Warrior in Turbulent Han Dynasty

"January! Take Shouzhou City in January!" Guo Shao Tie Qing said to the generals.

Thick smoke filled the wind, and the miasma seemed to be full of haze in the sky. The generals stood there in a daze, and there was silence nearby. Maybe everyone thought it was because he was out of breath watching countless siege equipment being burned on his own land.

But Guo Shao didn't seem to be talking out of anger, and then he said seriously: "Issue the military order, please play the officials to break the city within one month. If you can't do it, please bind yourself in front of the king!"

"My lord..." Li Chuyun immediately tried to persuade him.

Guo Shao waved his hand and said, "I have made up my mind, if you don't succeed, you will be benevolent!"

With a "snap", a burning piece of wood broke from the catapult bracket and fell down, startling everyone who hadn't paid attention to the surrounding scene. Guo Shao turned his head and looked in the direction of the Huai River in the northwest. Li Chongjin and Li Jixun absolutely wanted to shift the responsibility to themselves. One word of negligence is enough.

More than half a month ago, Guo Shao really didn't want to attack Shouzhou; but now, he must not give up Shouzhou. What does it mean to be dismissed from here with the shadow of failure? He wants to smash here, no matter it is a hard bone or a stone, he can only swallow the bitter fruit after chewing; there is no way out.

The most effective way to prevent the emperor from being disappointed is to replace the siege generals only if the military order expresses determination.

But this military order needs to have additional conditions. There are too few elite soldiers, and the right wing of the Hujie Army claims to be 20,000 elite outside Shouzhou City, but they can't move; And that guy Li Chongjin, always interfering makes people very upset and at a loss.

It's as if you are looking for the most appropriate timing and position when you draw a bow and shoot an arrow, and someone is shouting beside you: Shoot, why not shoot, shoot from here, where are you facing, shoot quickly...I shoot|You face!

Now in Shouzhou City, there is food, soldiers and walls, and Liu Renzhan is a powerful veteran. Guo Shao really doesn't think there is any opportunity, and it is not in line with his style to attack rashly without opportunity.

There are no fighters but fighters can be created.

...

Not long after, Li Gu sent someone to say that the first batch of supplies prepared for Guo Shao had arrived at the Xiacai warehouse. Saltpeter, sulfur, charcoal.

Guo Shao left the devastated battlefield in front of him, turned his head and said to Li Chuyun: "I'll go to Xiacai, you watch here, and if you have important matters, send a fast horse to Xiacai to find me. Except for clearing up the battlefield, everything else remains the same. The tunnels must continue to be dug, and the tunnels on the three sides will continue; but don't go beyond the city wall... Dig ditches and build walls in front of the city wall, and tear down the walls and build soil."

Liu Renzhan's use of oil is very effective in defending the city and destroying weapons. Guo Shao didn't know where his oil was dug up, and he couldn't find a place to dig it, but many people could find saltpeter and sulfur mines.

There was gunpowder in the Tang Dynasty, but it could not be used to bomb cities. The normal function of digging tunnels is to quietly transport troops to sneak attacks, and there is no other use. It is impossible to use tunnels to dig down the city walls from the ground. There have been no battles since ancient times. It is also impossible for Liu Renzhan to think that tunnels are useful other than transporting troops to attack.

Blowing down a section of the city wall may not be able to attack, but no one can expect this kind of thing now, this is a fighter...

He also wanted to siege the city with a base of soil to confuse Liu Renzhan. Of course, Guo Shao knew that Liu Renzhan would deploy heavy fortifications at the location of the base of soil and take precautions. This method won't work, but Liu Renzhan must be on his guard, otherwise the feint will become the main attack.

The only question now is whether the gunpowder can bring down the city wall?

The siege strategy shown by Guo Shao is clear at a glance: digging tunnels and building soil. Liu Renzhan was probably laughing at himself, even his own people didn't believe that Guo Shao's siege would be effective. But he didn't think it mattered, the more the other party felt that everything was under control, the easier it was to catch Liu Renzhan by surprise and give Liu Renzhan a hard blow!

Of course, if the gunpowder didn't blow up the city, there would be a sound. That would be a tragedy... The world is really full of dangers, Guo Shao endured it before, but now he doesn't think he has any way out.

One nitrate two sulfur three charcoal. Guo Shao recited it silently several times on the road. He didn't know whether the ratio was good, and he couldn't remember the exact ratio... It's useless to memorize it. Minerals have a lot of impurities. Who knows what ratio they are mixed together?

In a grain storage yard in Xiacai Town, Guo Shao met Li Gu.

"What does General Guo want these things for?" Li Gu said, "Is it used to burn down the city gates? There is a Wengcheng in Shouzhou..."

This sentence reminded Guo Shao that gunpowder is explosive, not explosive; the power of explosive depends on the speed of burning. Seeing that there were only a few sacks in the warehouse, he cut the opening with a knife and saw some gray lumps, the color of konjac. Guo Shao thought for a moment and asked, "Is this saltpeter?"

Li Gu nodded: "Sulphur and charcoal are not a problem. Large quantities have been transported from various places, and they will arrive in a few days. However, there is not much saltpeter that can be collected in the nearby states. They can only be transferred urgently from the customs. The cumulative amount reported by the local officials is no less than two thousand catties. It may take ten days to arrive."

