Chapter 170: They All Say the Lion Is an Auspicious Beast

Shanxi, the mountain outskirts southwest of Pingyang Prefecture city.

Gao Yingxiang stood on the hill, gazing at the distant, towering prefecture city, his weathered face full of bewilderment.

He was pondering a question.

The question of just what kind of thing Liu Shizi really was.

He had thought for a long time, yet Gao Yingxiang still hadn't figured it out.

On the third day after Liu Chengzong left Shanxi — the very first day Gao Yingxiang pulled his Fenzhou Prefecture troops into Yonghe County — hail fell on Yonghe County.

Gao Yingxiang's force of over ten thousand was loosely organized to begin with; when hail suddenly struck from the sky, a place as small as Huojia Fort had nowhere to hide.

The army was simply smashed apart on the spot.

By the time the hail stopped and the wind and rain first let up, Gao Yingxiang had just over four thousand men left, more than half battered black and blue.

The rest had all fled, and it took two days to gather them again — every one of them injured, with over seven hundred corpses killed outright by the hail alone.

Not many were actually killed by the hail; most had died during the night, falling to their deaths while fleeing blindly through the mountains, succumbing to untreated injuries, bleeding out, or freezing to death in the wind and rain.

A wretched sight beyond bearing.

Later, Gao Yingxiang realized the reason he had suffered this hailstorm was entirely because of Liu Shizi.

If he hadn't sent word to Liu Shizi, Liu Shizi wouldn't have made him go via Pu County; if he hadn't been made to go via Pu County, he wouldn't have been waiting at Huojia Fort for Shi Chengwo to make the clay molds.

Originally, he should have been happily looting the princely estates in Fenzhou Prefecture, not standing in Pingyang Prefecture battered black and blue by hail.

Standing on the cliff edge, Gao Yingxiang felt deeply wronged and muttered to himself, "They all say the lion is an auspicious beast."

For over thirty years before, Gao Yingxiang had never felt he was a man of ill fortune — until, after rising in revolt, he drew Liu Shizi to his side.

Staying too close to the lion was no good: when Li Bei led his troops into Yan'an Prefecture, he insisted on striking Gao Yingxiang first, fighting all the way from Yanchang to Fushi.

Staying too far from the lion was no good either: the moment the auspicious beast left, he got pummeled by hail.

The lion's front foot had barely left when the hail arrived on its back foot.

It was as if he were Heaven's own son, with the days all counted out.

Gao Yingxiang came to terms with reality.

The place they were in now lay in the western mountains of Linfen, the seat of Pingyang Prefecture, at the border between Linfen County and Xiangning County — a region that produced both coal and iron ore, specifically the magnetic iron ore commonly known as green ore.

In the early Ming, there had been two ironworks here, Fengguo and Fuguo, which at their peak produced over five hundred thousand jin of iron a year.

Later, though, the official smelting operations were abolished and replaced by private enterprise; the scale today was nothing like the early years, but to sustain their livelihoods, the local people still carried on iron smelting in that area.

Gazing past the rolling mountains at the Fen River plain beyond, Gao Yingxiang sighed. He was a man of ill fortune; this auspicious beast — he couldn't bear it.

Still, the trip to Pingyang Prefecture had not been without its good sides.

The mountain he now stood on was called Guajia Ridge; not far to the west lay two iron villages. The local farmland was scarce, and for generations the people had made their living by tending furnaces, mining ore, selling iron, and peddling charcoal.

These people were all struggling to get by, and with only a little grain, Gao Yingxiang got them to work for him.

Gao Yingxiang walked down the mountain; his troops stretched across sixteen camps in a river valley that was easy to defend and hard to attack.

Shi Chengwo, his head wrapped in plain cloth, was down in the river valley directing the craftsmen in casting cannon, while the arquebus smith He Xin supervised the making of firearms on the other side.

As Gao Yingxiang descended, a huge clay mold, dried in the shade, was being heated, and the craftsmen were using a pre-built wooden frame to pour the wax out from inside the mold.

Shi Chengwo was beside the copper smelting furnace at the other end, measuring on the ground with his tools, directing the masons to build a base platform, and then setting up a large wooden frame at the spot he had measured.

