lerbook #299 - Clockwork Gun Order
#299 - Clockwork Gun Order
After spending a week in Jeanne d'Arc Fortress, arranging all the affairs here, Horn and his officers prepared to return to Jeanne d'Arc Fortress.
Before that, however, he went to say goodbye to Hilov.
Under the gable of the Mechanical Palace, hiding behind the gate, Hilov quietly listened to Horn's decision to leave.
Although Hilov didn't say anything, Horn could still see her disappointment from her dragging tail.
"You have many friends here," Horn said, squatting down and holding Hilov's hand. "One day you will be able to go out on your own."
Hilov raised her head, looked at Horn's face, and turned her wheelchair forward.
Horn took a few steps back, puzzled.
Stopping the wheelchair in front of the door, Hilov opened her arms towards Horn, reaching out her hands.
Horn was stunned for a moment, but still walked over generously and gave Hilov a big hug.
What he didn't see was that Hilov's tail and ears stood up suddenly, and her usually unchanging eyes widened involuntarily.
Releasing Hilov, Horn sensed her surprise: "Didn't you want a hug just now?"
"I just wanted to show you that I can reach my hand outside the door," Hilov's human ears gradually turned red, while her beast ears drooped softly.
"Then do you want me to hug you?"
"Actually, I don't really want you to hug me," Hilov stubbornly turned her head away.
"Alright, I understand. If you want another hug, you'll have to wait until next time." Horn saw the child soldiers leading the horses over, patted the back of Hilov's hand twice, "Goodbye."
"Goodbye," Hilov barely recovered her previous elegant posture, waving her arm gracefully at Horn.
She leaned against the door, watching Horn's horseback figure gradually disappear from view.
Looking down at the marks pressed into the door panel, Hilov once again stretched her hand out from inside the door.
She could accurately judge that, from a physiological point of view, her hand had not suffered any damage.
But the pain and fear of her legs being chopped off by her mother more than ten years ago flowed in along her fingertips once again.
Her body trembled slightly, but Hilov still stretched her hand out the door.
"Hoo——" Exhaling a large breath, Hilov persisted for five minutes before retracting her hand as if electrocuted.
She turned her head to look at the clock behind her, as if murmuring to herself: "I persisted for one minute longer than yesterday..."
............
Thanks to the research on the dragon bone flute, Horn's journey back to Jeanne d'Arc Fortress from the Wild Spider Forest was exceptionally smooth.
Each outpost in the Wild Spider Forest had people assigned to play the dragon bone flute.
This time, Horn and his men were riding horses, so the speed was much faster than before, and they arrived at Mayo Town in a day and a half.
After changing horses in Mayo Town, Horn set off again without stopping.
When he reached Gray Furnace Town, Horn stopped.
Taking his guards down from their horses, Horn greeted the local guild leader and walked directly to the back room of the blacksmith shop on the west side of town.
Gray Furnace Town lived by metal processing, with a large number of craftsmen, the largest of which was the blacksmith industry.
Standing at the door of the large blacksmith shop, Horn peeked inside.
All kinds of tools were neatly hung on the wall, including hammers, pliers, chisels, etc., the curved openings gleaming with metallic luster.
Next to the medicine vat, several blacksmith apprentices were sweating profusely, pulling the huge bellows to fan the flames, making the hot coal dance with vigorous fire.
In the flames, bubbles gurgled from the medicine vat, and the iron ingots in the medicine gradually showed a pearly white sheen.
When the pearly white spots evenly covered the surface of the iron material, the blacksmith master would lift it out of the medicine vat.
On the anvil, the pearly white iron ingot was repeatedly hammered, and fluorescent light splashed everywhere.
These iron ingots, hammered into iron sheets, would eventually be gathered on a steel core, and gradually become iron tubes in the continuous hammering.
Unlike Horn's Autumn Dusk Island craftsmanship, the blacksmiths here did not have electric welding, so they naturally could not use the spiral rifling process.
However, as old craftsmen, they still had tricks.
The process they used was to wrap softened thin iron around a steel core to form an iron tube.
The joint of the iron tube was naturally not as strong as electric welding, so they wrapped another layer of iron outside the inner tube.
In this way, the joint of the inner tube was wrapped by the outer tube, and with the hammering process, they could actually create a rifled barrel that met Horn's requirements.
