After some mental preparation, Li Hongyun finally calmed down and accepted his fate.

"Looking at the bright side, this is no different from building blocks. It's just that the number of blocks is a little more, and it requires a little more patience..."

Li Hongyun did not immediately plunge into the exciting work, but decided to observe it first.

After all, such a large workload cannot be completed in two or three nights.

Even though the game "Dark Sand" has tried its best to reduce some unnecessary workload for players and skip those boring, boring, and repetitive plots, after all, this is a project that mobilized hundreds of thousands of civilians and troops, starting from preparations.

It is a huge project that takes more than ten years to be officially constructed, so no matter how simplified it is, it is still an unimaginably difficult challenge for players.

Since it is so difficult, there is no need to race against time.

Just like long-distance running, the important thing is not how fast you run at the beginning, but how to persist better.

Li Hongyun did not immediately set his sights on the imperial city. Instead, he first moved his sight to the origins of various materials and looked at them with interest.

For him, it was also very interesting to observe these ancient craftsmen cutting down trees and burning paper and gold bricks from this bird's eye view.

He had already taken a glimpse in the air and saw the origin of several main materials.

For example, in the deep mountains and forests of the southwest, a large number of people are cutting down thick golden nanmu, and trying every means to transport these precious wood to the capital by water;

In the southeast, craftsmen fired gold bricks using extremely complex procedures;

In the mountains near the capital, craftsmen are quarrying huge stones and transporting these huge stones into the capital through the ice roads in the cold winter months;

There are also many craftsmen who are constantly excavating earth around the imperial city, piling all kinds of waste materials and excess earth from digging the moat aside, and finally pile it up into a hill.

This mountain is Long Live Mountain, later also called Jingshan. Below it is the Yanchun Pavilion, the palace of the previous emperor. It is said that this was to suppress the luck of the previous dynasty.

Li Hongyun first set his sights on the brick kilns in the southeast where gold bricks were fired.

The so-called gold bricks should actually be called Jing bricks, which means fine square bricks fired for the imperial palace. However, the pronunciations of Jing and Jin are similar, and the value of this kind of bricks is extremely high, and there are even "one tael of gold per brick"

so it was later also called BRIC.

Gold bricks have fine particles and dense texture. They make the sound of gold and stone when struck. There are no pores in the cross section when cut, so they are an excellent building material.

Li Hongyun watched with great interest the entire process of the craftsmen making gold bricks.

These craftsmen must first select the soil. The soil must be sticky but not loose, and powdery but not sandy. After the selection, the soil must be left in the open air for a full year to remove its earthiness. Then the clay will be soaked in water and soaked by many cows.

Tread repeatedly to remove air bubbles from the mud.

Finally, after repeated beating, it is put into a mold, covered with a flat plate, and two people step on it, and finally dried in the shade for more than seven months before being fired in the kiln.

When it is fired in the kiln, it must first be smoked with chaff for a month to remove the moisture, and then chopped firewood, whole firewood and pine branches are burned for a month respectively before it can be released from the kiln.

If six of the batch of gold bricks coming out of the kiln cannot make a sound when struck and break without holes, then the batch of gold bricks will be considered scrap and must be fired again.

In this way, it takes up to two years to go from soil to gold bricks.

Li Hongyun watched these craftsmen start from selecting soil, then put batch after batch of gold bricks into the kiln for firing, then ship those qualified products and continuously transport them to the capital through the Grand Canal.

In the southwest, there are countless craftsmen cutting down suitable golden nanmu in the high mountains.

Golden nanmu was a wood exclusively used by the royal family in ancient times. It has stable performance, durability, mild wood properties and pleasant aroma, so it has been the favorite wood for royal buildings since ancient times.

If it is an ordinary minister, even if he has power over the government and the opposition, using golden nanmu as a building will still be in danger of exceeding the rules.

The growth cycle of golden nanmu is very long. It takes fifty years to enter the vigorous growth period, and it may suddenly stop growing due to various unexpected circumstances. If you plant it yourself, you will suddenly find that it has stopped growing after fifty years. It’s scary to think about it.

collapse.

The growth climate of golden nanmu is also very harsh. It must be at an altitude of about 1,500 meters to 2,000 meters to thrive. Once the climate and altitude are wrong, even if it grows, it will most likely be stunted.

Inferior wood.

These craftsmen and peasants go deep into the mountains and ridges to cut golden nanmu, which is very dangerous.

In the dense forest, you may slip and fall, you may encounter wild beasts, you may get lost, you may also suffer disasters due to sudden flash floods, mudslides, etc...

Therefore, there has been a saying since ancient times that "a thousand people enter a mountain, and five hundred come out".

After these people cut down suitable golden nanmu, it was almost impossible to transport it out of the mountains by manpower because it was too huge.

The craftsmen first used wooden boards to build a platform on the big tree, and asked the axemen to chop off the branches and leaves of the big tree. Then they used ropes to pull the platform to prevent the big tree from hitting people when it fell.

After cutting down the big tree, the axemen drilled holes in the big tree, and a large number of civilians laid horizontal logs on the ground. They dragged the big tree for a certain distance and then rolled it down the ravine and formed a raft.