"What's Officer Shi drawing there?"

Without raising his head, Shi Chengwo marked the ground with his compass and square, saying, "The cannon bore."

Gao Yingxiang stared, utterly baffled — there was clearly nothing on the ground at all.

There was only a brick-built base platform with a wooden frame set on it; Shi Chengwo had pulled a cord from the frame and was drawing on the ground like ghost talismans — beyond that, nothing whatsoever.

The whole thing looked like a spirit-channeling ritual.

"Right here — not a hair's breadth of error allowed. Dig."

At Shi Chengwo's command, the auxiliary soldiers of the work squad set to work on his orders.

Only then did he let out a breath, turn his head, and smile at Gao Yingxiang. "The Dashing King has arrived."

Gao Yingxiang said helplessly, "I've been here half the day. Just now you told me that was the cannon bore — where's the cannon bore?"

Shi Chengwo raised a hand to rub the wound on his head and smiled. "The Dashing King may not know this, but in casting cannon, the key is that the bore must be straight. If this position isn't found correctly, any cannon you make will be scrap."

His head had been struck by hail when he rushed out of the house to protect the shaded molds at Huojia Fort.

A wound in this spot was terribly troublesome; at night, if he wasn't careful while sleeping, he would scrape open the already-healed wound. Nearly a month later, it still hadn't healed.

"The Dashing King has also seen that clay shell. Bury it in the pit with half sticking out, and secure it to this frame."

Shi Chengwo pointed to the wooden frame — a very simple structure, just two upright posts with two horizontal beams tied at intervals. "The upper one on the outside, the lower one on the inside; between them, slanting from outside to inside, insert a wooden rod the same caliber as the cannon. That is the cannon bore."

"Actually, you don't even need the wooden rod. For an iron cannon, a willow rod might be better — after all, they stir-fry steel with willow rods too. For a bronze cannon, it doesn't matter."

Gao Yingxiang looked at the frame, frowned and calculated for a moment, came up with nothing, and asked, "You stick in a rod — how do you know the cannon bore is right there?"

"By calculation. I know how wide the bore is, how thick the walls are, and how long it is from the touchhole to the muzzle. It's not hard to figure out."

At this, Shi Chengwo rubbed the stubble on his chin and frowned. "Still, once this cannon is cast, it may turn out heavier than the General wants."

"How much heavier?" Gao Yingxiang asked. "Didn't Shizi want a two-hundred-jin cannon?"

"He did. The General wants a two-hundred-jin cannon, but this one I'm casting might come out at three hundred jin." Shi Chengwo shook his head. "I miscalculated... Dashing King, how long can we stay in these mountains?"

"How long?"

Gao Yingxiang had not considered this. Hearing the question now, he shook his head. "How long do you want to stay?"

"Until the sixth month — two months, can we?"

"I don't know."

That answer, at least, Gao Yingxiang gave very crisply.

How long they could stay here was not up to them; the moment the court dispatched a large army, they would have to leave.

"The government troops from Fenzhou Garrison and Pingyang Garrison are nothing to fear. Earlier, when we marched south from Huozhou and reached Gongji Bridge, Master Shi saw it too — they stayed across the Gao River, not daring to come over. They're afraid of us."

Gao Yingxiang's face broke into a smile when he mentioned the Pingyang Guard banner troops, then added, "Truth be told, compared to them, I'm more worried about the militia and village braves of Pingyang Prefecture."

The Fen River plain in Shanxi is crawling with manor lords, landlords, and merchants everywhere you look.

Under normal circumstances, there's nothing much to fear — landlord militias are hardly dangerous foes compared to the border troops.

If the border troops are jackals, wolves, tigers, and leopards, and the guard-and-battalion banner troops are yard dogs, then the landlord militias are nothing more than hedgehogs at best.

They've got more spines than meat — the Roving Army simply wouldn't bother fighting them.

But the current situation in Shanxi is a bit hard to call.

Because Gao Yingxiang is not the most ferocious leader stirring up trouble on the Fen River plain.

The most ferocious are the Jiaocheng Mountain bandits from Jiaocheng County in Taiyuan Prefecture.

Ever since Bu Zhanni and Gao Yingxiang raised havoc across the north and south over the past two years, the mountain bandits there have also grown active.

