Chapter 213: The Torrential Flow Swells

Two full years had passed since the twenty-first year of the King of Qin, when Yuan was granted the rank of Gongshi for making the "Anlu pestle," and was then spotted by the county Master of Artisans, who brought him to the county seat to work as a craftsman.

In those two years, Yuan and his wife had settled down in the county town. From their initial novelty and unease, they gradually grew accustomed to it. Life in the county town was far richer than in the small hamlet. No longer did they have to watch others eat with longing eyes; they could draw a fixed annual salary. With the hundred mu of farmland Zhong had been helping to manage, the family was free from worry about food and clothing, and could even eat meat once every two days.

Yuan was perfectly content, feeling that this was all he had ever wanted in life.

The only trouble was that as a craftsman in the government-run workshop, he could no longer make whatever he pleased. He had to receive official bamboo slips and obtain a production permit—a "mandate document"—before he could begin work. Without this item, he could not work; otherwise, even Yuan's superior, the Master of Artisans, would be fined two suits of armor.

Even when Heifu asked Yuan to help make a stone roller for pressing sugarcane juice, he could only find time to do it during his rest days, and he had to supply all the materials himself, not daring to take a single piece of wood from the workshop. Not long before, a craftsman had been severely punished for stealing workshop materials to do private work and was reduced to an indentured craftsman-slave without freedom.

Apart from the stone roller, when Heifu was about to leave Anlu in early January, he sent word to Yuan, asking him to take leave and return to their hometown for a few days. Yuan thought something had happened, but when he hurried back to Sunset Hamlet, he discovered that Heifu had prepared a tree's worth of lumber for him, hoping he would make something.

Yuan's skill was remarkable. Heifu merely described the general shape of the object, and he already had a plan in mind. As the axe and adze danced swiftly and the drawknife pushed out curling wood shavings, copper nails and wooden rafters were placed in their proper positions, the mechanism Heifu needed gradually revealed its embryonic form: a small waterwheel no more than four feet high...

Heifu had Yuan place the small waterwheel on the irrigation ditch beside their field. When the brothers released water into the rice paddy, the horizontal paddles of the small waterwheel, struck by the current, drove the entire wheel to rotate clockwise. As long as the water flowed without ceasing, it would not stop.

"This thing is rather interesting."

Although Yuan found it interesting, he did not take it seriously and did not think the thing could have any practical use. After Heifu left for the commandery city, Yuan threw himself back into his daily work over the following month and forgot all about the matter.

Until one day in early February, just as Yuan was teaching two apprentices how to make a treadle pestle, the county Master of Artisans summoned him over with a grim expression and handed him a transfer order from the commandery. Only then did Yuan sense that something was seriously amiss...

"The commandery wants to transfer me to Ying County?"

Yuan was somewhat dazed. Although he was reluctant to leave his current peaceful life, he dared not disobey a commandery order. Amid his wife's nagging, he packed his traveling bag, not bringing many extra things, only his ruler, carpenter's square, knife, saw, and the other tools of the stone and wood craftsman's trade.

"With these, I won't starve anywhere I go. Don't you worry."

Patting his cloth bag and comforting his wife thus, Yuan set out on his journey. This was the first time in his thirty years of life that he had left Anlu County.

As he tossed and turned at a post-house along the way, Yuan secretly pondered: "This matter of being transferred to the commandery—could it be related to Heifu?"

Because two years ago, it was Heifu who had given him a great gift, allowing him to come to the county town.

Yuan had assumed he would not meet Heifu until he reached the commandery city. He never imagined that, just after they crossed the wide Han River ferry, Heifu would already be there waiting.

"Brother-in-law!"

Heifu waved from a great distance at the travel-worn Yuan. Beside him was a young man who looked simple and honest, but the tattoo on that young man's face startled Yuan. Heifu was now a Guandafu; why was he keeping company with a tattooed convict?

As it turned out, Heifu had not been idle these past few days. He had volunteered to travel on official business to Jingling County, two hundred li away, to determine the county's conscription numbers, and had also taken the opportunity to visit Huaimu's widow and two brothers.

He conveyed Huaimu's last words to his widow, left ten taels of gold, and took his leave. As for Huaimu's two younger brothers, they had also regained their freedom. The younger half-brother was able to inherit Huaimu's "Dafu" rank, but the middle brother, Sangmu, received nothing and was worrying about what to do in the future. Sangmu himself had not committed a crime, but he had once tried to escape, so his face had been tattooed with ink characters. Apart from the Office of Rehabilitation, it was extremely difficult for him to make a living in any other trade.

Seeing that his appearance closely resembled Huaimu's, Heifu could not help but miss his old friend, so he simply decided to let Sangmu follow him back to Ying County.

"I happen to be short a charioteer to drive my carriage."

Heifu did not discriminate against Sangmu at all. Patting him on the shoulder, he said, "Sangmu says he can drive an ox cart. After a month or so of learning at the commandery, he should be able to drive a horse carriage too."

Yuan did not feel it was his place to say much, but the ink characters on Sangmu's face still struck him as jarring, for in Yuan's subconscious, anyone who broke the law was certainly not a good person. It was only when they rested at a post-house by the Han River that he finally found a chance to question Heifu alone.

As a result, Heifu's single sentence scared the soul out of Yuan!

