Chapter 59: The Happy Stick

The loss of grain pushed Black Dragon Mountain to its end, and pushed people toward a new life.

Once the heart grows wild, one dares to do anything.

Cao Yao gathered several blacksmiths among the refugees and told them to build him a firelock.

The craftsmen didn't utter a single word of complaint; they just started hammering away, clang clang clang.

He said the firelock he wanted was a thing from the Liao garrison, five chi in total length, with a three-legged iron stand, weighing eighteen jin, operated by two men, flat-trajectory range of two hundred paces, called the Great Wind-Chaser Gun.

The moment Liu Chengzong heard this, he thought, isn't this just a wall gun? He asked him: What are you making this thing for?

Cao Yao said this thing is especially deadly in street fighting — that little alley between the front and rear courtyards inside Wang Family Fort, as long as you rappel down from the back mountain, stuff the barrel with grapeshot and spray it, you could cripple ten men in one blast.

Liu Chengzong put a stop to his somewhat crazed idea. It was too dark to see clearly at night, and those guards at Wang Family Fort were no match for them anyway. If one of their own got mixed in and took a face full of shot, the loss would far outweigh the gain.

Gunpowder wasn't a major problem.

Black Dragon Mountain already had some gunpowder, but Liu Chengzu, out of caution, advised against using the powder from the garrison troops.

So they chose to mix their own. Cao Yao in Old Temple Village and Liu Chengzong at Black Dragon Mountain collected saltpeter from every household, scraping together quite a bit of saltpeter earth.

Shaanxi produces saltpeter, and most of their Shaanxi border troops knew how to leach saltpeter; it was just exhausting work.

It just so happened that the refugees assigned by the government were all sitting around eating idle meals, so they assigned a few men to the firecracker maker called Old Third Huang among them, and hid in the mountains to do this work.

When Yang Dingrui heard that Liu Chengzong needed sulfur, he could more or less guess what it was about, and quietly sought out Liu Chengzong to ask.

After all, he was his teacher, and there was truly no hiding it, so Liu Chengzong had to reveal the plan.

Who would have thought that the moment Yang Dingrui heard it, hatred surged forth: "They deserve to die. I wanted to kill Zhang Qing back then. Zhao Shou, sent by Grand Coordinator Lü, was a close friend of mine, yet he was tortured to death!"

Zhao Shou was a xiucai, serving in the residence of Shaanxi Grand Coordinator Lü Zhaoxiong back then. The grand coordinator sent him to secretly investigate the Qin prince's encroachment on ten thousand qing of horse pasture, and in the end, Zhang Qing had him beaten to death.

Lü Zhaoxiong impeached the matter to the imperial court, but the Tianqi Emperor told the Qin prince's estate to resolve the matter themselves. At the time, all the Shaanxi officials, high and low, were furious, yet utterly helpless.

But now, seeing Black Dragon Mountain driven to a dead end, Yang Dingrui didn't dissuade Liu Chengzong at all; instead, he took the entire sulfur matter upon himself.

He only borrowed one man from him, then took Guo Zhashi and rode off on two donkeys.

That very night, the two of them came back leading two donkeys, with four large pottery jars strapped to the donkeys' backs, carrying a total of one hundred ninety-five jin of sulfur.

At Yuanlong Temple south of Black Dragon Mountain in Yan'an Prefecture, they were running a work-relief program, building a glazed pagoda, digging mines, and firing kilns. Sulfur was a byproduct of calcining green vitriol. The man in charge there was a clerk from the prefectural works office, who owed Yang Dingrui a favor and whose word still carried weight.

And the timing of the visit was perfect; originally, Yang Dingrui hadn't planned on taking so much.

The work-relief program was about to end, and this batch of sulfur was scheduled for delivery to the Yan'an Guard. The recipient was Battalion Commander Zhang. The moment Yang Dingrui heard that name, he thought, an old acquaintance.

Giving it to that good-for-nothing guard officer would be worse than feeding it to dogs.

I'll be taking that!

The two of them loaded up as much as they could carry, finally taking four jars totaling one hundred eighty jin, and then had Guo Zhashi take off his clothes and wrap up another fifteen jin before they left.

Liu Chengzong, roused in the middle of the night, was utterly dumbfounded, and couldn't help worrying that Yang Dingrui bringing back so much sulfur might bring harm to that works office clerk.

Little did he know, Yang Dingrui was still not satisfied in his heart, saying that had he known earlier that batch of sulfur was going to Battalion Commander Zhang, he would have called for two carts and hauled back five or six hundred jin.

As for the works office clerk, Yang Dingrui told him to set his mind at ease. Over there they used a dozen or so large blast furnaces, each firing a thousand jin of green vitriol, producing over thirty jin of sulfur each time.

Even if he had hauled back six hundred jin, that would only be half a day's output.

Spread out over a month, a little adjustment to sifting loss would cover it.

Everyone was too timid to do any proper work, but they were all extremely deft at this sort of thing. Even if they hadn't gone to ask for it, someone else would have taken stuff from there to sell in the city.

Liu Chengzong had never dreamed that Yang Dingrui could get him this much sulfur.

