Zhushui Jiao Ruin Zone: Unexpected Contact

About a hundred kilometers east of the Zhushui Jiao Ruin Zone stood a human settlement, currently the one closest to the cluster.

The settlement was called Jian City, but its name had nothing to do with any city from before the Great Cataclysm. During the Great Cataclysm, the people of an original village had successfully banded together to save themselves. They then found an area with river access and hills for protection, and built a city there.

Now, a three-meter-high wall surrounded the entire city. Watchtowers stood at intervals along it, their dark cannon muzzles overlooking the surrounding area. The cannons used breech-loading technology and steel rifled barrels with very thick walls, and fired brown-powder propellant. Mounted on wheeled bases atop the emplacements, they could cover the surrounding area. Overall, this was roughly mid-nineteenth-century Krupp steel cannon technology.

Civilization had regressed to this point, social institutions had begun to stagnate, and much technology could no longer be maintained.

Take chemical engineering! Technically, one could prepare potassium nitrate, mix it with hydrochloric acid, and then nitrate glycerin or guncotton.

Every step was feasible! But many intermediate products were extremely unstable!

In the 21st Century, legitimate chemical plants hired people with qualifications and discipline, and needed good management. Even the private technicians at small, low-education workshops could cautiously manage to produce some chemicals, driven by profit despite the risk of going to prison.

But now, with resources monopolized by a few and most people deprived of any chance to advance, trying to maintain production of hazardous chemicals with so many critical steps was bound to lead to a major accident sooner or later! So it wasn't that people had all forgotten their knowledge. Society determined the relations of production, and those relations constrained the productive forces. Powerful explosives couldn't be made, so cannons didn't need high barrel pressure. For the sake of reliability, the military industry gradually sacrificed performance.

For small and medium-sized city-states like Jian City, reliable military technology had regressed to the 20th Century. A few craftsman-level technologies, such as precision gears, electrical wires, and optical glassmaking, barely reached the workshop standards of the mid-twentieth century.

Now, in the heart of this cannon-bastioned city—

The city's central administration was housed in a building like a tower atop the Great Wall.

Its walls had very small windows on all four sides, while three groups of skylights in the roof let in light. Steel shutters could be lowered over both the skylights and the windows, sealing the room completely.

Inside the building were electric fans, incandescent lights, and other equipment. Sunlight from the skylights fell just right on several potted plants. Two of them were kumquat trees, their little fruits still green.

An old man in a white lab coat lay back in a wooden chair, like a researcher from the 21st Century. In this era, even having clothes that had survived from centuries ago was remarkable, because humanity had lost its cotton supply. Most people now wore clothes made from flax fiber.

This was Zeng Longmu, the ruler of Jian City. He studied a report from the person in charge of the Spore Culture Room. It stated that the fungi in the culture dishes had shown abnormalities. The city's ruler opened a book and turned to a page describing the cause of such a phenomenon: a major change in the surrounding area's Gene Colony.

He went over to another glass-fronted cabinet and took out a box of nameplates. They bore the names of the Beast Tamers under his command. First he picked up a plate belonging to one of his own descendants, then another, and hung both on a kumquat tree beside him. He smiled kindly.

Nearly forty days had passed since Wei Keng had crossed over here, and his territory was thriving more and more.

One Primitive Blast Furnace after another had been built in the settlement. They stood five meters tall and were made entirely from bricks dug out of the city ruins. A blast furnace of this size couldn't be kept blowing by human power alone—well, mainly because Wei Keng's arms got tired.

So Wei Keng had deliberately dammed the small river and used levers and waterwheels to drive the furnace bellows back and forth, continuously pumping hot air inside.

As the hot air blown into the hot coals turned into jets of flame, the furnace temperature rose high enough to melt steel. At last, the Metal Items dug out of the ruins melted at that temperature.

In the 1960s, this kind of Primitive Steelmaking had wasted huge quantities of resources and produced mountains of useless scrap. As a result, after the 1980s, some literary intellectuals sneered whenever they mentioned that era or this method of steelmaking.

But in reality, this method could produce fairly usable steel. Going back to the 1930s, the country had relied on it to obtain weapons during its war of resistance against invasion.

The catch was that the people who used this method to make steel in the 1930s were science and engineering students who had returned from studying abroad. The method was primitive, but every standard was met.

By contrast, the people who took part in the Great Leap Forward Steelmaking campaign in the 1960s were farmers with no grasp of industrial production. Unable to understand the purpose of each assigned requirement, they relied on enthusiasm and quantity, hoping to earn praise and approval. Their small furnaces were too short, their inner walls too weak, and the temperature never even got high enough. The result was scrap steel, and no technical summaries to show for it.

All in all, the problem wasn't the method, but the lack of qualified people in industrial production.—Wei Keng: So what the hell are all those artsy types complaining about? Do you have what it takes to make steel?