Their great chieftain, the Gourd King, burst out of the mountains with over ten thousand men to attack Jiaocheng, successively capturing Jiaocheng, Wenshui, Qingyuan, Xugou, and Taigu.

The latest news is that the Gourd King sent someone three days ago to contact Gao Yingxiang, saying they were going to attack Fenzhou Prefecture.

"If it were just us here, staying until the sixth month would be no problem, but now with those madmen from Jiaocheng kicking up a storm, it's really hard to say when the court will dispatch troops to suppress us."

Gao Yingxiang genuinely felt the Jiaocheng Mountain bandits were not the same kind of people as them — the situation over there was very complicated.

There were over a hundred chieftains in the Jiaocheng Mountains; the great chieftain Gourd King had only four hundred men under his direct command, and the ten-thousand-strong force had no unified command — the personnel were a complete mixed bag.

Just from what Gao Yingxiang alone knew.

Alongside the Gourd King as fellow Shanxi local bandits, famine refugees, and starving troops, there were also the mutinous starving troops from the Datong Yanghe Guard in the seventh year of the Tianqi reign, the remnants of the White Lotus follower Zheng Zhenming's rebellion from the second year of Tianqi, Yang Dagao who resisted taxes in the third year of Tianqi, and Wang Deshan who rebelled in Jiangzhou.

Besides the local bandits, there was a wave of grain-transport troops who had come from Yangzhou Prefecture and Fengyang Prefecture.

They called themselves the Dragon Flower Society, and including the remnants of Zheng Zhenming's rebellion from the second year of Tianqi, they were all White Lotus followers.

Truth be told, Gao Yingxiang liked coordinating operations with others — for instance, working alongside the Auspicious Beasts put his mind at ease.

But these Jiaocheng Mountain bandits couldn't even coordinate among themselves.

The Gourd King only wanted to seize an opportunity to plunder near Jiaocheng and would retreat into the mountains the moment government troops arrived to suppress them; the tax-resisting peasants would go home as soon as it rained; the White Lotus followers, on the other hand, struck out in all directions, practically wishing the government troops would come suppress them.

Compared to them, the many rebel kings of northern Shaanxi were far too pure.

Gao Yingxiang weighed things carefully in his mind — although his force was an army that could be scattered by a hailstorm, at least four thousand men within it were under his control.

The current guard-and-battalion troops and landlord militias in Shanxi — he could handle them even without combining forces; if the border troops came in the future, he wouldn't be able to beat them even if he did combine forces.

When the time came and the government troops suppressed them, this whole lot would burrow back into the mountains, leaving him alone as the big fool to take the beating.

Better to forget it.

He asked, "Why do we need to stay until the sixth month — isn't this cannon just about finished being cast?"

"This cannon shell needs a month to air-dry; this cannon was a trial build, and after it was done I realized I'd miscalculated — the cannon's too heavy, so I need to make another shell, which takes us to the fifth month. If the new shell has no problems, as long as we have enough copper material, make a few dozen shells, and by the sixth month we'll have a few dozen cannons."

Once the earth pit beside the cannon-casting platform base was dug, Shi Chengwo had men move the clay mold over, burying it half in the pit aligned with the direction of that slanting wooden pole.

Then he carefully compared the positioning. Gao Yingxiang watched from the side, tense and holding his breath, though he had no idea what he was so nervous about.

It wasn't until Shi Chengwo completed all the preparatory work and the copper kiln beside them began blasting air that he finally let out a sigh of relief.

He pointed at the clay mold and said, "The rest is easy. Once the copper melt enters the mold and cools, you smash the shell off, and there you have it — a divine artifact, bumps and all."

"I just like making bronze cannons. Bronze cannons, good or bad, you polish them and they gleam. Iron cannons don't polish up nearly as slick."

Gao Yingxiang was left staring wide-eyed. "It's that simple?"

"It's that simple. The red-barbarian cannons are just thick where they need to be thick, thin where they need to be thin, with different dimensions depending on what the cannon is used for. Other than that, there's no difference from how cannons were cast before."

Shi Chengwo laughed as he spoke.

The so-called red-barbarian cannon — the most critical part lay precisely in these dimensional rules.

