Warring States Survival Guide

Chapter 158 Busy and fulfilling

Yuanye and Princess Inu were engaged, but it was uncertain when they would officially get married. He did not understand the etiquette of marriage in medieval Japan, and there were no experts in "rituals and laws" in his territory, so he was prepared to do whatever Oda Nobunaga said and wait for notification.

He was not in a hurry to get married. Marrying an eleven-year-old wife would only cause him trouble. The covenant was set, and his main focus was on restoring production and building a new Wanjin.

The workshop needs to be rebuilt, the house needs to be rebuilt, and the small laboratory also needs to be rebuilt. However, through the marriage, all the things that were confiscated from Wanjin will be returned. He can just send people back to move many of the instruments and containers. The new Wanjin only needs to build a factory building and so on, so he doesn't need to worry too much.

In particular, the new round of construction can use volcanic ash cement. This building material is cheap and very suitable for rapid construction. It can also be used to construct large buildings. When the factories and the like are built, they should be more magnificent and more practical than before.

At the same time, the soil in Xinwanjin was quite good. He organized people by the river and reclaimed the first paddy field in Wanjin's history. He also made various plans as soon as possible, preparing to build a small water conservancy irrigation system in the future and continue to expand the cultivated land area so that he could be self-sufficient in food in the future and grow some cash crops to meet industrial and commercial needs.

The successful emergence of the field boosted the morale of the people of Xinwanjin. After many elderly people collectively petitioned and got their approval, they chiseled a long boulder from the mountain, dragged it all the way to the river, planted it there, and then asked Yuanye to personally take a file and file the first line on the boulder.

This thing is called "Huangshi" and is used to record the height of the river. It is said that if you live in the area long enough and keep recording the height of the river according to the season, farmers can use Huangshi to judge whether there will be a good harvest next year or whether they need to start preparing for famine and store grain early. There are even many myths and legends about "Huangshi" among the people.

After all, strictly speaking, Japan is not a maritime civilization. Even though its main territory is made up entirely of islands, it is actually a river-based civilization - a wonderful phenomenon caused by the profound influence of China since the Sui and Tang Dynasties. It is completely different from most island countries. The situation of relying on the sea for food is not serious, which is very rare in world history.

This resulted in most villages in Japan at that time being built along rivers, and "barren stones" became a landmark in most villages. Now Xinwanjin finally has "barren stones". In a sense, these subjects have truly accepted this place, are truly willing to settle here, and have begun to regard it as their home.

The situation in the new Wanjin is better than that in the old Wanjin. At least after a great war, the future is bright. The collective sense of identity of the people is getting stronger and stronger, and the number of people who call themselves "Wanjin people" is increasing. There is no longer any distinction between "old Wanjin" and "new immigrants", and they are gradually merging into a whole.

Also because of the appearance of fields, accumulating fertilizer has become a voluntary thing for many people. The residential area attached to the workshop has not been completed yet, but a large number of public toilets in the residential area (called wild manure fields at that time) were completed as soon as possible. Even though it is summer now and the typhoon season is not long, and farming cannot begin, people who think they can rent fields still start scrambling to accumulate fertilizer. Japan already has a tradition of accumulating fertilizer in this era. It was introduced to Japan during the Song Dynasty. For example, in the "Illustrated Book of Honen Shonin", there is a picture of Honen Shonin chanting sutras while squatting in the dry toilet, and taking a little monk to collect feces and urine in buckets to accumulate fertilizer.

The people were voluntarily and consciously accumulating fertilizers, preparing to plant a crop of beans to nourish the land once the typhoon season was over. Yuanye, of course, was looking forward to the betterment of his territory, and he was not idle either. He gave priority to transporting back the guano stones that he had accumulated in the past, and after proper crushing and processing, he put them into the fields.

Struvite has a slow release property. After being applied to the soil, the nutrients in it will not be released quickly, but will gradually dissolve over time and continue to provide nutrients to plants. This feature can reduce the frequency of fertilization and reduce labor consumption. It can also avoid waste caused by too fast nutrient release and can meet the nutrient needs of plant growth for a longer period of time.

At the same time, guano is also an excellent natural fertilizer, rich in nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and magnesium that crops urgently need. For example, the Wu and Yue countries in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods relied on guano, cooked guano soil, and flocks of migratory birds that regularly came to defecate to cultivate the land, which resulted in extremely high grain production and greatly increased national strength. They were able to train a large number of swordsmen and beat the hegemons such as Chu and Qi with the power of a small country, and even almost destroyed them.

