Chapter 265: A Thousand Gold for Horse Bones, a Mustard Seed Contains Mount Sumeru (With Thanks to Alliance Leaders One, Two, Three B

The Empress is with child.

This news, enough to shake the realm, was at last formally announced to the outside world through the pulse diagnosis records of the Imperial Academy of Medicine.

The entire capital instantly boiled over — the hundred officials pressed hands to foreheads in mutual congratulation, the common people cheered and leapt for joy.

Yet behind this heaven-covering roar of acclamation, very few knew that the news had in fact been held back with a death grip for a full ten days. During those ten days, the Eternal Chang Emperor set aside most of the trivial matters of court administration.

The fifty core eunuchs and palace maids closest to him were all personally sifted through, one by one, by men he himself led.

Eight generations of ancestry, social connections, everyday words and deeds — not the slightest trace or clue was let slip.

Not only that, but for all food and drink entering the mouth, all utensils used, all clothing touched, three or more layers of cross-inspection were newly arranged, along with four decoy options.

The most outrageous part was that inside and outside the Hall of Earnest Reflection, the water vats for extinguishing fires were even increased from the original ten to twenty...

Beyond these, the Eternal Chang Emperor also prepared a number of measures to reduce risk, and arranged each one in place, before finally declaring this great victory to the outside world — yes, precisely a great victory.

To put it coldly, compared to the consolidation of people's hearts, the elevation of the new sovereign's prestige, the strengthening of confidence in the new governance —

three victories on the scale of the Battle of Qingcheng likely could not match this one piece of news.

So what exactly were the measures the Eternal Chang Emperor had prepared?

On one hand, within the Academy of Sciences' "Decree Seeking Worthies," a medical section had been specially added.

Zhu Youjian intended to first give the medical circles of the realm two months' time.

To see whether this "Decree Seeking Worthies" could attract worthy talent.

If the famous physicians of this era, by some miracle, truly regarded rank and emolument as dirt and were unwilling to come to this flourishing place of the capital, then he would not mind tearing off that veil of tender warmth.

When the time comes, do not blame Us for failing to observe the ethics of the jianghu.

With a blade pressed to the neck, no matter what lofty talk of "hanging a gourd to succor the world" or "indifferent to fame and fortune" — all of you, roll on over to Beijing and get to work for Us!

Zhu Youjian had even thought of the pretext — compiling a monumental medical canon that would surpass the Compendium of Materia Medica.

With the weight of a great moral cause pressing down, and a Son of Heaven's edict on top of that, who would dare disobey?

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That We are willing to drape this cloak of morality over it is already giving you plenty of face.

On another hand, Zhu Youjian stretched his sinful hands toward Consort Yuan, Consort Ren, Consort Liu, and the other consorts...

But the selection was still mainly from the former concubines of the Prince Xin establishment and the current palace maids within the palace; no new selection of elegant ladies was held.

In truth, Zhu Youjian did want to hold a new selection of elegant ladies.

After all, the aesthetic standards of this era were, in the end, somewhat different from those of later ages.

For instance, the bound feet some people now favor — he truly could not endure them.

But he would have to bear it a while longer. The time had not yet come for the Eternal Chang Emperor's ideals to deteriorate.

As for the final aspect, that was precisely what Zhu Youjian was doing right now.

In Ciqing Palace, the underground flues were burning fiercely hot.

Zhu Youjian and Zhou Yu arrived together.

After the formal greetings, Zhu Youjian beckoned to Ma Wenke behind him.

"Imperial Sister-in-law, come quickly and see — what treasure have We brought you today?"

Zhang Yan, who had been somewhat bored and listless, looked over curiously at these words.

She saw Ma Wenke carefully bring forward a tray.

On the tray were two small dishes of clear water, and a... most peculiar brass object. The thing was only the size of a palm. Its main body was a polished, gleaming brass plate, set in the center with a tiny, crystal-clear glass bead, and attached behind were a silver needle as fine as a hair and several delicate screw knobs.