Wei Keng was making steel now because he needed it. He was documenting every related process.

The copper and iron dug out of the city were sorted. The steel went into the No. 1 large furnace, and the copper into a smaller one.

Once the steel was ready, it flowed directly from several outlets into separate casing molds! Another outlet fed the forging area, where the metal was hammered into shape and drilled. Then it was compressed until it became an iron canister thirty centimeters long and about as thick as a mineral-water bottle. A support was welded underneath. Oh, and an angle gauge wasn't necessary. The system provided a visual ballistic-marking system. This was a Grenade Launcher! A simple steel tube, with cast-iron ammunition blocks. Easy to use!

Once enough pressure-resistant iron frames and steel tubes had rolled off the line, Wei Keng immediately announced, "I don't want to use that sling anymore."

As for the copper from the smaller furnace, it was hammered into Copper Skin while still hot, then cut to specific sizes.

After being heated and compressed, it became Copper Pen Sleeves and Copper Pen Nibs. The Copper Pen Nibs needed to be weighted by pouring lead into them.

The measuring team brought these clanking components to the chamber and tried pushing them through, then took them out and tested whether they could be worked with a file.

The Copper Pen Sleeves were filled with black granules, then fitted with a "pen nib." Next, a large, stapler-like frame pressed and crimped the front so the nib wouldn't fall out.

The most complicated part of the process was actually the thing at the bottom of the copper sleeve. The system's instructions were extremely complicated.

Fortunately, this place had hot springs and sulfur. With sulfur, one could make sulfuric acid; with sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid could be made from salt; when hydrochloric acid was heated with pyrolusite, it produced Yellow-Green Gas; and that gas could be used to make a kind of Bleaching Powder with potassium hydroxide.

And then, you could make snap-pops. All you had to do was find realgar. (A hundred words omitted.)

Nitrating that stuff in a thermometer? Too dangerous. Making it required proper industrial technology. Every step had to stay below eighty degrees, and even a slight wipe with your hand could bring it to that temperature.

Row after row of Border Region Made products came off the line in the workshop of Wei Keng's mud-brick house.

After a day of industrial production, water used to cool the equipment flowed through bamboo pipes that had been baked dry, then poured over every Wei Keng who had soaked in the pond. After bathing and drying himself, he rubbed crushed Panax Japonicus Leaf from a jar over his body.

These days, the Wei Kengs had been tormented by female mosquitoes intent on sucking their blood and laying eggs. In fact, every mosquito that had sucked Wei Keng's blood had died. Every mud-brick house was desperately short of Grass Mats.

The only slight drawback was that Wei Keng, so focused on heavy industry, was terribly inefficient at weaving grass blankets.

Wei Keng: "If only a bunch of girls would come weave Straw Shoes and Grass Blankets for me. Wouldn't that be wonderful?"

Oh, Wei Keng hadn't said that to the Observer. Though his emotional intelligence was a little low, he could still tell that his refusal to cooperate with certain things had caused a rift between this girl and him over this plane. When a disagreement arose, the goal was to avoid arguing. Telling jokes wouldn't win her over; it would only annoy her.

Wei Keng's assessment of his relationship with the Observer was this: in 21st Century terms, their personalities weren't compatible? Their spending habits weren't compatible, and neither were their lifestyles. In short, he was too country bumpkin to get together with a flight attendant.

Meanwhile, inside the Dimensional Space Bubble, the Observer, Bai Linglu, was constantly reviewing records of Wei Keng's actions over the past few days. Naturally, when she came across some indecent scenes—like the time in the morning when a row of golden streams of urine made an archway—she activated the intelligent censorship system.

Her impression of Wei Keng had improved considerably, and she now had a positive assessment of him: "Extremely decisive and capable of taking action. He considers his available resources to the fullest. He's quite reliable now."

Take the Nitrate Treatment project she was reviewing at that moment. Wei Keng's plan called for an initial output of just three kilograms a day. But when he put it into practice, he set the standards as high as he could. He dammed the river, caught large quantities of fish, and added their innards to the nitrate heap, ensuring a daily output of fifteen kilograms of Pure Nitrate.

It was only one tiny part of a tiny plan, but Wei Keng set a target and always met it. That made Bai Linglu feel the overall plan for this plane was feasible.

So, here was the question: how could she convince Wei Keng to stay here?

Bai Linglu: "He doesn't chat me up anymore. What should I do?" She didn't send this worry over to the Gravity Well.

Wei Keng wanted to stay in the Ruined Area in peace for a hundred days, then leave. But when you lived somewhere, unexpected encounters were hard to avoid.

Forty days after arriving in this plane,

A boat passed by from upstream and lingered outside Wei Keng's settlement. Its furtive behavior made its occupants seem just like undercover spies.

Naturally, Wei Keng responded by warmly inviting them ashore for a drink.

Bullets struck the river, warning them to stop.

