Volume 3: The Land of Jingchu Chapter 209: Attack
After Sima Lang returned to the posthouse, he calmed down his embarrassment and shifted his focus to thinking about what he had seen and heard that day.
"The greatest traitor appears loyal, and the greatest falsehood appears true!" This is Sima Lang's current evaluation of Bai Tu.
What did he eat at the General of Chariots and Cavalry’s Mansion before?
Fresh sea fish, vegetables, peaches and plums...
Is wine and meat considered a luxury? This may be true for ordinary people, but for the rich and powerful, wine and meat are obviously nothing.
Fresh sea fish means ice that has been preserved by the labor of countless people, and out-of-season fruit means building a fire room that is labor-intensive and costly.
Off-season planting had already appeared in the Han Dynasty, but ordinary princes and nobles could hardly enjoy it. Even the emperor thought it was too wasteful. During the reign of Emperor An of Han, the imperial kitchen was prohibited from using off-season vegetables - an investment of tens of millions of dollars a year was something that even the emperor felt uneasy about.
However, before at Bai Tu's house, Sima Lang recalled those fresh vegetables...
Not only are they fresh, but they also look great. Not to mention that it’s late spring, which is the off-season for fruits and vegetables... Sima Lang rarely sees vegetables of such great quality even when they are in season.
If the Han Dynasty was still able to hold on, these fruits and vegetables would be sold for the price of gold if placed in Luoyang!
Not to mention, the waiters were all dressed in the finest brocade, and the cups used at the banquet were all exquisite treasures.
The world is in chaos now. All the high-ranking officials in Xudu have become more frugal, but Bai Tu...tsk tsk.
Sima Lang now even wanted to appeal for justice for Wang Mang - compared with Wang Mang, Bai Tu was the one who truly deceived the world and stole fame, and even... he didn't put any effort into "deceiving", and didn't even pretend, but he was so successful in "stealing"?
Of course, Bai Tu actually didn’t feel that he had ever acted so treacherous as to appear loyal.
After all, ice cubes are just the most basic kind of ice made from saltpeter - this technology already existed in the Tang Dynasty, using saltpeter, whose main component is potassium nitrate, which absorbs heat when dissolved in water. Saltpeter is dissolved in a large basin and ice is frozen in a small basin. The ice in the small basin is then used, and the saltpeter can be dried out from the ice water in the large basin and reused.
However, this technology was rarely used among the people during the Tang Dynasty. After all, saltpeter is the main component of gunpowder, so as a dangerous good, its circulation was severely restricted.
Moreover... even in modern times, China is a country with scarce potassium mines, even in total. In ancient times, the source of potassium saltpeter, also known as saltpeter, was also very limited.
However, it is not a big problem for Bai Tu, because the potassium in the sea can be said to be "infinite". By using natural zeolite, potassium can be "exchanged" from the bitter brine left over from salt drying - clinoptilolite has abundant reserves in China, especially in the Jiangdong area.
Bai Tu did not specifically mine saltpeter, but only used Pang Tong's "potassium chloride", which is different from potassium nitrate, the main component of saltpeter, but has a similar heat absorption effect.
The reason for extracting potassium is not to make ice for Baitu, but to use it as fertilizer...
Potassium fertilizer is one of the important types of fertilizers!
It can increase the protein content of grains, increase the vitamin C content of fruits and vegetables, improve the size and color of fruits and vegetables, and enhance their storage stability.
Although fertilizer-free, purely green crops are highly praised in later generations, we have to admit that the emergence of fertilizers is definitely a huge progress in civilization. If there were no benefits for human development from fertilizers, productivity would not be so high that people would dislike fertilizer crops...
In the late Eastern Han Dynasty, naturally no one would dislike chemical fertilizers, just like Sima Lang... He had been eating green food all his life, and today he tasted out-of-season fruits and vegetables grown with chemical fertilizers for the first time. He loved them so much that he slandered Bai Tu in his heart, thinking that this was a manifestation of "arrogance and debauchery."
Of course, the production and use of fertilizers are still in a very early stage, and Pang Tong is still in the process of continuous debugging, so it is still some distance away from civilian use.
Now it is mainly used in conjunction with glass greenhouses as an important auxiliary means of breeding - in the short term, the focus of increasing agricultural product output is on cultivating excellent varieties, and the popularization of chemical fertilizers will have to wait.
As for the glass house...
It is indeed a bit of a luxury. It certainly cannot be popularized among the public relying on a few government-run glass factories. It is now only used for breeding. In terms of off-season planting, Pang Tong is also researching cheap substitutes that can be used as covering materials.
This year, the first batch of breeding products have entered the natural environment for cultivation. If successful, they will play a huge leading role in the future development of agriculture!
The development of science and technology makes Bai Tu very confident about future great achievements.
But now, Bai Tu learned some bad news...or rather, he finally confirmed some bad news.
"Really didn't find it?" Bai Tu looked at the document in his hand and couldn't help but mutter to himself, rubbing his eyes in distress.
