open sea

Chapter 2
Chen Mu has never felt in his life what it means to have a meal without a second meal, and he was a little caught off guard when he encountered this situation suddenly.

In order for life to go on, he had to find a way to make some money.It seems that it is always easy for a traveler to make money, but looking at the rice vat, Chen Mu feels his head is full of muddleheadedness. He knows a lot of things, he has insights beyond this world for hundreds of years, but what can he do?
Chen Mu thought for a while, he knows how to cook, although he may not be able to compare with the well-known chefs in the world, but opening a restaurant and bringing the marketing concept of his era will definitely not be too bad.But he is a military family, and this relatively low status prevents him from leaving the Qingyuan Guardhouse without war or dispatch, let alone going out to do business by himself; There are several blast furnaces.He has been a soldier and knows how to maintain firearms, but being able to disassemble and maintain guns does not mean he can make guns... He can't pull rifling, and he doesn't know how to make a primer, not to mention that in this era, black powder and smokeless gunpowder are being used all over the world. , How to make custom ammunition?
God knows!
Perhaps the only knowledge that he can use in a short time is the local method of making nitrate.

It is not the method of making latrines to make nitrate. It takes several years of accumulation to make it once. He needs to complete the initial accumulation in a short time, and use the ready-made nitrate soil in the cave to boil.Boiling nitrate in a cave is still a story that his grandfather often told him when he was a child. Chen Mu’s grandfather went to the cave with his elders when he was eight years old. It made Chen Mu remember it in his mind, and he was deeply impressed by every process.

Although it is an indigenous method after liberation, it is better than the ancient method of collecting indoor moisture to make nitrate. It is mainly boiled with nitrate accumulated in caves for thousands of years, and the output is huge. If you can boil [-] catties of nitrate, you can earn thousands of taels of silver by reselling it.

Thousands of taels of silver are enough to make people crazy wherever they are placed.

As a military household, and a single-family military household, Chen Mu basically has no chance to see the silver. Even if there is, it is the silver in the hands of others and has nothing to do with him.His monthly salary is three stones of brown rice. According to this year's rice price of 630 renminbi per stone, if he can boil a few hundred catties of white goods nitrate powder and sell it for one thousand and several hundred taels of silver, and buy back the rice, it will be his salary for 100 years!
Qi Jiguang's soldiers killed Japanese pirates in Fujian, and the imperial court gave a reward of 30 taels of silver to a Japanese pirate.

Is the money for murder so easy to earn?
"Brother, the rice has been sent back. My family can't go to the ground, or I will thank you in person." Chen Mu was thinking about how to operate the digging and salting, when he heard the door of the house that was leaking from the wind was pushed open, and Shao Tingda's tall figure stepped in , with heavy gratitude on his face, before he sat down, he pulled the stool and said, "If you have anything to say, I will definitely take care of it for you!"

When Chen Mu saw his brother coming, he stopped thinking about it. The hole must be made, but not now.The memory in his head is sometimes sober and sometimes confused, and coupled with the influence of the time-space dislocation brought about by past memories, he must first figure out what the situation in the Ming Dynasty Guardhouse he is in is, otherwise he will always be filled with uneasiness and anxiety. Uneasy, don't even think about doing anything serious!
He closed the door of the room, and then cut to the chase: "I've been feeling dizzy for some reason recently, and I've forgotten a lot of things. Do you know any caves near the guardhouse that are close to water sources, preferably with stagnant water in the caves?"

"It's in the north of Qingcheng. When we were young, we used to play in it. There was spicy soil on the ground. You mixed it with dry food and let me eat it. It was so spicy that I cried!" Shao Tingda was so surprised that he shouted: "You don't remembered?"

"As soon as you said it, I remembered it!" As soon as he heard his brother say it was hot soil, Chen Mu showed joy and quickly restrained himself, but the upturned corners of his mouth couldn't hide the joy in his heart.Grandpa said that nitrate is divided into sweet and sour, bitter and spicy, with sweet and sour being the worst, and spicy being the best.Then Zheng Se said to Shao Tingda: "Take me to have a look some other day, maybe I can do something in the cave."

Even though Grandpa told this process no less than ten times, his ears were callused. After all, he had never done it himself, and Chen Mu didn't know if it could be done.You can't make promises until it's done.

"What's so difficult about this? When we go to defend the city on the flag wheel, the next duty will take you there." Military households can't leave the guardhouse if they have nothing to do. Their range of activities is in the suburbs of Qingyuan City. If you can't come back, you can only wait for their turn to defend the city.Twenty-eight percent of the military households' plowing and rotation duty, [-]% of the entire guard station is on duty for guarding and patrolling the city, and [-]% of the military households are plowing the fields.In Qingyuanwei, it is distributed according to ten small banners under one hundred households.

Speaking of this, Shao Tingda thought of something, and said with a shy face, "Brother Mu, you can talk to Bai Baihu, why don't you ask whether we are on duty this year to guard Qingyuan City or to farm? Just the six of us , harvesting a field of 12 people, the rice can’t be harvested even if they are exhausted.”

Qingyuanwei's land is everywhere outside Qingyuan County, and it is scattered in various military households of hundreds of households.In the past, military households farmed a lot, and the harvest could be handed over to the court to leave a lot of surplus. But at that time, it was the old calendar when Zhu Yuanzhang founded the country.Nowadays, there are more and more private fields of high-ranking officials in the guard, and fewer and fewer official fields. The same land is also cultivated by military households, and the harvest is just enough to turn over to the court.

The military households fled, and the same fields were cultivated by fewer people, and the remaining people lived more and more like pigs and cattle. The official fields that could not be cultivated were not afraid of being deserted, but Shangguan's private fields must be cultivated well.If things go on like this, it is not a lie that the guards' military households are called officers and soldiers, but they are actually serfs.

But when it comes to harvesting rice fields, Chen Mu may have other methods, but this requires a craftsman.

Shao Tingda was the least willing to go to the field to farm. In Chen Mu's intermittent memory, in the past, all the Shao Tingda's family who could work went to the field.This year his wife gave birth to a baby, and the old man is old and frail. "Oh!" Shao Tingda sighed for a long time, shook his head and said, "In the past two years, Japanese pirates have been everywhere along the coast. Those high-ranking generals use their own soldiers and recruits. These soldiers of the world have been plowing the fields all day long, and they don't even practice soldiers, when will the hard days end!"

"Huh? What did you say... When will the hard days end?" Chen Mu was distracted and didn't hear Shao Tingda's long sighs. Even if he heard them, he didn't care. Can Bai Baihu and I talk? Then our brother's hard life is coming to an end!"

Bai Yuanjie from a hundred households, whose name is Jingchen.This person, Chen Mu has known him for two lifetimes!

Note: General Bai Yuanjie once participated in the Wanli Aid Korea War, fought against the Japanese army and won the naval battle, so don’t say inappropriate words.

(End of this chapter)