(Image attached: a Leeuwenhoek microscope capable of 270x magnification.)

"What is this thing?"

Zhang Yan reached out and took it, weighing it in her hand — it had quite a bit of heft.

Puzzled, she held the brass plate up against her hair bun for comparison, then felt the shape was simply too bizarre and did not resemble any novel hair ornament. "If this thing were worn on the head, I fear one would be laughed to death." Zhang Yan covered her mouth in a light laugh and placed the object back on the tray.

Zhu Youjian laughed heartily, picked up the brass object, and said, "Imperial Sister-in-law has misjudged it. This object is called a 'microscope.'" "Microscope?" Zhang Yan blinked, not understanding the term but sensing its profundity.

"Correct. This is something We had the craftsmen of the Wensi Court trial-produce based on the principles in A Brief Account of Optics."

Zhu Youjian pointed at that tiny glass bead. "Do not look down on it for its plainness. This object can magnify all things two hundred times! It can see a speck of dust as Mount Tai, and behold the great world within a single drop of water!"

Two hundred times?!

Zhang Yan was now truly curious.

After the telescope was made, Zhu Youjian had also given one to her.

Zhang Yan treasured it like a priceless find, and from time to time would take the telescope up onto the city walls to secretly spy on the commoners' lives below — only the recent cold weather had curtailed these shameless activities.

But that thing could magnify at most a few dozen times, could it not? This object could actually magnify two hundred times?

"Changqiu, teach Imperial Sister-in-law how to use it." Zhu Youjian nodded toward Zhou Yu.

Zhou Yu had long since played with this novel object. Hearing this, she immediately stepped forward. "Sister-in-law, watch closely." Her movements, though careful, were very practiced. She took out an extremely fine glass tube, dipped it lightly into one dish of clear water, drew up a tiny droplet, then carefully affixed the glass tube to the tip of the silver needle behind the brass plate.

Next, she fixed the microscope onto the table, leaned in close before that tiny glass bead, and gently twisted the screw knob beside it with her fingers. "This is called focusing..." Zhou Yu muttered as she squinted to observe. After a moment, her eyes lit up. "There! Sister-in-law, come look, quickly!"

Zhang Yan, her curiosity thoroughly piqued by the pair's elaborate preparations, hurriedly leaned in.

But no matter how she looked, the brass object was still a brass object — there was no change at all.

"There's nothing at all?" Zhang Yan looked up, baffled.

"Aiya, Sister-in-law, you have to get closer!" Zhou Yu took Zhang Yan's hand and guided her to press her eye right up against the glass bead. "You have to look with it pressed right up!"

Zhang Yan followed her instruction and leaned in again.

This time, her whole body suddenly stiffened.

Through that tiny glass bead, the originally clear, transparent water droplet had actually transformed into a clamorous and terrifying world!

Countless bizarrely shaped little things were madly swimming, colliding, and devouring one another in that grotesque and dazzling liquid!

"Ah!"

Zhang Yan let out a startled cry, straightened up abruptly, her face going pale as she stumbled back two steps.

"Wh—what is this?! That water… there are bugs in the water?!"

She pointed at the dish of clear water, her eyes filled with utter disbelief.

Zhou Yu stole a laugh, having already forgotten how shocked she herself had been the first time she saw it the day before yesterday: "Sister-in-law, don't be afraid. This is simply the microscopic world within water. It is just like the small chiliocosms spoken of in Buddhism."

She chanted leisurely, "A flower, a leaf, a world; a tree, a bodhi — it is just so. Amitabha, haha."

Watching Zhou Yu's demonstration, Zhu Youjian stood to the side, a surge of indescribable excitement welling up in his heart.

The craftsmen of the Great Ming… are really too damn incredible!

Except for that steam engine, which for some reason, no matter how they built it, always had as little power as an old man with kidney deficiency.