The cost was a low yield, requiring repeated reheating, with only one out of five meeting the requirements.
Adding the time to smelt iron ore in Mayo Town, it took an average of ten days for a blacksmith to produce a finished barrel.
Adding small parts such as firing rods, it took about 15 days for a gun.
However, the head of the Gray Furnace Town Blacksmiths' Guild swore with his whole family that this was only because the blacksmiths were not skilled enough.
Give him some time, and he can definitely shorten the time to within ten days.
Horn finally decided the day before yesterday to place an order for 1,000 spring-powered gun barrels from these blacksmith shops.
In addition, he also placed an order for 500 spring-powered gun barrels from the electric welding witches on Autumn Dusk Island.
Although he lost Jeanne, the strongest electric welding machine, the remaining five electric welding witches could still produce 2-3 barrels per person per day.
According to the output of the Autumn Dusk Island Holy Gun Workshop, it would not be a problem to produce 500-600 gun barrels in 50 days.
The Gray Furnace Town did not have the help of electric welding witches, and it took about ten days for a blacksmith and their apprentices to build a gun barrel.
Although their production efficiency was not high, they had a lot of people. It was still acceptable for 200 blacksmiths to build 1,000 spring-powered guns in 50 days.
At the current rate, Horn would be able to collect 1200 to 1500 spring-powered guns by the end of May.
According to Horn's precise calculation, each spring-powered gun used 20 pounds of iron, and the total price was between 25 and 30 dinars, including labor, materials, and other costs.
The pricing profit of weapons on the Imperial market is 50% to 70%.
The Salvation Army purchased them from them at a price of 45 dinars each, totaling 375 gold pounds.
This price does not include the mithril spring.
A mithril spring box costs 90 dinars, which translates to 1 gold pound at the purchase price.
So, in fact, the total price of a spring-powered gun is about 1.5 gold pounds, which is similar to the price of a knight's sword.
With the current number of Salvation Army battalions, only 1,000 out of 4,500 people are Holy Gun soldiers.
Even if they expand two more legions according to the plan, that's 5,500 people.
According to the current organization, there are at most 1,200 Holy Gun soldiers, and even if you count the ones damaged in the war, there is no such a big gap as 1,500 guns.
Besides supporting these blacksmith shops and preventing them from going bankrupt, the most important point for Horn to do this is that he does have a shortage of 1,300 spring-powered guns.
When he was on Autumn Dusk Island, Madelaine sent a letter from Jeanne d'Arc Fortress, with data attached showing that:
In the month after the war, the transcendence rate of Salvation Army soldiers soared from 3% to 10%, and is still gradually climbing.
The Holy Favor rate soared from 25% to 52%. Among the active war monks of the Salvation Army, there are already more than two thousand Holy Favor recipients.
Strangely, however, this time the Holy Favor disease is more serious than before, and there have even been multiple cases of war monks dying from Holy Favor.
Madelaine cannot temporarily determine whether these war monks who died of Holy Favor disease died because of injuries, physical weakness, or other reasons.
This really confused Horn. I am not even in Jeanne d'Arc Fortress, how did you get Holy Favor disease?
Holy Favor disease does not have the characteristic of human-to-human transmission, only Horn can transmit it.
If Holy Favor disease could be transmitted from person to person, the Empire would have been captured by the Witch's dependents long ago, okay?
With this question, Horn set off again. Since he couldn't figure it out, he temporarily stopped thinking about it.
The group set off again, and Horn still stopped to observe and ask questions every time he arrived at a place.
They passed by farmers weeding and learned that the land distribution team had advanced to near Gray Furnace Town.
They passed by a priest hanged at the entrance of the village and learned that a few days ago, a knight colluded with armed farmers to try to assassinate the land distribution team, but was defeated by the Black Hat Army.
They passed by laborers carrying soil, building water conservancy projects, and reclaiming wasteland, and learned that the Holy Plow and Holy Scythe monasteries had officially opened.
Near noon, looking at the smoke rising from Jeanne d'Arc Fortress, a smile unconsciously appeared on Horn's face.
"Your Majesty is in a good mood," Martin asked.
"Of course! There is hope for food to get through the spring famine, the land distribution is progressing smoothly, and the craftsmen are working so hard." Horn pointed to the winding road ahead in the distance, "Although we don't know where the future will lead, as long as we don't stop, our road will continue to extend."