When flash floods occur, these rafts are washed down the mountains and into rivers, and then transported through the Yangtze River to the Grand Canal, where they continue to slide along the river and head north to the capital.

The entire journey is more than 1,800 kilometers, and there are officials on duty along the way to prevent the loss of these precious timbers.

These huge timbers, together with the ships transporting gold bricks, grain and various other building materials, passed through the Grand Canal and continued northward.

There are more than 20,000 ships, and the food that hundreds of thousands of civilians and troops need to transport reaches 400 million liters.

Looking down from a high place, you can see countless ships going north along the wide Grand Canal; and behind these ships, there are a large number of various types of wood, either bundled into rafts, or huge single pieces of wood connected with ropes.

, drifting slowly to the north.

That is what the ancients said: "Drifting big trees block the water surface."

In the mountains where white marble is mined, there are also a large number of craftsmen busy at work.

There are more than 10,000 migrant workers and more than 6,000 soldiers here, and on the road to the capital, there are tens of thousands of migrant workers and thousands of mules and other livestock.

The method of quarrying stones is also very primitive. In the absence of heavy machinery, one can only drill holes first, use wooden wedges to knock into the stones, and then burn them with fire and pour water to cause thermal expansion and contraction of the stones, and let the stones expand and contract.

The wooden wedge absorbs water and expands, widening the cracks in the stone.

If the boulder is used as the first perspective, then the whole process becomes more interesting.

One of the huge rocks was originally part of the mountain. It spent an extremely long time here. Even before human beings established civilization, it was quietly buried in the soil, without sorrow or joy.

looking at the world.

But now, countless civilians climbed onto its body and began to use insignificant hammers and chisels to carve out small holes in its body.

This may be just an itch for it, after all, it has seen countless landslides and ground cracks in these long years. But soon, the wooden wedge stretched in along the hole, and the boulders were also burned by fire and water splashed

During the process, I felt some changes in my body.

Huge cracks appeared and quickly became unmanageable.

The civilians continued to use larger wooden blocks to prop up the cracks, until as tens of thousands of people screamed, the huge boulder suddenly slid down the hillside.

Then, this huge rock that had not moved for thousands of years began its journey.

The boulder of more than 200 tons was like a small mountain. At that time, no matter how many people worked there, they could not move it at all.

But soon, these clever craftsmen began to dig wells along the way, pour water into ice, and then use a lot of manpower and animal power to drag them along.

The people dragging it formed a long queue one mile long, and the moving speed of this boulder reached the fastest speed since its birth, less than five miles per day.

Along the way, it saw countless scenes that it had never seen before, and those little ant-like people actually dragged it to its destination bit by bit.

Then, various craftsmen began to carve on it.

According to the color and text of the stone, the craftsmen exerted their talents according to local conditions.

There is a cyan stripe on the lower right side of this boulder, which is exactly where a green dragon is carved; while the left part is pure white, where a white dragon is carved. The two dragons are churning endlessly in the flowing clouds, and the sea water is rushing at the lower end, and the flowing clouds are dazzling.

.

The five-clawed golden dragon soared into the sky, and finally extended all the way to the magnificent palace hall.

Around the imperial city, these civilians and soldiers were also busy.

They demolished the buildings in the previous imperial city and moved the people away. Then they dug out the entire foundation of the previous imperial palace and backfilled it with layers of lime soil mixed with quicklime and clay and broken bricks. They also sprinkled boiled glutinous rice and alum on the foundation as cement.

The mixture eventually makes the foundation very hard.

Further above, there are several layers of floor tiles.

The deepest point of the entire foundation even reaches more than eight meters, completely avoiding potential subsidence risks and making the Forbidden City palace on the foundation as stable as a mountain.

As various materials are continuously transported to the capital, Li Hongyun is almost about to officially start his work.

From a historical perspective, the construction of the Forbidden City can be said to be an excellently planned systematic project.

It took a total of fourteen years from preparation to completion. Eleven of these years were spent on preliminary preparations, transporting various materials, etc. Construction officially began in the last three years.

In just three years, countless palaces were built, and the commendable details were revealed to the world one by one.

Three years is a long time dimension, but if you take into account the huge amount of work in the entire Forbidden City, then three years is already a very short time.

The various processes can be said to be intricate, and if you are not careful, they may drag each other down and delay the construction period. However, ancient craftsmen were able to arrange the various processes in an orderly manner through very proper arrangements. It must be said that this ability

It is definitely not something that ordinary players can have.

In short, this is a job that Li Hongyun feels he cannot hold onto no matter what, and now he can only choose to believe in the integrity of the production team of "Dark Sand".

Start by laying the floor tiles first.

Various floor tiles of different specifications appeared in Li Hongyun's field of vision. He laid these floor tiles on the corresponding phantoms through his mind, and then various craftsmen would carry the floor tiles to the designated place according to his wishes.

Place it in a stable position and then compact it continuously.

After more than a dozen complicated processes, the gold bricks are not only extremely hard, but also as smooth as jade.

In the process, Li Hongyun gradually discovered that this matter was not as difficult as he imagined.
To be continued...