The Great Ming craftsmen's skill in other fields had utterly surpassed his expectations.

The capital hemisphere experiment was like that, and so was the hand-pumped pressure well.

No matter how abstract the blueprints Zhu Youjian drew, how fragmented the principles he explained, or how bizarre the terminology he gave, once these craftsmen figured out the core logic, they could immediately produce the thing as if their Ren and Du meridians had just been opened. And the speed was frighteningly fast — often they could deliver a finished product in just a month or two.

What was even more outrageous was the Great Ming's baseline technical level.

Back when he first ordered the construction of the thousand-li mirror, the first batch of trial products was quoted at ten taels of silver each.

Later, when Tian Ergeng stepped in and cleaned out the grafters and skimmers in the Embroidered Uniform Guard, the quoted price was immediately cut in half, down to five taels. Even later, as the craftsmen took over his optics experiments and tested out concepts like focal length and curvature one by one, the observation range of the telescopes stabilized at twenty li, and the price…

Crashed straight down to one mace of silver!

One mace of silver!

When he first heard that price, Zhu Youjian's eyes nearly popped out of his head.

One mace is one hundred cash — equivalent to ten taels'… one-hundredth!

Tian Ergeng even said that if things stabilized later and mass production increased further, the cost could continue to drop even more…

Is that even reasonable?!

Zhu Youjian's first reaction at the time was — cutting corners and using shoddy materials.

He had seen plenty of that sort of thing in his previous life.

During bidding, whoever had the lowest price won the bid, and in the end it even went below the cost price.

But even so, the winning bidder still made a profit — it was just that everything they built was bean curd dregs.

He was deathly afraid that Tian Ergeng, in order to curry favor, was forcing the craftsmen to do shoddy work.

In the end, after summoning the man and questioning him, Zhu Youjian realized he had been measuring a gentleman's belly with a petty man's heart.

It turned out that the initial high price was partly due to corruption, but also because the lenses used were expensive crystal.

On top of that, at the beginning no one understood optical principles, and that missionary's "Illustrated Treatise on Distant Views" was vague and incomplete, leading to a frighteningly high rejection rate, so the cost naturally stayed high.

Later, after Zhu Youjian personally designed the optics experiments, and Tian Ergeng sent men to Yanshen Town in Shandong to purchase raw glass directly, the cost came down by a large margin.

By last month, Tian Ergeng had simply packed up the old glass craftsmen of Shandong, families and all, and brought them to the capital, setting up a furnace to fire glass right at the foot of the imperial city… which led to the absurd price of one mace of silver per thousand-li mirror.

Zhu Youjian asked: Since when has the Great Ming had people who fire glass? Why was I unaware of this?

Tian Ergeng could not answer at first either. He took the order, went and asked around, and only then reported back: In the time of the Eunuch Sanbao, he brought back craftsmen who fired glass. It was just that most people still preferred colored glaze, and this transparent glass was not very popular, the market being relatively small.

Heh heh… a "relatively small market" for transparent glass…

The aesthetic taste of our ancestors was indeed high-class — no argument there.

And the microscope before him now, which had made Zhang Yan's jaw drop, was even more outrageous — it practically slapped Zhu Youjian hard across the face.

The thought process of these craftsmen, who could barely read a few characters, went like this:

In the optics experiments His Majesty arranged, it had already been proven that the more curved a convex lens is, the shorter its focal length, and the greater its magnification.

In that case… what is the most convex, most curved convex lens?

A sphere, of course!

Can't we just fire a perfectly round little glass bead?!

Crank the curvature to the max! Drive the focal length straight to the minimum!

The result…

When Zhu Youjian saw this "bizarre microscope," the only word in his heart was a capitalized "RESPECT."

So it turned out that the half a day he spent explaining "eyepiece" and "objective lens" to these craftsmen had actually been misleading them.

The microscope built according to his theories looked very similar to those of later ages, but its magnification was at best a few dozen times.