These rules could, in this era, maximize the power produced by the union of gunpowder and tube, and make that tube more durable.

In truth, for Shi Chengwo, the hardest part of casting the small red-barbarian cannon Liu Chengzong had requested lay not in the casting, but in the design.

Normally, when others used this set of methods to build cannons, they'd start at a thousand catties and go up.

Just like last year when he helped Wang Zheng cast cannons in Sanyuan County — they cast three red-barbarian bronze cannons of fifteen hundred catties each.

But once he reached Lion Camp, Liu Chengzong wanted a small cannon of two hundred catties cast. The differences in every aspect were enormous, and he had practically designed an entire cannon almost single-handedly.

That was far harder than the casting.

Once he had finished the design work, the rest was no longer a problem — in fact, the later steps didn't even need him anymore, especially here in Shanxi.

Just find any metalworking smiths who could cast bronze bells, give them the dimensions, and they'd all be able to cast the cannon.

That very night, an excited Gao Yingxiang held up a torch and watched as Shi Chengwo poured water over the spindle-shaped bronze column.

Seeing that no water leaked out, he began drilling the touchhole, then polished away the casting burrs and pitted, uneven spots on the cannon body and bore.

He also used a hammer and chisel to carve the two characters "Lion" in front of the touchhole.

Originally, Shi Chengwo had also wanted to carve his own name, but Gao Yingxiang talked him out of it. "Don't chisel it — just carve a serial number on the cannon. If you carve your name on, what if the government troops capture it someday?"

In the end, Shi Chengwo carved the six characters "Heavenly No. 1 Great Blunderbuss" onto the cannon, and with that, this cannon was considered complete.

In the firelight of the river valley, soldiers used a specially made large balance scale to weigh the cannon and measured all its various dimensions.

This cannon had a bore diameter of two inches and two-tenths, a muzzle wall thickness of four inches and four-tenths, and the vent area was the thickest part of the cannon body at six inches and six-tenths. The entire cannon was four feet in total length, weighed three hundred and two catties and a bit, and fired a three-catty tight-fitting iron ball.

"It's indeed heavier than what the general requested, but I think this cannon is quite good."

Shi Chengwo looked it over again and again, then turned to Gao Yingxiang and said, "Roving King, if you too can't say for sure how long we can stay here, I'd like to prepare for both eventualities. Starting tomorrow, I'll modify the two-wheeled cannon carriage the general drew, and then make new clay molds."

Gao Yingxiang leaned in to listen, and heard Shi Chengwo say, "First, make ten clay molds based on this one, then make some smaller clay molds. If we must return to Shaanxi by the first ten days of the fifth month, then we'll just take eleven Heavenly-character Lion Cannons back."

"I estimate the two-hundred-catty clay mold can be finalized next time — let's tentatively call it the Earth-character Lion Cannon. In the fifth month, make another twenty Earth-character Lion Cannons, and that way we can bring thirty-two Heaven-and-Earth Lion Cannons back."

But Shi Chengwo hadn't expected Gao Yingxiang to actually shake his head. "I don't think that works. There's not enough copper material. With that many cannons, the copper material is just barely enough. If even one cannon fails, it's ruined. We need to make more clay molds."

Gao Yingxiang said this with a perfectly serious face, but immediately afterward he couldn't hold it in and broke into a grin. "And if we make more clay molds — I, Gao Yingxiang, have been standing beside you all this time, and you still don't get what I mean?"

"This cannon is good. I want some too. You've got to make me a few."

As he spoke, as if afraid Shi Chengwo might refuse, Gao Yingxiang held out his hand. "Not many — cannons like this one, you need to make me five. Earth-character Lion Cannons, make me ten. Just half of what the Lion gets."

"You're short on hands — however many you need, I'll find you that many. Goldsmiths and smiths, I've already found a hundred and forty households. I guarantee you can get it done."

"Hands are easy enough," Shi Chengwo said, pursing his lips. "Fifteen more, and the materials truly won't be enough."

Gao Yingxiang, hearing him relent, pressed his lips together and let out a silent breath of relief. "As long as you're willing to cast it, tomorrow I'll go strip the Buddhist temples!"