Guo Shao hurriedly said: "Mr. Li is so able to help, I am very grateful."

"It's all trivial matters." Li Gu smiled and said, "I was a prime minister before, and I had official correspondence with many local officials, and I was often ordered by the officials to prepare military supplies.

Guo Shao then took a piece of saltpeter out of the sack and held it in front of him for a closer look. In his previous life, he had finished high school and went to college. He knew that the compound potassium nitrate should be a salt-like crystal. The stone-like thing in his hand was dusty, and he didn't know how much effective substance there was.

After thinking about it, he didn't want to reveal the military plan, so he sent people to Shouzhou to transfer three hundred soldiers under Luo Mengzi to Xiacai, ordered the warehouse to be sealed off, and the idlers to be driven away.

Then, under Guo Shao's instruction, everyone set up a cauldron in the yard and found some needed things. Potassium is an active element at the top of the periodic table, and potassium compounds must be easily soluble in water.

After half a sack of saltpeter is hammered, it is stirred with water in a wooden barrel, and then the water is filtered out with tofu filter gauze. Filtered water is poured into large pots to boil and dried. Finally, a bunch of white-gray crystals came out after frying. Is this potassium nitrate? Guo Shao grabbed a pinch and pondered it in the palm of his hand, and found that the crystals in it had different rules, some were small particles like salt, and some were long strips. This is not a substance, otherwise the shape should be the same after crystallization.

Guo Shao asked people to use bamboo sieves to sieve and classify. Then mix the two crystals with an approximate amount of charcoal and vulcanization, and light the fire to try. It was found that only long crystals could burn violently.

Then several other pots were erected, and in half a day using that method, several sacks of saltpeter were processed into three buckets of saltpeter.

Zuo You helped, and weighed it with a scorpion for weighing valuables, and mixed it into forty-nine kinds of gunpowder in different proportions. It is more troublesome to mix. The three dry items will spontaneously ignite if they are mixed heavily. But Zuo You and the others easily came up with a way to mix it with water to make it wet like dough, and then pound it in a stone pound for processing grain and grass. After drying for one day, it is carefully ground into powder the next day.

But at this time, Guo Shao asked them not to bother to grind it into powder, but to grind it into granules directly, and sift it evenly with a fine sieve.

Everyone worked hard for three days, and forty-nine packs of dark things were brought up. Guo Shao stayed with Zuo Youluomengzi and a dozen or so trusted soldiers to experiment in the room.

The method is very simple, try to find out which one burns the fastest.

The forty-nine kinds of gunpowder were subdivided into seven groups, and the fastest-burning one was selected for each group; then the winners were tested together for the final test. Like the rules of the game. Seven kinds of gunpowder are folded with paper to make a long strip, and then counted one, two, three and ignited together to see which one burns to the end first.

Soon the room was filled with gunpowder smoke, and everyone was coughing, so they had to open the doors and windows to breathe.

The whole process is actually very simple, Guo Shao waited for less than an hour and finished the experiment. I found out the ratio of the pack of gunpowder: seven taels of nitrate, one tael of sulfur, and one tael of charcoal.

Guo Shao vaguely knew that gunpowder granules burned faster than powder, and thought about the reason, probably because there is a gap in the middle that makes it easier to burn? However, he felt that experiments were the way to prove all conjectures, and it was a simple matter, so he took the same kind of gunpowder granules and powder alone, and the difference was obvious... For the same length of gunpowder, the granule gunpowder burned out, and the powder did not burn even one-third.

It's almost done here, Guo Shao ordered Zuo You to stay in the warehouse, Luo Mengzi restrained the soldiers, and told them not to leak the military aircraft, otherwise the death penalty would be inevitable. Another personal scout was sent to set up light and dark posts near Feishui to guard against careful operations.

Guo Shao returned to Shouzhou City. The next day, the ministers sent by the emperor went to Shouzhou again. The person who came back this time was no longer the talkative Wang Pu, but someone Guo Shao knew: Dou Yi, and a follower, Zhao Pu.

Guo Shao gradually remembered that Zhao Pu seemed to be a person who took refuge in Zhao Kuangyin, but he didn't know how he was with Dou Yi now.

Dou Yi didn't say anything, just wandered around the city, inspecting the deployment outside the city. Guo Shao explained his deployment intentions and considerations on how to guard against counterattacks in the city one by one, and said without hesitation that Li Jixun did not move.

Two days later, Dou Yi went to the Hujie army's right camp. Then went southeast to Chuzhou.

Within two days, Kuai Ma rushed to Shouzhou, and ordered Li Chongjin to move the town of Haozhou, and Li Jixun's troops to move to the northeast of Tushan; the main forces of the third to sixth armies of the left wing of the Hujie Army deployed in the south of Luzhou were transferred to Shouzhou, and Guo Shao, the capital of the wing, was dispatched.

Dou Yi, who delivered the decree, said to Guo Shao: "The officials said that although you did not slack off, you allowed the defenders to counterattack successfully. You cannot escape the blame! Now that you have issued a military order, you have something to say in front of the generals. The officials are not ruthless people. The deadline is one month. When the time is up, if there is no progress, Guo Du envoy will bind himself in front of the king and plead guilty!"