Before taking his leave, Li Gan had mentioned that the remaining Fire Crystal Stone was nowhere near enough to forge weapons for every soldier in the Assault Camp. He needed more Fire Crystal Stone.
Zhou Xu had a clear understanding of the situation.
In fact, the first batch of Fire Crystal Stone they had received had all been mined from the walls of Chilian's lair. All things considered, it had practically been ready-made, and was very easy to obtain.
Once they had mined all of that Fire Crystal Stone, the only way to obtain more would be to mine it themselves, bit by bit.
Under those circumstances, considering the distance from Volcano Island to Black Moon City, even if they ignored mining efficiency and considered only transportation efficiency, they would be lucky to receive a batch every five or six months.
Speaking of weapons, he could not help but mention another important resource he had discovered on Volcano Island: Sulfur.
With Zhang Xuemei in charge from start to finish, the Sulfur mining operation had already gotten smoothly underway before he left Volcano Island.
At the same time, after receiving his orders, Potassium Nitrate had also begun to be collected on a large scale throughout the empire.
As far as raw materials went, he had basically gotten everything settled. From there on, developing Explosives was, in plain terms, a process of constantly trialing and erroring with different material ratios. It required manpower, energy, and time, and was essentially much the same as the Forging Department trying to smelt new alloys and conduct experiments with various proportions.
Because every department was short-handed, the number of people assigned to the Explosives Department was not large. On top of that, once raw materials were consumed during the development process, they were simply gone.
And