On the contrary, the "folk-method microscope" these craftsmen came up with, relying on a single bead, directly reached two hundred times! — although it was very inconvenient to observe with, and very hard on the eyes…

This is the wisdom of the laboring people!

Zhu Youjian had only one thing to say about this — Reward them! Reward them heavily!

However much value you create for me, that is how much silver I will give you!

Now that the four main optical telegraph routes have been laid, a total of 695 thousand-li mirrors are used as observation instruments.

At the initial quoted price of ten taels per thousand-li mirror, this would have cost the privy purse nearly seven thousand taels of silver.

And now?

Seventy taels!

What was saved in between — was that money? It was clearly the wholehearted loyalty of his subordinates!

With a grand wave of his hand, Zhu Youjian directly launched a massive silver-scattering operation.

Tian Ergeng, for his merit in reorganizing the guard stations and rooting out corruption, received two thousand taels!

The craftsmen who participated in improving the process, divided fifteen hundred taels equally according to the magnitude of their contributions!

And that wildly imaginative craftsman who first proposed firing glass beads — he alone received one thousand taels, and was granted the rank of Artificer, Ninth Grade!

The Artificer rank is a new regulation after the reform of the Wensi Institute; it counts as Embroidered Uniform Guard military registration, but is separately ranked and merited, judged solely on talent and contributions to research and development. Is that excessive?

In an era where a few taels of silver could buy a maidservant, one thousand taels was practically an astronomical figure.

In truth, giving them a hundred taels, or two hundred taels, would be more than enough to make these craftsmen weep with gratitude and sell their very lives to the imperial house.

But what Zhu Youjian wanted was precisely this kind of excess!

What he wanted was precisely this kind of sensation — spending a thousand gold pieces on a horse's bones!

The effect was immediate.

Now, inside the reorganized Wensi Institute, the atmosphere had gone utterly frenzied.

The hot-air balloon team, the bicycle team, the flintlock team, the clock team, the steam engine team, the movable-type printing team, the cement team, the cowpox team, the glass mirror team…

Every single craftsman was in a state of extreme exaltation.

What do you mean, report at dawn and leave at dusk? That is an insult to the silver! And an insult to our loyalty!

Eat at the Wensi Institute, live at the Wensi Institute — open your eyes and you're on duty, close your eyes and you're asleep! That is the portrait of a Wensi Institute craftsman today! As for experimental funds?

Even if every one of these project teams failed a hundred times over, could they possibly spend ten thousand taels between them?

What a joke!

You have to understand, on the markets of the Great Ming today…

One catty of raw iron costs nine cash coins!!

And ten-times-forged wrought iron, the kind that can make a matchlock musket — two hundred and seventy cash per catty!!

Was this still the agricultural country he remembered?!

With productive power this absurd, in this era, wasn't it basically an industrial Cthulhu? Did it really need him to launch some great steelmaking campaign? Of course, Zhu Youjian knew the truth in his heart.

That ten thousand taels, twenty thousand taels — to a penniless bottom-rung transmigrator, that was an astronomical sum, the first pot of gold that took ages to scrape together.

And master craftsmen of every high skill — those were men that a transmigrator starting out from Hainan, Shandong, Liaodong, or Shaanxi would need a very long time to recruit.

But for the present Eternal Prosperity Emperor, this was merely a matter of trimming palace expenses a little, confiscating a few corrupt officials, and issuing one edict summoning talent. What Zhu Youjian truly lacked was money for disaster relief, money to pay the troops.

And that money, conversely, was the part those bottom-rung transmigrators never had to worry about.

That was a bottomless pit starting in the millions of taels, the millions of shi of grain — not something that could ever be filled by confiscations and frugality alone.

For this, Zhu Youjian already had a grand game of chess laid out in his mind.

Only, this game — he intended to wait until the New Year had passed, until spring warmed and the flowers bloomed, before he placed his first stone.