This was enough to mix two thousand jin of gunpowder. Given the chance for Cao Yao to dig a tunnel, he really could blow those high walls of Wang Family Fort sky-high.

Unfortunately, they didn't have that much saltpeter, so blowing up the fort was still a joke.

Moreover, Liu Chengzong discovered that even blasting open the door bolt had a big problem.

They could make an explosive charge, but fixing the charge against the door bolt on the opposite side of the fort gate was extremely difficult.

They couldn't exactly go right up to the enemy's fort gate and hammer in nails, could they?

Even if the defenders were truly so lax as to let them hammer in nails, an explosive charge big enough to blast open a thick, solid wooden gate would need several large nails hammered in.

During the few days Old Third Huang was leaching saltpeter, Liu Chengzu focused single-mindedly on smothering charcoal in the brick kiln.

Only Cao Yao and Liu Chengzong racked their brains worrying over this problem.

Until a strange thing flashed from another set of Liu Chengzong's memories — the board-mounted happy stick, formally known as the lunge mine.

A metal casing, a conical red copper shroud, packed with a large amount of black powder, plus a long wooden pole, pressed against the fort gate.

With a different charge, it could punch a hole through a tank.

If they used it, could they accurately punch a hole through the gate and destroy the door bolt behind it?

But as Liu Chengzong drew up the blueprint, the more he looked, the more uneasy he grew. After all, no matter how he looked at it, this thing seemed especially suited for the starving people of this era, and not so suited for blasting fort gates.

A great host of starving people, each gripping a blasting pole, charging toward the brilliantly armored Han Dynasty generals beneath the Forbidden City gates, shouting, "When will this sun perish? We shall die together with you!"

Suitable. Far too suitable.

Cao Yao was like Liu Chengzong's robotic cat; no matter what he needed, he could pull it out of the old scoundrel's belly. Only when he truly couldn't pull it out did they need to find another way.

Blueprint drawn, a bag of Wanli Tongbao swindled from Cao Yao, Liu Chengzong gleefully hoisted a hoe onto his shoulder and went to place an order with the blacksmith.

The copper coins and the hoe were both materials.

"Make a sturdy, thick iron tube casing, and hammer the copper coins into a thin conical shell, just like the drawing. Right, remember to leave a hole in the iron tube for attaching the pole. What kind of pole, you ask? What's the longest pole in the mountains?"

The honest, simple refugee blacksmith, seeing the boss suddenly grow impatient at the mention of what kind of pole, could only answer with a pitiful look: "Long spears, the one-zhang-eight kind."

"Right, use whichever is longest."

The pole absolutely could not be short; Liu Chengzong hadn't lived long enough yet.

Still, this thing was indeed much simpler to make than Cao Yao's Wind-Chaser Gun. The blacksmith finished it in just half a day.

It wasn't until he poured the gunpowder in that Liu Chengzong stood dumbfounded — he had forgotten to drill a hole for the fuse.

He had the blacksmith rework it, had Cao Yao twist a fuse, packed in three jin of gunpowder, and in the middle of the night, several men hauled the long pole and a broken door plank to the back mountain.

Time for an experiment.

Liu Chengzu and Cai Zhongpan both thought the thing looked pretty stupid, but they were well-bred and didn't say so.

Only Cao Yao said it.

Cao Yao was pretty annoyed with Liu Chengzong right now.

The day before yesterday he'd wanted to fool around with his wife for a bit — pants already off — when he got dragged out to survey terrain. Yesterday he traveled all day. Today he'd just lain down inside when he got hit up for money again.

Tonight, when he'd finally felt his chance coming, he got yanked out to watch an experiment.

And the kid they'd picked up got dumped at his place, under the fine-sounding name of letting him train a bit on how to raise a child first.

And now, to top it off, he had to light this thing that looked especially idiotic.

Three door planks stood upright on the ground. Liu Chengzong stood there gripping the tail of the long pole, looking utterly self-righteous.

Cao Yao clutched a fire striker, held it up to the cone-shaped powder charge of the blasting tube, swallowed, and asked Liu Chengzong, "Light it for real? Don't get me blown to death."

"How about you go to the cave dwelling and drag Song Shouzhen over here instead?"

Liu Chengzong meant that with all sincerity. Who knew what Cao Yao thought of — he cursed: Motherfucker, the imperial court couldn't finish me off!

Liu Chengzong hadn't even heard clearly when the flame shot up — Cao Yao clutched his head and scurried, rolling to one side, and right after came a boom.

Ahead, fire blazed and the roar was deafening. A vibration traveled up his hand and knocked him backward into a tumble.

He scrambled up. Acrid smoke hung thick, making him cough violently, but he wasn't injured.

Looking forward, the top of the long pole had split open. The iron casing of the blasting tube had burst apart like an exploded firecracker.

Further ahead, the three wooden doors had been pierced through with bowl-sized holes, neat and uniform.

Amid the cheers of the three men, a smile unlike the others' spread across Liu Chengzong's face.

In his heart he was screaming wildly: It works!

My memories — they're useful!