This was also Huang Qi's miscalculation. Over the past few years, he had poured nearly all his energy into firing furnaces and studying how to fire them better.
In a sense, the gun in his hands now, whose destructive power far surpassed standard-issue firearms, was the crystallization of his Wisdom over the past three years.
However, although the gun he had improved was tremendously powerful, it could not be widely adopted. On one hand, it was far too heavy. On the other, in pursuit of greater range and more devastating power, he had sacrificed not only the gun's stability, but, more importantly, the use of large-caliber ammunition made the barrel prone to overheating.
A weapon like this was actually better suited for assassination than for large-scale battlefield warfare.
And precisely because he no longer commanded troops in battle—even when he went to the battlefield, he did not lead soldiers, nor did he intend to plunge into enemy territory—he naturally knew little about the enemy's latest developments.
Huang Qi, who fired furnaces day after day, only knew that the enemy had also developed firearms, and that their superior firearms already had a range of one hundred meters.
But he truly had not expected them to come up with shields like these.
The main issue was that, to defend against bullets, the shields had to be thick. Yet in wilderness marches and combat, even if wheels were fitted beneath the shields, they were practically useless.
Under such circumstances, even with two burly men pushing and lifting a shield weighing over a hundred jin as they advanced, their speed simply could not rise.
If the Peace Camp wanted to leave, then given its mobility, Cao's troops carrying shields would never be able to catch up.
But that was in open terrain.
If such