"Didn't you find anything? The kind of stone that can be used for making fire? It's just a folk legend, don't take it too seriously." Seeing this, Lu Lingqi comforted her.
That’s right, just last month, when Bai Tu decided to take advantage of the gradual recovery of agricultural production and the lack of disaster relief pressure to improve productivity, he discovered a fatal problem - the Chengji world... actually has no oil and coal.
It is said that in the "Geographical Records" of the Han Dynasty, there were records that "Gaonu County has flammable Wei River" and "Yuzhang has stones that can be burned as firewood." Logically, the former should be petroleum and the latter should be coal.
A few days ago, Bai Tu decided to mine some coal as an efficient fuel. As for the steam engine...it is not difficult in principle.
However, when Bai Tu told this to Lu Kang and others, they all looked at Bai Tu strangely. Yu Fan, who had just returned from Poyang County, even shouted directly, telling Bai Tu not to believe the nonsense of the folk alchemists.
That’s right, they had never heard of “Yuzhang produces stones that can be burned as firewood”. Stones that can be burned... It sounded like something said by a liar alchemist!
At first, Bai Tu thought that it was because of the lack of popularity that people didn’t know about coal, so he cited the example of Geography, but the result was…
I sent someone to get the "Geographical Records" from the study, and found... this sentence was not there!
Bai Tu clearly remembered that this sentence was in his hard drive.
When he first discovered this, Bai Tu even suspected that there might be an evil god hiding somewhere nearby. Should he learn how to act it out?
For a long time, the overlap between Cheng Ji's world and the world before Bai Tu crossed over made Bai Tu a little careless.
It was natural to think that I could find coal...
However, the details in the "Geographical Records" were different, which made Bai Tu realize that something was wrong - after all, it was not the same world, and even if it really did not exist, it didn't seem strange.
So in his "death struggle", Bai Tu specially organized a survey team. Although everyone was puzzled by Bai Tu's behavior, as he was looking for burnable stones or even burnable black springs for no reason, it seemed that he had been fooled!
Fortunately, other aspects of the white map were relatively normal, and the so-called survey only involved a team of about a hundred people, so it was not a waste of money and time, so except for the upright Yu Fan, no one paid too much attention to it.
What Bai Tu has in his hand now is the report document from the survey team, which has completely confirmed the bad news - there is no coal in Yuzhang.
Even when he just learned about the differences between the versions of "Geographical Records", Bai Tu specially went back to look at the records of petroleum in the Chengji version . Sure enough... he did not find any records of fierce fire oil, Wei water, etc., which basically means that petroleum does not exist!
Regarding Bai Tu's depression, Lu Lingqi felt like she was coaxing a child.
After all, in Lu Lingqi's opinion, it was naive enough to believe in such a "burnable stone" for no reason, and to be depressed because one could not find it...wasn't that childish?
"Obviously we have everything else, but oil and coal... wait, is it possible that there are no fossils?" Bai Tu was a little confused.
"Huh? What fossil? The Husband-Waiting Stone?" Lu Lingqi asked puzzledly.
"Ahem, nothing..."
"Don't be sad! Can't we just burn charcoal?" Lu Lingqi comforted her like a child.
Bai Tu rolled his eyes and said helplessly: "This is not a problem of burning charcoal. There is no coal... Forget it, I'm fine." Bai Tu also realized that it was difficult to explain how important coal and oil are to people who didn't know what they were.
The lack of incendiary oil for fire attacks in war is a small matter, but the lack of oil, which is the "blood of industry", has dealt a heavy blow to the development prospects of Baitu's technology tree.
This is not just a fuel issue. From artificial plastics to asphalt, lubricants... countless industrial products use petroleum as raw material.
It can be said that without oil, there would be no modern industrial civilization.
However, in the world of Cheng Ji, it seems that there is no oil at present, or even... no coal!
If the lack of oil limits the upper limit of Bai Tu's technology tree, then the lack of coal will directly frustrate Bai Tu's current development plan - without coal, charcoal can only be used as the main fuel.
Well, during World War II, when a certain mustache was trapped both internally and externally, due to lack of resources, he did have charcoal-burning tanks...
If we just burn charcoal, even if we burn all the wood in the Greater Khingan Range into charcoal , it is still far from enough to develop modern industry - in other words, in terms of resources, it is impossible to copy the modern technology tree.
"Or...how about asking the woodcutter to chop more firewood every day?" Lu Lingqi didn't understand what Bai Tu was worried about.
"No, don't bother the woodcutter... Wait! Woodcutter?" Bai Tu suddenly thought of using a woodcutter to extract the Artemisia annua medicine - of course, the woodcutter here is not an ordinary woodcutter, but specifically refers to the nameless
Although there are no fossil resources, but...it seems that there is another kind of "resource"?
Perhaps if we want to find another way, we should focus on this aspect?
"You are so smart!" Bai Tu looked at Lu Lingqi and said seriously.
Hearing this, Lu Lingqi also said seriously: "Are you too stupid?" Then she laughed first.
From the beginning to the end, Lu Lingqi felt that Bai Tu was innocent and cute this time...
