Destiny Only Han

Chapter 536 Liu Ying: Big Han people don't cheat big Han people!
Bashang Wharf.

While Liu Ying was shaking her legs and sipping mung bean soup, two flat-bottomed cargo ships with a deep draft sailed down the Wei River and docked at the pier.

When those shirtless, dark-skinned, skinny but smooth-skinned stevedores stepped forward to pick up work, they were blocked on the side of the road by soldiers who had stepped off the boat.

Immediately afterwards, teams of strong men dressed as workers, accompanied by the army, came quickly pushing small wheeled carts and began to erect pulley cranes, taking over the loading and unloading work on site.

When the stevedores on the dock saw this scene, they showed dissatisfaction on their faces.

They have to rely on selling their physical strength to support their family, and they are considered outsourced personnel, who pay an entrance fee, so they sign a contract with the wharf, and the loading and unloading work can only be done by them.

But no one dared to step forward to make trouble.

Because this is the Bashang Wharf, most of the consumer goods supplied to hundreds of thousands of households around Chang'an City will be unloaded here, and it is no big deal if there is one more order or one less order.

But the most important thing is that the opponent is the army, and they can't afford to mess with it.

After all, no matter ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign, the army is the biggest violent group in the world. It needs people, weapons and weapons. All evil forces are nothing but ants in front of the army!

While the dock workers were busy, Liu Ying, who was full of food and drink, walked over swaggeringly, picked up a big box casually, and inspected the goods inside pretending to be an expert.

Zhang Buyi followed behind him, his eyes shining brightly: "Is the quality of this cinnabar good? Is it your product? Make a price, I'll take it all!"

Liu Ying asked without raising her head, "Why do you want so much cinnabar?"

"Eat!" Zhang Buyi said nonsense, facing Liu Ying's suddenly widened eyes, and said with a smile: "Cinnabar is a medicinal material, ground into powder and swallowed with water, it can cure many diseases..."

"But I want these cinnabar, mainly for dyeing!"

"You know, there are a lot of big families in Chang'an City. They never bargain for the kind of fabrics with excellent weavers and dyeing, and they can't buy them no matter how much!"

"We can be regarded as real relatives. Let me tell you the bottom line. Even if I buy cinnabar of this quality at the highest price in the market, after dyeing the fabric, half of the profit is considered a bad business..."

Liu Ying looked at Zhang Buyi, who looked like a profiteer, and shook her head lightly. Unexpectedly, this guy also turned into a stinky look, and she didn't know who led him astray...

However, the cinnabar that Zhang Buyi said is actually safe to use as a medicinal material. After all, as long as it is not heated to hundreds of degrees, the toxicity of cinnabar is minimal. Unless you eat three to five catties at a time, there is no risk of death...

Looking at the earnest Zhang Buyi, Liu Ying shook her head lightly: "Not for sale. I still have use for the cinnabar here! It's not that I'm stingy, it's that there are only so many cinnabars of this quality! After the Yelang Kingdom opens trade, there will be as much cinnabar as you want!"

Zhang Buyi tilted his head slightly: "What do you mean?"

Liu Ying explained:
"The cinnabar here is all produced in Berkshire, which is the cinnabar mines that were taken over from them after the attack on the Ba clan. Because of the natural danger of the river, they were transported by land to Guanzhong from the old road, and then transferred by water, along the Weishui River. Bashang Wharf."

"The reason why there are only so many reasons is mainly because Qin Shihuang used a lot of mercury to build the emperor's mausoleum for himself. The widow Qing was his supplier... the high-quality cinnabar is easy to mine. Some of them turned into mercury and were buried in the Lishan underground palace!"

"Well, mercury is mercury, after heating cinnabar..."

Zhang Buyi waved his hand to interrupt Liu Ying's science popularization, and said with disdain: "I understand everything you said, and you don't even look at who my father is! Besides, using cinnabar to make mercury is not a unique skill. When Duke Huan built his mausoleum, he used mercury as a pond!"

"It's good to know." Liu Ying nodded, and suddenly asked curiously: "How does my teacher know the method of refining mercury with cinnabar? Why haven't I heard him talk about it?"

"You haven't heard much!" Zhang Buyi squinted at the sky at a 45-degree angle with a proud face, like a proud little rooster.

After all, his father's name is Zhang Liang, one of the Three Heroes in the early Han Dynasty. Anyone who has such a father will have this expression...

Are you trying to fight your dad again?Ha ha... Liu Ying curled her lips in disdain.

"It's normal for my father not to teach you. You are a prince and you will be the emperor in the future. This kind of small art of smelting lead and mercury is useless..." Zhang Buyi shook his head, and continued under Liu Ying's inquiring gaze. explained:
"My father sometimes said he was sick at home, and when he was very bored, he would open a furnace to make alchemy...Don't mention it, the elixirs that are refined are either golden or colorful, they are so beautiful!"

Hearing that Zhang Liang was concocting alchemy, Liu Ying was taken aback, and hurriedly grabbed Zhang without questioning, "Where's the elixir that was refined? It won't be eaten by people, right?"

