Mythical Three Kingdoms

Chapter 2396: Chapter 2114: Professional Spirit, Never Leaving Empty-Handed

Zhou Yu pretended as if he hadn’t seen anything, casting a vacant glance at the excited Gan Ning, who was carrying a large stone monument. The monument, of unknown origin, had two flamboyant characters carved on it — Boundary Monument, and in the lower corner, a line of small characters — Gan Xingba, Admiral of the Han Navy!

Hmm, Boundary Monument. Then, suddenly exerting force, Gan Ning fiercely thrust the huge monument into the mountain below, where it was rumored to contain an iron mine. With a loud rumble, the monument was remarkably inelegantly inserted into the place believed to have iron ore.

“This fellow Gan Xingba…” Zhou Yu, standing on the cliffside, said with a twitch at the corner of his eye. To Zhou Yu, such behavior was extremely disgraceful.

At this moment, a gust of wind swept by, carrying a rusty scent that caught the attention of several geomantic land appraisers crouched on the ground, deep in examination, suspecting something unusual about the place. Instantly, all of them shared a look of shock.

They all exchanged glances, seeing the astonishment in each other’s eyes.

“Brother, I feel there’s something wrong with this place, what about you?” Wang Heng looked at several familiar faces beside him and asked. More than just wrong, for a gust carrying the scent of rust, it suggests an open-pit mine, and a massive one at that.

“Fear this entire place might be a chunk of iron,” said another old man beside him, equally serious. The smell of rust carried by the wind, coupled with the fine dust on the ground that looks somewhat reddish at a glance.

Previously, this group thought the soil environment was just like this, but upon further reflection, everyone was terrified. It seemed the place was not just about having iron deposits; perhaps it was a gigantic mine buried under sand and stones.

Seeing their expressions, Wang Heng felt quite confident. If their initial estimates proved correct, the iron content of this mine might be unbelievably high.

“Bring the South-pointing Chariot.” Wang Heng gestured to a servant nearby, who quickly retrieved the South-pointing Chariot from a box nearby, only for it to immediately malfunction upon testing.

“Hematite above, magnetite below?” an elderly geomancer carefully scraped off a layer of reddish dust from the ground, letting it trickle down from his hand toward the South-pointing Chariot. Every face turned somber.

“This entire place might be a mine, potentially covering hundreds of miles…” Wang Heng spoke, twitching at the corners of his eyes. Only such an extensive open-pit would scatter such a vast amount of hematite dust through the perennial wind and sand assaults.

“That might be the only explanation.” Wang Heng murmured, as everyone else wore an expression of astonishment. Such a vast iron deposit was almost unheard of in the domain.

With difficulty, Wang Heng and others climbed a hill and surveyed the area, the reddish reflections confirming to them that they weren’t standing on earth or rocks, but on iron ore.

“Commander Zhou, please find a way to occupy this place.” After confirming the situation, Wang Heng and others promptly informed Zhou Yu, bringing along many chunks of iron ore they had blindly chipped from the open-pit and fragments eroded by wind and sand.

“Uh, why occupy it, because of the iron mine?” Zhou Yu looked puzzled at the elderly geomancers, who hailed from the Wu Territory and were well-versed in geomancy. Though not aristocrats, they belonged to families that thrived wherever they went, so Zhou Yu was willing to give them some face.

“This place can’t grow crops, trees don’t thrive, and even grass struggles, but based on our experience, there is iron below, and this iron mine,” said Wang Heng, as he pulled out a piece of iron ore from a box nearby, weighed it, and spoke with incredulity, “With our many years of ore selection and forging experience, it can be directly melted and used for casting.”

Iron ore that doesn’t need sorting and can be used right away is rare in the Central Plains, as most of China’s iron deposits are low-grade, requiring extensive effort and time to refine after extraction, very energy-consuming.

However, here, Wang Heng randomly picked a piece of ore. With forty years of experience gleaned from family practice since age ten, at the touch of hematite, he knew the ore was essentially iron, containing sixty percent metal!

With eyes closed, he picked over twenty pieces, sensing an iron content around sixty percent, some almost seventy, none below fifty-five.

Picked blindfolded, meaning even the worst ore here could be smelted directly, which seemed insane.

Unlike the ores in the Central Plains, which need sorting after extraction, the quality of ore here was astoundingly high for Wang Heng and others.

More significant was the elders’ earlier estimation of the mine’s range by trekking and feeling around, concluding that the estimated reserves might need to be calculated in billions, with an almost unbroken sweep of the reddish expanse within view.

Though the numbers estimated by Wang Heng and others amount to a billion jin, which is tens of thousands of times less than the hundreds of billions of tons estimated by modern science, even so, the high-grade iron ore weighing over a billion jin is enough to make them resolute. They understand its importance.