"I told the Commandery Commandant that if you, brother-in-law, are given manpower, funds, and materials, you can transform the treadle pestle—which still requires human effort—into a divine device that needs no human hand and can operate automatically, saving tenfold the labor!"

Yuan's eyes widened. Simple and honest as he was, he murmured, "Is there really such a device? How come I don't know about it?"

Yuan lost his appetite again. This "impossible mission" that Heifu had taken upon himself on Yuan's behalf worried him endlessly.

Heifu, however, was not worried at all. He simply had Yuan follow him to the shore of the Han River at dusk.

"So broad is the Han, one cannot swim across; so long is the Jiang, one cannot raft its length."

The boatmen ferrying travelers back and forth still sang the songs that had been passed down for centuries. Under the setting sun, the water's surface, dyed red by the sun, stretched as far as the eye could see.

"Water flows through the land; the Jiang, the Huai, the He, and the Han are such." The Han River, along with the Yangtze, the Great River, and the Huai River, was ranked among the four great water systems of this era. Compared to the Ru River Heifu had once crossed, it was more than two or three times as wide.

By the water's edge, a group of youths frolicked and played, stark naked. Unlike the landlubbers of the north, they had been in and out of the water since childhood and had trained themselves into excellent swimmers. These youths swam joyfully, some drifting downstream, others struggling upstream. The strongest among them would even swim a round trip across the Han River. They would be the primary targets for conscription into the Southern Commandery's three thousand "Tower Ship Marines."

Heifu also saw wave after wave of washerwomen, brandishing clubs by the water's edge as they pounded and scrubbed laundry, loudly gossiping about domestic trivialities. There were even some old washerwomen rinsing bamboo baskets and earthenware jars in the river water...

The Han River was the mother river of the people of the Southern Commandery. Tens of thousands of households lived along its banks, relying on the Han to irrigate their fields and depending on the inexhaustible aquatic life in its waters to supplement their meat supply.

However, come summer and autumn, the Han River would not be as gentle as it was before their eyes. Then it would become the "Raging Han" that everyone feared. Floods occurred every year, washing away fields and houses in low-lying areas and making the riverside dwellers tremble with fear.

"At that time, the torrential flow truly swells, until one cannot tell ox from horse between the two banks and the islets."

After walking a hundred-odd paces along the Han River and speaking a string of seemingly unrelated words, Heifu finally asked Yuan: "But brother-in-law, have you ever thought—this torrential flow, which rushes faster than galloping oxen and horses, if it could also be used like livestock to do work for people, how wonderful that would be!"

"Harness... the torrential flow?" Yuan could not imagine it.

"I dare not say harness."

Good swimmers drown easily; one must still hold nature in awe and reverence. Heifu smiled: "I merely hope that the River Earl will share a little of this wasted power of the flowing water with us, that is all."

Yuan still felt that Heifu's idea was wildly fanciful. They could ladle water from the rivers to drink, build water conservancy projects and dams, and divert streams to flow into parched fields—but directly making the water flow do work for people like oxen, horses, and other livestock?

"That is probably something only water deities like the River Earl and the Xiang Consorts could accomplish. How could humans possess the power of water gods?" Yuan raised his doubts. The idea was good, but he did not think mere human strength could achieve such a thing.

Heifu shook his head: "Not so. I have heard that in high antiquity, people also believed fire was a gift from the Heavenly Gods, until a sage called Suiren Shi produced fire with his own hands. Now, using a flint and a small knife to make fire, even any child can do it. Does anyone still consider that a divine miracle?"

He knew that the history of humanity's use of energy was also the history of humanity's understanding and conquest of nature. The first stage was the discovery and use of fire; the second stage was the use of natural power such as animal power, water power, and wind power; only later came fossil fuels, electricity, atomic energy...

The Huaxia of today was still in the early part of the second stage. The power of livestock was already fully utilized, but the use of water and wind power was still extremely limited. On the land of Zhonghua, thousands upon thousands of streams and rivers rushed into the sea, their potential energy all going to waste, with no one thinking to use it. Only countless indentured servants and commoners still toiled desperately, using their own labor to do those heavy tasks, groaning in misery under such burdensome labor, many not living past thirty or forty years of age...

Therefore, Heifu felt it was time to upgrade technology from 2.1 to 2.2. A transmigrator's duty was not only to remedy the regrets of history but also to liberate productivity as much as possible, freeing more people from monotonous heavy labor. This was also his historical mission.

And all of this would begin with this conversation by the Han River.

"Brother-in-law, do you still remember that small waterwheel you and I made in Anlu?" Heifu said.

"I remember." But Yuan had only regarded it as a plaything to amuse children.

Heifu prompted: "That is actually a sharp tool for harnessing water power. The water current strikes the horizontal planks on the waterwheel, making the wheel turn ceaselessly day and night. If a wooden axle is installed on the waterwheel, and a wooden pestle is placed on that axle—of course, the specifics of how to install it will need you, brother-in-law, to figure out... In this way, without a person needing to press down with their body weight, won't the wooden pestle move on its own, driven by the waterwheel?"

Seeing the look of sudden realization dawn on Yuan's face, Heifu knew he had finally understood, and said: "This is the divine device I spoke of, which needs no human effort and can automatically pound and grind ore and grain."

"Since this thing moves by water, how about we call it a 'water-powered pestle'?"

PS: The second chapter will be in the evening.

(End of chapter)