Chapter 96: The Four Great Generals

The flames quickly roared to life inside the furnace. Then came the brute labor: several Workers kept shoveling the mountain of Offcuts piled nearby into the furnace. The insufficiently sun-dried Offcuts sent thick black smoke billowing from the Boiler chimney.

After a while, the Boiler water boiled, and steam began flowing through the pipes. The four Kiln Masters, ledgers in hand, started directing the steam supply.

... None of the dozen or so people currently in the Industry Department had ever operated a Drying Kiln before, so they were all learning on the fly and selling it as they went. Fortunately, drying kilns from later generations were everywhere; buying a Boiler came with the manufacturer's secret drying manual. Data like drying times, moisture content, and kiln temperature for common Wood could be found online—what they needed now was practical experience.

A single kiln batch of finished product usually took around sixteen hours. Considering the need for shift rotations, Zou Guoqing assigned four great generals to master the Drying Kiln technique.

These generals were no ordinary men. Before Crossing Over, their specialties were lofty fields like engineering automation, industrial robot repair, artificial intelligence control, and blockchain solutions—they were the weighty pillars of the Transmigration Nation.

The reason these Advanced personnel were now deployed as Kiln Masters was that the leadership felt a strong start was crucial for boosting Morale, adopting a mindset of "use a lion's full strength even to hunt a rabbit." And so...

Ahem, I digress. As the steam passed through the pipes, drying officially began.

The Kiln Masters monitored conditions inside the kiln through observation ports, thermometers, and dry-wet bulb hygrometers. Additionally, several sets of probes at different points in the kiln were used to constantly measure changes in the Wood's moisture content.

Once the Boiler steam entered, the Kiln Masters began controlling the Temperature and humidity changes inside the kiln according to the ledgers in their hands. For now, all these operations were voice-controlled—meaning they relied on shouting. Raising humidity was solved by spraying water; lowering humidity meant opening the exhaust windows on the kiln roof, where prepared laborers would crank the fans; and the kiln Temperature was adjusted by controlling the amount of fuel fed into the Boiler.

After over ten hours like this, the kiln was shut down and the fire extinguished, then ventilation continued. Once the Wood Temperature was only twenty degrees higher than the outside air, the goods were ready to ship.

The first kiln of Wood dried by the Transmigrators was Green Bamboo cut from a nearby bamboo grove. According to the data, Green Bamboo could be removed from the kiln after fourteen hours of drying.

The kiln door opened. The four generals, ignoring the sweltering heat, went in with smiles to take a look. Hmm, the ends of the bamboo were a bit cracked... Perhaps they forgot to pierce the bamboo Knots?

Why were all these pieces on the top layer of the bamboo stack arched up? We're not making composite bows here!... Perhaps they forgot to press some heavy objects on top?

The moisture content of the bamboo in the middle and lower layers was completely chaotic? Damn, damn, perhaps the airflow circulation at the kiln bottom wasn't managed well...

Old comrades encountering new problems—in that One Moment, the four generals were left with nothing but "damn."

Looking at the Pile before them—twisted and warped, split at both ends, like deep-fried green dough sticks—all the Transmigrators who had come to collect the finished product turned away, covering their faces, and left without looking back.

The Four Great Generals had lost face completely.

"Alright, let's all take this seriously. No more messing around!" said Zuo Bin, the one among the four who specialized in industrial robot repair. "Analyze—first, analyze the problems. I refuse to believe a lousy kiln's technical Difficulties can outnumber a robot's!"

The lousy kiln's technical Difficulties might not outnumber a robot's, yet certain Difficulties only reveal themselves after problems occur. The group then devoted themselves to intensive cultivation, and after spending another three days, working day and night shifts, they repeatedly produced four batches of waste before finally obtaining qualified finished Green Bamboo.

It wasn't easy. The secret manual in everyone's hands had long been tossed aside: the manufacturer didn't understand 17th Century Tainan Green Bamboo at all. The original fan positions had also been readjusted—human power and electric drive apparently do differ. A temporary Pit was dug outside the kiln, connected to a Hot Wind circuit. Burning these crappy firewood pieces seemed easier to control after lowering their moisture content a bit...

There were many other modifications, such as piercing the bamboo Knots, readjusting the gaps in the stack, and pressing heavy objects on top of the stack. In short, after paying a sufficient price, the Crossing Faction had finally processed its first qualified type of Construction Material—Green Bamboo.

The first step is always the hardest. Now that they had mastered the core technology, whenever a new variety entered the kiln, the four Great Masters could grasp the heat after burning at most one batch of waste, then record the data in the Crossing Faction's own ledgers.

The river ice broke open: with the success of the first Drying Kiln, three more Drying Kilns soon rose from the ground. The four Long Strip-shaped kiln bodies and two sets of Boilers formed two "H"-shaped structures, and the Boiler chimneys began spewing black smoke day and night.

Wherever the Four Great Kiln Generals went now, a retinue of Apprentices followed at their heels. These people, both old and young, were all selected from among the Hangzhou-registered employees. Among them were kiln workers who had originally fired charcoal kilns or tile kilns, as well as some quick-witted young men.

The requirements for these people weren't high; they only needed to learn to read a thermometer and memorize the processing data for various types of Wood from the manual. As for other issues... one of the Kiln Generals would be on duty around the clock.

After the Wood was dried and removed from the kiln, it entered the processing stage. Currently, with no Electricity, all Wood processing was done entirely by hand, which looked extremely inefficient to the Transmigrators. Yet to all Ming People and Dutch carpenters, this efficiency was already super speed—for no other reason than the steel saw alone.

Metal Processing technology in the medieval era was a completely different concept from the steel saw blades common in later generations. Wrought Iron lumps, full of impurities after low-temperature Smelting, were hammered into saw blades by blacksmiths.

Such cheap daily necessities naturally wouldn't receive the so-called "hundred-refinement" craftsmanship. Thus, the soft Iron strips that needed their teeth resharpened anytime, anywhere, along with other woodworking tools of equally soft hardness, were one of the chief culprits behind the high cost of houses, ships, furniture, and other goods in this period—labor-intensive.

The "Import Goods" used by the Crossing Faction, since only volume needed consideration and not price, followed an almost pathological pursuit of quality: ordinary Carbon Steel saw blades wouldn't do; machine-made saw blades forged from vanadium-containing Advanced Mold steel were the divine tools in the hands of these medieval carpenters.

Hard, arm-span-thick oak was effortlessly pulled into Wood Boards and stakes by the large saws. The incredibly smooth planes quickly pushed boards into Smooth surfaces. Amidst continuous exclamations of wonder, Chinese and foreign carpenters fondly stroked the tools in their hands, ready to craft some fine art furniture as practice first.

But at that moment, the fearsome Kunlun Master appeared. The Master nailed several large sheets of paper onto the workshop wall. On the paper were workpiece diagrams drawn with Blue ink lines. All bamboo and Wood were restricted to workpieces of a few fixed Specifications. The Blue-line workpiece diagrams were presented in a three-view format the craftsmen had never seen before—clear at a glance, with precise Specifications.

Finally, on a per-head basis, every master craftsman received a set of measuring tools that included a steel tape measure, and was told: the measure lives as the man lives; the measure is lost, the head is lost.