Chapter 1277: Everyone Has Secrets

Since Chai had already spoken to this point, Xiong found it difficult to press him further, so Chai shifted the topic and said: "If you want to return now, taking the land route is no problem at all. The forest along the banks of the Dahe has already been cleared away by the people of the Xuanyuan Tribe, and the road has been leveled. Along the way, you can also see many places where camps have been set up."

"After all, once the trees by the river are cut down, they can be transported directly via the waterway, which is more convenient. Now their construction intensity is increasing year by year. I estimate that in not too long, they will be able to completely finish the road. By then, the gap between them and our city construction in Huaxia will truly be getting smaller and smaller."

Xiong gave a confident snort: "As long as they haven't created Cement, they will always be different from us. Can the quality of Cement and mud be the same?"

After saying this, Xiong suddenly felt a sense of crisis: "Oh no, we must keep a close watch here in Huaxia. These Workers, for instance, must not be allowed to leave Huaxia at all. We must keep them under strict supervision. If the Xuanyuan Tribe were to poach even one, wouldn't our gap disappear just like that?"

"And there are other Artisans; it seems our current management is still not strict enough. Look at how strictly Xuanyuan manages things—in all these years, have you ever seen a single silkworm from the Xuanyuan Tribe? I certainly haven't."

Chai then remembered that it did seem to be true. Moreover, because the quality of the Xuanyuan Tribe's Silk was slightly better, Huaxia would also trade for a small amount of Xuanyuan Tribe Silk to use every year. Although they were not short of Silk at home, they still wanted something better.

He had never thought about it before, but now that it was pointed out so suddenly, if he dug deeper, it really seemed a bit wrong. The process of his own Huaxia Silk, starting from raising silkworms, was very strict at every step, and tasks like reeling and Weaving were basically done by machines, which was much faster than people threading needles one by one.

But why was the Xuanyuan Tribe's Silk better than Huaxia's? It made no sense. After all, every aspect of Huaxia was stronger than the Xuanyuan Tribe, so why was this the only thing inferior to the Xuanyuan Tribe? Thinking it over, he now felt that perhaps the Xuanyuan Tribe's silkworms were different from Huaxia's, and the Xuanyuan Tribe's silkworms might be even better.

Xuanyuan knew this point, so he wouldn't let Huaxia know, nor would he let Huaxia see them. Good things had to be held onto tightly.

Chai now felt that it was a real loss for them to teach these technologies to the Xuanyuan Tribe. No, this year when the Xuanyuan Tribe's students take their grading exams, they must be strictly vetted—vetted to death. Don't let anyone who can pass actually pass.

The current industry standards were set by Huaxia. If they wanted to obtain higher qualification certificates and better treatment, they had to take grading exams. These apprentices taking the first or second-level exams must also be blocked; don't let them off. Make Xuanyuan feel that the people they sent were all of poor standard and unusable.

Keep blocking them so they feel that their Xuanyuan Tribe is always lacking high-end engineers, striking at their confidence. As long as they have few or no mid-to-high-level engineers, if they want to take exams, they will have to go to Huaxia to do it.

Otherwise, if they organized their own exams and set their own levels, even if you produced a tenth-level engineer, Huaxia would not recognize you. As long as Huaxia's engineers were of a higher standard than yours and the things they built were better than yours, Huaxia's highest engineer rank would always be higher than your Xuanyuan Tribe's.

This was the only revenge method Chai's brain could come up with. As for the teaching, he couldn't just suddenly lower the teaching quality now. The main thing was that after two years of training and education, their foundations were already very solid, and they already knew the simple things. From now on, it would depend on their own talent and the accumulation of experience.

As long as enough experience is accumulated, they will naturally know more things, because they will encounter more problems. As long as they can solve the problems, their own abilities will naturally improve by a large margin.

The reason he had cultivated them with care before was so they could work for Huaxia for free for a few years and relieve the pressure on Huaxia's construction. Now that they had been trained and could be useful, they couldn't be placed in important positions.

Those cities and towns that were being built or were about to be built must absolutely not be places they could go to; they shouldn't even be allowed to know of these places' existence. It was likely the Xuanyuan Tribe was also building other new cities.

Given Xuanyuan's ambition and his charisma, it was likely a very simple matter to call upon the tribesmen of one region to build a new city. Plus, their own food supply was gradually no longer a problem, and without so many troubles, they could naturally embark on large-scale construction.

Huaxia had secrets it was hiding from the Xuanyuan Tribe, and hadn't the Xuanyuan Tribe also been hiding secrets from Huaxia? There were many things they were secretly imitating.

Xuanyuan was now in his own secret harbor, a place where Huaxia people had never been and could not go. Here were Large Ships built with the full effort of the Xuanyuan Tribe's Artisans, but compared to Huaxia's Large Ships, they were still not worth mentioning. Furthermore, they still hadn't figured out the operating principle of the sails; even if they had seen them, they couldn't make them.

They could only hoist the sails when the wind was favorable and use the wind's power to increase their forward speed, but for now, this had only been successfully tested on small boats. For the Large Ships, they didn't even know how large the sails needed to be or how to control them.

Even Huaxia had experimented for a long time, and only after practice and multiple improvements were they relatively easy to use now. Moreover, many essential facilities to ensure safety had been built into them by Baifeng from the very beginning. This was the advantage of knowledge reserves and experience.

Even if Baifeng had never built a boat, he knew what an anchor looked like and how to tie ropes to maximize friction, because he had more ways to acquire knowledge. But the Xuanyuan Tribe had to pay with time and human lives to conduct experiments bit by bit.

This Large Ship had been built for some time, but because Xuanyuan was away, it hadn't been launched. Everyone was waiting for Xuanyuan to return before letting the Large Ship launch for testing.

Xuanyuan looked at his own ship and was very satisfied. Although it was still far behind Huaxia's, after spending a few years, they could build even larger ships. Now was just a time for accumulating experience. Besides, the Dahe was only so wide, so how big of a ship could one really need? No matter how big the ship was, it would be useless. It was fine as it was now; slowly, they would be able to catch up to Huaxia. Everyone would be using the same Large Ships, and no one would be better than anyone else.