The Chinese ancestors had used up natural fertilizers such as guano in advance, so the later generations naturally had no more to use. There are very few historical records. Japan copied the work from the Sui and Tang dynasties, but it didn't copy it at all. That was a good opportunity for Yuanye, so he could pay tribute to the ancestors and help Japan use guano in advance, so that he could also use fertilizer - crops are really different when they are used with or without fertilizers. In modern times, it is not wrong to say that more than 60% of the world's population is fed by fertilizers.

Xinwanjin is thriving and recovering very quickly. New buildings are completed every day and the size of the fields is expanding every day. Yuanye roughly estimates that this rapid recovery and development will last until the beginning of next year. By then, 80% of his manpower will be insufficient and he will be forced to maintain the status quo and will no longer be able to develop rapidly.

This gave him another headache. His strength was increasing at a slow pace, which greatly affected his final plan. However, he could not plan ahead for such a thing. Now he looked around and found that there was no one who could be forced to immigrate. He could only hold it in for the time being and see if he could think of other ways to plunder some people back. Of course, he did not forget the islanders in Ise Bay.

The two sides have been dealing with each other for so long that their trust is much stronger than before, so he sent Aman and Yuda to hire islanders again to help transport goods, and continued to give them benefits to lure these people to move to his place, and it has been effective. He has already gathered about thirty families. However, his territory is now larger, more than five times the size of Wanjin before (including the territory of the Yuya family that he could occupy but has not had time to occupy). Even if he threw a hundred people in, he couldn't even see a splash. It can only be regarded as an additional group of managed fishermen.

The development of the territory still has a long way to go. Now he is still just a powerful family, at most a powerful family that has mastered advanced production technology and is very good at making money. If he wants to truly become a "small daimyo" and have the power to influence the situation at a critical moment, he must at least fill up the territory with a large population, otherwise it will be no different from before.

When the workshop gradually resumed production and construction projects such as fields, water conservancy facilities, and houses were planned, he tried to build a small salt field on the beach with volcanic ash cement to ensure a stable supply of salt to the territory. At the same time, he also accumulated technical processes and management personnel in order to expand production on a large scale and squeeze out his salt-selling colleagues.

Of course, he couldn't do it in a short period of time. He had already lost hundreds of young and strong men for this piece of land. It was barely enough to restore the original production of the workshop. It would be a bit difficult for him to assign people to dry salt and water salt flowers on a large scale. He could only wait and see in the future.

He also tried to make sugar, attempting to use microbial fermentation to produce white sugar from rice. He had read a related paper before traveling through time, and remembered some of the operating steps and data, but unfortunately, this kind of fermentation conditions were extremely harsh in ancient times, and the number of successful attempts in the laboratory was extremely limited. Moreover, the cost was unbearable, and workshop-style production was impossible.

It seems that if you want to get a highly profitable product like white sugar, you still need to find and improve the ancient method of making sugar. However, Yuanye sent Aman out to inquire for several times but couldn't find sugarcane and sugar beets (he looked for them while restoring the Owari intelligence network). Maybe it hadn't been introduced to Japan yet at that time.

Or just like domestic pigs, which have been introduced to Japan from China or the Korean Peninsula several times since the Tang Dynasty, but for various reasons, they have all become extinct and cannot be found at all now.

Perhaps it was true. He vaguely remembered that modern Japanese people did not have the habit of eating sugar cane, and sugar cane could not be found in fruit stores or supermarkets. Beet was a vegetable whose leaves and roots were eaten, and it was not very common either. At least, in the Guanzhong region where he had lived before, people hardly ate it.

Fortunately, Aman did not return empty-handed. After searching for several times, she did not return completely empty-handed. She actually brought back a handful of watermelon seeds from Atsuta Port, which was a pleasant surprise. Besides, there was still time to plant the autumn watermelons. Yuanye quickly started planting seedlings in holes, hoping to eat a bite of watermelon in the autumn to recall modern life. Life in ancient times was so miserable, just like suddenly going from a big city to a remote tribe in Africa, where there was really nothing. He worked hard every day and wanted to eat something good to adjust his mood.

As for the sugar-making business, it had to be put on hold for the time being unless he could find sugarcane seedlings to restart it. He would only occasionally grind a jar of rice in the laboratory to see if he could produce some sugar for use in making medicine and explosives.

"A handful of gunpowder and a handful of sugar, nicknamed Big Ivan", and "a mouthful of sugar, a life", these are all common sayings. If you are seriously injured, drinking a bowl of sugar water or licking sugar crystals can greatly increase your chances of survival. In this way, these sugars are strategic materials, and strategic materials never need to consider costs, so it is better to prepare more.

The simple construction life is very suitable for an engineer like him. As the watermelons begin to bear fruit and grow, his life becomes more busy and fulfilling.

In fact, if you don't consider the final plan and let him live like this for the rest of his life, he doesn't really have much objection.

(End of this chapter)