"We will take over Shouzhou city one month at a time," Guo Shao said to his generals with a green face.
Thick smoke filled the air, and the sky was filled with haze. The generals stood there in a daze, and there was silence everywhere. Perhaps everyone thought that he was angry because he saw countless siege equipment being burned on his own territory.
But Guo Shao didn't seem to be speaking in anger, and then he said seriously: "I will issue a military order and ask the government to break the city within one month. If you can't do it, I will tie myself up in front of you and boil it in the cauldron."
Lord Li Chuyun wanted to persuade him immediately.
Guo Shao waved his hand and said: I have made up my mind. If I don't succeed, I will die.
With a snap, a burning piece of wood broke off the support of the catapult and fell down, startling everyone who had not paid any attention to the surrounding scene. Guo Shao turned his head to look northwest in the direction of the Huai River. Li Chongjin and Li Jixun would definitely put the blame on him. A word of negligence was enough.
More than half a month ago, Guo Shao was very reluctant to attack Shouzhou; but now, he must not give up Shouzhou. What does it mean to be dismissed from here with the shadow of failure? He must fight here to the death, no matter it is a hard bone or a stone, he must chew it to swallow the bitter fruit; there is no way out.
The most effective way to prevent the emperor from replacing the commander of the siege due to disappointment is to issue a military order to demonstrate determination.
But this military order needs additional conditions. There are too few elite soldiers. The right wing of the Hujie Army is said to have 20,000 elite soldiers outside Shouzhou City, but they cannot be transferred; Guo Shao has seen the combat effectiveness of the town soldiers and the rural soldiers. When the enemy army rushed, they panicked and could not organize. And Li Chongjin, that guy, always interfered and made people very upset and at a loss.
It's like when you draw your bow and shoot an arrow, you are looking for the most appropriate time and direction, and someone next to you yells: Shoot, why don't you shoot, shoot from here, where are you aiming, shoot quickly, I will shoot you in the face
Now Shouzhou City has food, soldiers and walls, and Liu Renzhan is a powerful veteran. Guo Shaozhen doesn't think there is any opportunity. It is not in line with his style to attack rashly without the opportunity.
There are no fighters, but we can create them.
Soon, Li Gu sent someone to say that the first batch of materials prepared for Guo Shao had been delivered to the Xiacai warehouse: saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal.
Guo Shao left the devastated battlefield in front of him and turned to Li Chuyun and said: I will go to Xiacai, you stay here, if there is anything important, send a fast horse to Xiacai to find me. In addition to cleaning up the battlefield, everything else remained the same. Tunnels should continue to be dug, and the tunnels on the three sides should continue; but they should not exceed the city wall, and ditches should be dug and walls should be built in front of the city wall, and the walls should be lifted and earth piled up.
Liu Renzhan used oil to defend the city and destroy weapons. Guo Shao didn't know where his oil came from, and couldn't find the place to dig oil, but many people could find the saltpeter and sulfur mines.
Gunpowder existed in the Tang Dynasty, but it could not be used to blow up cities. The conventional use of digging tunnels is to quietly transport troops for sneak attacks, and there is no other use. It is impossible to use tunnels to dig down city walls from underground; there has been no war example since ancient times, and the ancients used all means to attack cities. If it is possible to dig tunnels to dig down city walls, there would have been a precedent, and the Zhou army would have used it when they besieged Shouzhou for two months. Liu Renzhan would not have thought that tunnels had any use other than transporting troops for attack.
Even if a section of the city wall is blown down, it is not certain that we can attack. But no one can predict this now. This is the opportunity.
He also wanted to use earthwork to confuse Liu Renzhan. Guo Shao knew that Liu Renzhan would deploy heavy fortifications at the location of the earthwork and be well prepared. This method would not work, but he, Liu Renzhan, must be prepared, otherwise the feint attack would become the main attack.
The only question now was whether the gunpowder could bring down the walls.
Guo Shao's siege strategy was clear at a glance: digging tunnels and piling up earth. Liu Renzhan was probably laughing at him. Even he himself didn't believe that Guo Shao's siege would work. But he didn't care. The more the other party felt that everything was under control, the easier it would be to seize the key point and give Liu Renzhan a hard blow by surprise.
Of course, if the gunpowder didn't blow up the city, but just heard a noise, it would be a tragedy. The world is really full of dangers. Guo Shao had endured it before, but now he doesn't think he has a way out.
One nitrate, two sulfur, three charcoal. Guo Shao recited it several times on the way. He didn't know whether this ratio was good or not, and he couldn't remember the exact ratio. It was useless to remember it. Minerals have many impurities. Who knows what the exact ratio is when they are mixed together
Guo Shao met Li Gu in a grain storage yard in Xiacai Town.
What does General Guo want these things for? Li Gudao, are they used to burn the city gates? Shouzhou has a urn city
This sentence reminded Guo Shao that gunpowder is combustion, not explosion; the power of combustion depends on the speed of combustion. He saw only a few sacks of things in the warehouse, cut them open with a knife, and saw some gray blocks, the color of konjac. Guo Shao thought for a moment and asked: Is this saltpeter
Li Gu nodded: Sulfur and charcoal are not a problem. Large quantities have been transported from various places and will arrive soon. However, the nearby states can only collect a small amount of saltpeter, so it can only be urgently transferred from Guanzhong. The local officials have reported a total amount of no less than 2,000 kilograms, and it may take another ten days to transport it.
