Chapter 108: The Beacon Is Lit

"Ah!" Yao Zhesheng, recalling everything that had happened before he blacked out, leaped up from the wood board.

He first glanced at the cloudless sky, then at the suitcase beside his feet, then excitedly at the busy crowd on the construction site and the guards carrying AKs; unable to contain his agitation, he blurted out a few words and dashed toward the nearby work shed.

"Hey hey hey, what are you blindly dashing around for, kid?" Several men wearing hard hats and blue work uniforms stopped him.

"Where is this?" Yao Zhesheng asked urgently.

Zou Guoqing looked cheerfully at the young man before him — wearing a blue plaid casual western suit, hair parted three-to-seven, flat round face, about twenty-seven or twenty-eight — stroked his chin, and asked, "You're that Purchasing Factory Manager, right?"

"Ah! How do you know?" Yao Zhesheng's train of thought was derailed.

"Let me ask you, why is the table saw's motor a Mitsubishi? Weren't you supposed to buy Siemens?" Zou Guoqing's face tightened as he asked with a bluff.

"At that time this model was out of stock, and time was tight, so I…" At this point Yao Zhesheng suddenly jumped up and shouted, "Bastard, tell me where this is right now!"

Haha, the group burst into laughter — lots of Transmigrators acted like this at the start.

"The Great Ming Dynasty," Zou Guoqing replied playfully.

"It really is the Great Ming Dynasty?"

"Really, no lie."

"Holy crap!" Yao Zhesheng jumped up again, and upon landing he smashed a fist into his palm and shouted excitedly, "I knew it, I knew it — would Earth ever need this kind of brainless equipment? What year of the Great Ming is this? Quick, hmm… the vegetation is really lush, the south? Aha, we're in Guangnan, right? Are we doing the Northern Expedition? Zhu Yuanzhang…"

Zou Guoqing and his group stared blankly at this lunatic pacing back and forth, spouting incoherent nonsense; honestly, this was the first time everyone had seen someone so exhilarated and so quick to accept things after crossing over, leaving them momentarily unsure what to do: their rhythm had been thrown off.

"Ahem!" Zou Guoqing coughed loudly, grabbed this thick-nerved individual, and said, "Yao, is it? Look, we are currently in southern Taiwan, it is now 1627, and we've only just started developing."

"Stop!" Zou Guoqing cut off the thick-nerved one's next question. "Listen to me first. Today is very important, no one has time to give you a primer. I am now field-appointing you as Kiln District Deputy Manager. You personally ordered every piece of equipment here. Don't ask anything for now — just get everyone to finish installing the production line, then we'll talk."

Yao Zhesheng was thus swept along to urgently install the production line. Only when eating that evening did he have a moment to have someone explain the current situation to him, and as a result was extorted for two packs of cigarettes — a newcomer being extorted by veterans in a novice zone where he can't fight back, that's a traditional routine, one only the protagonist can avoid. Yao Zhesheng was not the protagonist, so after hearing the current situation, he laughed heartily, pulled two packs of cigarettes from his luggage, and handed them over.

The 19th was another full busy day. Only by noon on the 20th were all the equipment in the Core Power Plant and the Wood Factory fully installed. The brick kiln couldn't be finished in time; they urgently needed a trial run now, so they'd deal with it tomorrow… During this period, the newly arrived Manager Yao helped enormously: he had personally installed and tested every piece of equipment in Durban, so he knew them like the back of his hand.

At noon on the 20th, Cao Zong once again arrived at the construction site surrounded by big shots. Upon seeing a certain person, Cao Zong laughed heartily and exchanged a few words of "old times" with outstanding employee Yao Zhesheng. The freshly minted Manager Yao declared: If I'd known earlier, I'd have come earlier — back when I was studying at Zhejiang University of Technology, I already loved reading crossing-over stories…

At 2:22 PM on December 20, 1627, the auspicious hour had arrived. Before the gaze of all the Transmigrators, Cao Zong smiled as he walked up to a milky-white Volvo diesel generator that looked much like a freezer and gently pressed the electronic fuel-injection button.

The next moment, the 200 kW diesel generator started up. The crusher nearby started up right after. Its mace-like roller teeth began to turn, slow yet resolute. The wood already placed on the conveyor belt was fed beneath the roller teeth. The alloy roller teeth, designed to crush scrapped automobile steel plates, easily crushed thigh-thick wood into large chunks of debris, which were conveyed out from the belt at the rear of the machine.

The wood debris was relayed by conveyor belts into the feed inlet of the biomass pellet machine. The pellet machine, whose principle was no different from a meat grinder, began working. The crushed wood was pressed into a ring-shaped mold with a circle of holes. At this point, due to the sharp rise in temperature, the lignin in the wood began to melt, acting as an adhesive. Finally, finger-length wood pellets were extruded and formed just like that.

The third stop was the fluidized bed boiler. The furnace chamber was already in a burning state — the stoker had lit the fire manually in advance. As the scalding biomass pellets were fed into the furnace chamber by the conveyor belt, a great fire blazed up. The designed hot airflow began circulating inside the furnace. The wood pellets now flowed in a ring inside the furnace along with the airflow. After one cycle, they quickly turned into ash and slag and were discharged from the furnace chamber.

The heat contributed by the wood was carried away as steam by the boiler water surrounding the furnace chamber, traveling along the pipes to the final stop of the power system: the steam turbine unit.

The Siemens-manufactured 6000 kW Type 28 steam turbine — at this moment, its turbine blades were slowly driven by the high-temperature steam. The integrated generator rotor also began to spin in tandem. Electricity — the very first joule of electricity produced through the natural resources of this plane — was finally generated!

As the boiler steam pressure increased, twenty minutes later, Zou Guoqing, serving as the on-site commander-in-chief, gave the order: shut down the diesel generator.

The generator, which consumed 40 kilograms of "imported diesel" per hour, quickly ceased operation. Yet the entire system continued running normally — the electricity produced by the steam turbine from local energy had now completely replaced the imported diesel. At the same time, good news came from the Wood Factory several hundred meters away: the electricity-powered table saws could operate normally!

The sound of over a dozen AKs firing into the sky once again drowned out everyone's cheers. The Transmigrators raised their hands, shouting and embracing.

The lighting of the beacons — that deep, stirring music rang out in some people's hearts at that moment. The Lord of the Rings fans felt that only the scene of relaying the signal fires best suited their current mood. What surfaced in other people's minds was the celebratory scene after the successful atomic bomb test back in the day. Well then, the people of Dayuan had stood up from this moment on and could go and ruthlessly oppress the people of other regions.

In the vast darkness, the beacon fire of industrial civilization was finally lit. The most powerful skill tree of the time-space visitors — its foundational skill — was finally illuminated today. Surging power transmitted everywhere through steam and electricity, resonating with everyone present. The Transmigrators who drew upon this power would grow stronger and stronger. They would harness this power, use it to blanket this land, and format everything they reached according to their own will, turning it into a brand-new world.