"Aren't you stupid?" Zhang Buyi said with contempt on his face: "That thing is so hard, throw it out and kill the dog... What do you eat? Anyway, the pills made by my father are shelved, and they won't even be seen by others. I'll steal two of them for you to play with..."

Liu Ying looked at Zhang Buyi who was joking, and inexplicably thought of a person, Zhang Daoling.

It is said that Zhang Daoling is the descendant of Zhang Liang, that is, the descendant of the guy in front of him...

Well, in fact, the so-called lead in Taoism is the aura of heaven and earth, and mercury is the rhetoric of the soul of the human body. There is a high probability that the alchemy failed with lead ingots and mercury.

After all, in the era when everything can be made into medicine, it is possible for them to come up with any weird things!

For example, gunpowder...

Another example, tofu...

Therefore, Taoism actually lacks nothing, except for a Lavoisier...

So, Liu Ying said with a smile: "I didn't expect my teacher to have such a black history... Bah, how about leisure and elegance?"

The alarm bell rang in Zhang Buxuan's heart, and he decided to give up the idea of ​​stealing pills for Liu Ying to play with, and began to seek compensation:
"Actually, my father's alchemy was also taught by the patriarch. When the patriarch gave my father the book of war, the second half of the volume taught people how to make pills for longevity..."

"Well, my master is a genius. My father inherited his old man's art of war and strategy. As for the secret art of the Book of Changes and the skill of divination, he passed it on..."

Suddenly, Zhang Buyi shut up, with a constipated expression on his face.

"Say it, keep talking!"

This time, it was Liu Ying's turn to put her hands on her hips, feeling complacent.

Zhang Buyi's face flushed suddenly, and his mouth was stiff: "Anyway, I am your sister-in-law, this is an indisputable fact!"

"Okay, let's talk about things from now on. I'll call you brother-in-law, you'll call me... you'll call me...well, I'm your elder anyway!"

Liu Ying raised her head and smiled all over her face: "Hurry up, fan your elders, I'm going to die of heat!"

Zhang Buyi spat at him, but still walked to his side, shaking the folding fan:

"Why do you want so much cinnabar? Is it possible that you are also planning to make dyes? Let me tell you, in Chang'an City, the silk and satin business is basically done by Yingyinhou's family, and I don't care about my little troublemakers. , if you intervene rashly, you will lose your fortune..."

Yingyinhou refers to Guanying.

Hey, this guy is back to his old job again?Well, that's right, when his family was in Suiyang, they were a big seller of silk products... Liu Ying scratched her head and said with a smile: "Dyeing with cinnabar is a waste of money!"

Zhang Buyi sneered: "Then what are you going to do? Refining mercury to make medicinal materials? Or like the first emperor, making elixir of life?"

"Neither, but it's barely half of your guess." Liu Ying grabbed a handful of cinnabar and let it slip through her fingers:

"I want to turn cinnabar into mercury, and then transport it to overseas gold mines to pan for gold! Of course, it can be used for other purposes such as batteries in the future..."

"Gold panning? How to pan for gold?" Zhang Buyi suddenly became interested.

Liu Ying thought about it, anyway, this is not important knowledge, after all, the gold mine is in the hands of the country and him...

So he explained: "The characteristic of mercury is that it can dissolve many metals, such as gold. In this way, when panning for gold, you can pour the sand containing gold on the copper plate covered with mercury, so that the gold can be mixed with the mercury. Afterwards, the mercury is scraped off, and the next step can be performed.”

"The first emperor built the underground palace with mercury, because a lot of things would float on the mercury. When we pan for gold, the sand and gravel will float on the mercury, but the gold will not. In this way, the mud and sand will be picked out, and the mercury will be poured out. It's all gold!"

Zhang Buyi thought for a while, and then exclaimed, "This method sounds like it's much faster than panning for gold with water?"

Well, unless you can dig up a large piece of dog's head gold, things like gold are generally small particles. In the movie, the gold diggers stand by the river and use special tools to pan for gold. They use the buoyancy and turbulence of the water to wash away relatively light particles Stone sand, let the gold sink to the bottom.

Liu Ying nodded: "Yes, I have tested it before, and the efficiency of mining gold with mercury is more than twice as fast as that of water!"

Having said that, he glanced at Lishan Mountain in the distance and sighed silently.

If he wasn't worried about causing irreversible damage, he would even have wanted to do a gold touch to extract the mercury from the tomb of the First Emperor...

After all, things like gold, even in the era of credit currency, are also hard currency. You can buy what you want in any human country on earth.

It's nothing more than that some things are at the market price, while some things are several times or even dozens of times higher than the original price...

Liu Ying stopped the attack on Yelang Kingdom by force before, in order to obtain Yelang Kingdom's cinnabar mine relatively peacefully, efficiently and cheaply. After all, it has the title of "Mercury Capital" in later generations!

Zhang Buyi nodded slightly, and suddenly looked at Liu Ying with some doubts: "You said before that you would refine the cinnabar into mercury and send it to overseas gold mines? But why not use it in China first, such as the Yeyi Gold Mine... "

"Because mercury is poisonous!" Liu Ying said as a matter of course: "Big Han people don't bully big Han people!"

(End of this chapter)