Guo Shao hurriedly bowed and said: I am very grateful to Mr. Li for his helpful help.
They are all trivial matters. Li Gu smiled and said, I used to be a prime minister, and I had official correspondence with many local officials. I was also often ordered by the government to prepare military supplies. I am familiar with it and it is just a piece of cake.
Guo Shao took a piece of saltpeter out of the sack and held it in front of him for a closer look. In his previous life, he had finished high school and went to college, so he knew that potassium nitrate should be a crystal similar to salt. The stone-like thing in his hand was gray and he didn't know how much effective substance it contained.
After some thought, he did not want to disclose the military secret, so he sent people to Shouzhou to transfer 300 personal soldiers under Luo Mengzi to Xia Cai, and ordered the warehouse to be sealed and all outsiders to be driven out.
Then, under Guo Shao's instruction, everyone set up a big pot in the yard and went to find some necessary things. Potassium is an active element at the front of the periodic table, and potassium compounds must be easily soluble in water.
After half a sack of saltpeter was crushed, it was mixed with water in a wooden barrel and then filtered out with gauze used to filter tofu. The filtered water was poured into a large pot and boiled and dried. Finally, a pile of white-gray crystals were fried out. This is potassium nitrate. Guo Shao grabbed a handful and pondered it in his palm. He found that the crystals inside were irregular. Some were small particles like salt, and some were long strips. This is not a substance, otherwise the shape should be the same after crystallization.
Guo Shao asked people to use bamboo sieves to sift and sort. Then he mixed the two crystals with the same amount of charcoal and sulfur and ignited them. He found that only the long crystals could burn rapidly.
Then several other pots were set up, and using that method, several sacks of saltpeter were processed into three barrels of saltpeter in half a day.
Zuo You helped, using a scale for weighing valuables to weigh and mix 49 different proportions of gunpowder. It was troublesome to mix the three dry items. If they were mixed too heavily, they would spontaneously ignite. If they were not mixed evenly, they would not mix well. However, Zuo You and others easily came up with a solution. They just wetted it with water, and then pounded it in a stone mortar for processing grain and grass like dough. After drying it for a day, they carefully ground it into powder the next day.
But at this time, Guo Shao told them not to bother grinding it into powder, but to directly crush it into granules and sift it evenly with a fine sieve.
After three days of hard work, they presented 49 packages of the black stuff. Guo Shao, Zuo You, Luo Mengzi, and a dozen of his trusted soldiers stayed in the house to experiment.
The method is very simple, just try to find out which one burns the fastest.
The 49 kinds of gunpowder were further divided into seven groups, and each group selected the one that burned the fastest; then the winners were put together for the final test. It was like the rules of a competition. The seven kinds of gunpowder were folded with paper to make a long strip, and then they were ignited one by one, two by three, to see which one burned to the end first.
The room was soon filled with smoke and everyone was coughing, so they had to open the doors and windows to get some fresh air.
The whole process was actually very simple, and Guo Shaodeng finished the experiment in less than an hour. He found out the proportion of the gunpowder: 7 liang 5 qian of saltpeter, 1 liang of sulfur, 1 liang 5 qian of charcoal.
Guo Shao vaguely knew that gunpowder particles burned faster than powder. He thought about the reason and guessed that it was because there was a gap in the middle, which made it easier to burn. However, he felt that experiments were the way to prove all conjectures, and this was a simple thing to do, so he took the particles and powder of the same gunpowder and tried to light them. Sure enough, the difference was obvious. For gunpowder strips of the same length, the particles of gunpowder burned up, but the powder did not even burn one-third.
When the work was almost done, Guo Shao ordered Zuo You to stay in the warehouse and Luo Mengzi to control his personal soldiers, telling them not to leak military secrets, otherwise they would be punished by death. He also sent personal soldiers to set up sentries near the Fei River to guard against spies.
Guo Shao returned to Shouzhou. The next day, the ministers sent by the emperor came to Shouzhou again. This time, the people who came back were no longer the easy-going Wang Pu, but people Guo Shao knew: Dou Yi, and his follower Zhao Pu.
Guo Shao gradually remembered that Zhao Pu seemed to be a person who had defected to Zhao Kuangyin, but he didn't know why he was with Dou Yi now.
Dou Yi said nothing, but wandered around the city to inspect the deployment outside the city. Guo Shao explained his deployment intentions and how to prevent counterattacks in the city, and said without hesitation that Li Jixun's inaction, his lack of elite troops and the surprise attack led to the failure a few days ago.
Two days later, Dou Yi went to the right wing camp of the Hujie Army and then headed southeast to Chuzhou.
Within two days, fast horses arrived in Shouzhou, and an order was issued to Li Chongjin to move his garrison to Haozhou and Li Jixun's troops to move northeast towards Tushan. The main forces of the third to sixth armies of the left wing of the Hujie Army deployed in the southern direction of Luzhou were transferred to Shouzhou and came under the command of Guo Shao, the commander of the wing.
Dou Yi, who was delivering the imperial edict, said to Guo Shao: "The emperor said that although you did not slack off, you let the defenders counterattack successfully, and you cannot escape the blame. Since the military order has been issued, you have something to say in front of the generals. The emperor is not a heartless person. The deadline is one month. When the time is up, if there is no progress, Guo Dushi will tie himself up and plead guilty in front of the emperor."