The merchants who came ashore stammered that they were from Jian City and had come to trade after spotting a new human settlement here.

Trade? Wei Keng was all for it. He needed tea, Cotton Cloth, and Tung Oil.

He'd crossed over intending to become a Time-Space Merchant, and still had quite a few Gold Bars on hand. Of course he wanted to buy things. He could brew tea to treat constipation, hang mosquito nets, and coat waterproof cloth.

Wei Keng invited the panicked, possibly merchant-like strangers into camp to discuss business. But after they entered, they kept trembling. Wei Keng already had trouble understanding the Yue Region dialect, so he had to rely on the Translation System, which made communication even more cumbersome.

It wasn't hard to understand why the group of merchants was trembling. A human settlement had suddenly appeared in a place that had been ruins, and once inside, they'd found that all the humans there looked exactly alike.

The Pandora World contained all sorts of strange Gene Colonies. Some included humanoid individuals, known as Fused Humans. Although some looked almost exactly like humans, their behavior was extremely unsettling to ordinary people. For example, they might spend one year as a human, then pupate and spend ten years as a beast. These Gene Colonies only used the human brain's ability to think; human morality and social habits were entirely absent.

Wei Keng looked just like one of those strange Gene Colonies. And since he looked exactly like a human, he provoked an even stronger Uncanny Valley Effect.

Of course, Wei Keng stubbornly argued: "If you saw a thousand identical beauties, you'd never get an Uncanny Valley Effect. The Gold Bars in my hands are way more attractive than beauties. Show me the greed of capitalists—the kind that'd sell you a noose for a tenfold profit."

The system reminded him again: these people might not be merchants, or at least not pure merchants.

They went through the motions during business negotiations and didn't haggle at all over the tea and cloth specifications. Whatever Wei Keng said, they accepted, clearly just humoring him.

That night, when Wei Keng deliberately left an opening, they escaped. Then they fell into the latrine and nearly suffocated. That gave him an idea of where he'd left the opening.

"Ah, ah, Mother, Father..." Down in the tunnel, the poor fellows were convinced that some kind of creature had swallowed them. Their minds collapsed as they cried for their parents, while waves of foul stench kept rising.

Wei Keng squatted on the edge of the dry latrine, tossed down a rope, and pinched his nose. "Gentlemen, since you came here to do business, why have you repeatedly gone around our territory without permission? I'm afraid that's not how guests should behave."

Wei Keng's words calmed the people in the Manure Pit a little. They seemed to realize they weren't inside some ferocious beast's belly. Besides, there were dry leaves Wei Keng had tossed in for wiping themselves.

Wei Keng's question went unanswered for several minutes. Just as Old Master Wei Keng was about to undo his trousers and flush them with some hot water,

A defiant voice finally shouted, "We're not your guests. You're the ones who showed up uninvited!" Then a lump of shit flew out and nearly hit Wei Keng, who'd called out to them.

Wei Keng was left speechless. He stopped arguing, hauled them up, and splashed a basin of water over them. Then he spread out a map on a wooden board several meters away from them.

Wei Keng warned the merchants: "See this map? The river is the boundary. Your city's armed forces must not cross it for the next six months. Don't say you weren't warned." Then he handed over a small, crude wooden map.

A few cowards in the group that had crawled out of the Filthy Tunnel accepted the map with runny noses and tear-stained faces. Then the whole group plunged into the jungle without looking back, as if a Ghostly Realm were at their heels and they couldn't stop for a second.

The Wei Kengs watched them disappear, then lowered their heads to think. The situation seemed far too insecure. So they sent out a squad to follow from a distance and confirm the group's route back. Of course, they also needed intelligence on Jian City.

A week later, some members of the Reconnaissance Squad returned, while another group was sent out to relieve the rest and continue scouting.

To Wei Keng, it was a somewhat remote city, surrounded by layers of Cement City Wall. The outer walls were pitch-black, and moss grew thickly in some damp patches.

The Reconnaissance Team climbed a nearby hilltop to observe the condition of the dilapidated human settlement.

Based on the number of animal-drawn wagons parked in open areas, along with the roads shown on the map, they estimated how many troops the city could send out if fully mobilized: about a thousand, armed with cannons and other heavy weapons, to attack the area he occupied.

Naturally, that was the best-case upper limit.

Even under Genghis Khan's Mongol system, with an extremely compelling reason for war, it would have been impossible to commit all its forces to a single direction.

And judging by how overgrown the shrubs around the city were, its soldiers hadn't conducted large-scale marches or other military drills in a long time.

Under the circumstances, even if the city's highest authority held absolute sway, after years of simply maintaining the status quo, the forces he could mobilize for an offensive war were probably less than a tenth of the city's total available strength.

But even with such an optimistic assessment, Wei Keng still felt uneasy.—War meant death, and he was scared stiff of it.