After all, this is premium iron ore that can be thrown directly into a steel furnace without beneficiation, and more terrifyingly, it’s an open-pit mine, with the only difficulty being how to extract it.

In simple terms, one could casually build an iron smelting plant here, extract ore on the spot, and throw it into the furnace to produce steel. As for technology, the iron content of this ore already exceeds 60%. Who needs high technology? It’s basically blocks of iron oxide!

Zhou Yu was flabbergasted. Ever since smelting technology advanced to the point where iron could be cast, iron has been important in every era. Thus, Zhou Yu understood how high-quality ore that can be directly thrown into the furnace truly is.

The problem is, what’s the use when it’s of such high quality? This godforsaken place is literally ten thousand li away from the Central Plains, it’s no joke. If it were near the South Blue, having not passed the Strait of Malacca, Zhou Yu would still see value in setting up a casting point locally and transporting finished steel back at intervals. But this place is nearly twenty thousand kilometers round trip!

In Zhou Yu’s view, besides the potential threat of a Kushan Fleet lurking in the middle, even without it, it’s not worth it.

Although high-grade iron ore smelting on the spot can indeed yield finished iron easily, combined with this frightening distance, it’s utterly useless. Even if the iron is produced, there’s no way to transport it back. The transportation cost is through the roof!

Furthermore, even local iron smelting requires blast furnaces and coal, and this top-notch technology was obtained from Chen Xi’s excavation of high-level technicians. They can easily smelt steel locally, but they still need coal!

This is not like the Central Plains, where coal can be easily sourced nearby. No coal, no blast furnace, no blast furnace, no large-scale steel production. You can’t just transport ore back; that would be even worse!

Who in their right mind would transport ore back to the Central Plains? Don’t they know most current ships have a load capacity of only a few hundred tons? Accounting for drinking water and provisions, transporting ore from ten thousand kilometers away is a plan designed by an idiot!

Transporting it back in hundreds of tons is a fool’s errand, in a barren place with no people. Are we supposed to transport people over? What a joke, the cost would instantly explode, and Zhou Yu decisively rejected this idiotic plan.

As for the Seventh Generation Ship, with a carrying capacity calculated at three to four thousand tons, considering smelting, it might barely cover costs. The problem is one Seventh Generation Ship costs a billion, and with such a huge investment and low efficacy, Zhou Yu suggested forgetting about it. The costs are prohibitive!

“But leaving such a high-quality mine wasted here is painful for those of us who do Geomantic Site Selection!” Wang Heng said, touching his heart, truly in pain.

Though Zhou Yu was somewhat interested, after considering the costs, he refused. To him, even though maritime familiarity and the speed of ship traffic were improving, it would still take nearly a month to travel from Eastern Wu to this place.

The drinking water and provisions required for a month-long voyage made Zhou Yu shake his head. Small ships nowadays can’t handle oceanic mining transport. Though Zhou Yu’s mathematics was not particularly strong, he could roughly estimate that unless the load capacity exceeded ten thousand tons, transporting iron ore from Australia to Eastern Wu was impractical.

Of course, if Lyu Bu’s space-tearing method could be pinpointed, Zhou Yu wouldn’t mind seizing this place, but thinking of opening a passage to connect the Central Plains and Australia is just a fantasy.

In short, Zhou Yu decisively rejected the proposal from the Geomantic Site Selection experts, but Gan Ning grew interested. The so-called thieves don’t leave empty-handed, and Gan Ning promptly ordered his pirate subordinates to disembark and start hauling the ore.

At least Gan Ning still had over thirty thousand pirates. Even though the plan for total annihilation failed, the Kushan only managed to take down over forty thousand pirates and sank just over two hundred of the six hundred pirate ships, leaving several ten thousand tons of transporting capacity unused.

Moreover, even though half of those Sixth Generation Ships sank in the battle, there remained a dozen or so, with a carrying capacity just over ten thousand tons.

Gan Ning now unquestionably had more ships than men, with each akin to a decommissioned Fourth Generation Ship that, without cargo, had a carrying capacity of about a hundred tons.

Thus, Gan Ning ordered all pirates off the boats, instructing them to mine the open-pit ores, with each person required to haul two thousand jin, equivalent to a metric ton.

Fortunately, there were many of them and the ore was open-pit. Everywhere the Legion Attack opened up the surface mines, no sifting was needed, and more than thirty thousand people managed to fill the fleet’s empty ships with iron ore in two days, leaving Gan Ning satisfied with the speed. Zhou Yu again felt helpless towards Gan Ning.