, nearly two months since it was set up, the Armoury Division passed 50 sets of Mingguang Armor to the cavalry unit and 100 sets of Buren Armor to the Infantry Unit.
These two armors played a huge role during the Battle of Zhuolu and shocked everyone.
Which at the same time, the armors suffered various degree of damages from the war. The damaged armors were brought back and handed to the Armoury Division for repairs and then passed back on to the soldiers.
After two months of organisational pains, the Armoury workshop artisans had slowly started to form up. To date, they had one master blacksmith, four advanced, 20 intermediate, and 150 basic blacksmiths. They also had one master tailor, one advanced, five intermediate and ten basic tailors.
Such a massive group of people took up 340 gold a month, more than the overall spending of a unit. Moreover, this did not include Qing'er's advising fees.
After the completion, the results started to show. Since the start of the 5th month, they could produce 150 sets of Mingguang Armor and 200 sets of Buren Armor in one month.
They made the batch of armor handed out during the 5th month before the month had started. As such, the Armoury division was able to pass 150 sets of Mingguang Armor to the vanguard unit and 200 Buren Armor to the mixed regiment at the end of the month.
Based on this speed, at the end of the 7th month, the vanguard unit would be fully equipped. At the end of the 6th month, the first unit of the mixed regiment would be fully equipped and the second unit would reach the same stage by the middle of the 9th month.
In a short time, their production speed wouldn't have any large increases. Firstly, they had already chose the residents in the territory who could become blacksmiths; they could only search from the New refugees. Secondly, the supply of iron ore had reached a bottleneck.
Shanhai city's only mining site needed to supply the weapons workshop to craft lances and Tang knives, the bow and crossbow division for crossbow machines and bolts, and the Armoury division for armor. As such, they had already reached its max. Even if they increased the quantity of miners, it was no use as the space was limited.
The only solution was to find new iron mining sites in the territory.
Walking out of the Armory division, Ouyang a Shuo returned to the lord's manor and continued to deal with administrative issues.
……
In the next week, Feng Qingyang and Di Chen had both successfully upgraded their towns to grade 1 cities. In particular, Handan Town had recovered so quickly after their failure, which certainly wasn't easy.
With that, there were a total of seven rank 1 cities in the china region. Only three spots remained for the fight for the Top 10.
Be it Xiong Ba, Sha Pojun, wandering magic, Wufu, or even Xunlong Dianxue, they all stood a chance.
These five territories were considered 3rd series, and compared to the first series Shanhai city and the second series cities, they were lacking. In a short amount of time, they wouldn't be confident of applying to upgrade. Especially Stone Town and Xunlong Town, who hadn't even fulfilled the basic requirements.
The situation of Sha Pojun was as Ouyang Shuo had expected. Out of the original Six Tyrants of Handan, he was the weakest. This was because the powers he represented had a huge weakness. Once their assets were frozen, their friends and business partners wouldn't bother with them, which caused them to be abandoned.
Sha Pojun and his men were good at fighting. However, in terms of managing a territory, they were still lacking a lot.
During this week, Qiushui Town became the brightest light in the entire territory as a total of one medium-sized tribe and four small tribes decided to migrate. This meant that the hesitant tribes had all decided to come down from the mountains. In addition to the small tribe from the beginning, Qiushui Town suddenly had an influx of 14 thousand people.
In the south, of the barbarian tribes that cooperated with Shanhai City, including Xianniao tribe, only two medium-sized and four small sized tribes remained in the mountains.
Apart from Xuanniao tribe and the three small tribes close to the Langshan mining fields, the remaining medium-sized tribe and the small-sized tribe were very stubborn and probably couldn't be convinced in a short amount of time.
The arrival of the mountain barbarians made the population jump two grades and directly become a grade 2 city. Zhao Dexian was also assigned the role of Qiushui City Magistrate.
The ambitious Zhao Dexian tossed out a plan to reclaim a total of 400 thousand mu of farmland.
He planned to reclaim 380 thousand mu of farmland and raise the scale of their farmland to a total of 400 thousand mu.
Based on the average of 10 mu per person, 400 thousand mu would need 40 thousand farmers. Now, they only had half of that, Moreover, a large portion were novice mountain barbarians. If you excluded the children and the elderly, the number would be much smaller.
If one looked at it that way, the 400 thousand figure was exaggerated and rash.
In truth, Zhao Dexian had made his calculations. Qiushui city was made with a silver village creation token, and its refugee attraction rate had increased by 40%. This rate meant that everyday, it could have 280 refugees and 8,400 a month.
There was still more than a month till the second rice planting at the start of the 8th month. As long as they passed half a month of struggling and hardship, the population of Qiushui city could hit 40 thousand in the middle of the 9th month.
The way he saw it, the early struggles for half a year's of grain was worth it. Since he already made such specific and clear calculations, Ouyang Shuo obviously didn't have any reasons to disagree.