Once the blade is forged, use a whetstone to sharpen it before use. The forged iron is quite effective; after sharpening, it's just as sharp and sturdy as my machete.

I took two bamboo strips that were cut into squares about one centimeter apart, placed them on the ground to hold them in place, and then used a push knife to push the two bamboo strips at the same time.

The rounded push knife is very useful; the sharp knife can push the bamboo strip into a smooth cylindrical shape in just a few strokes.

The next step is to press and straighten these round arrowheads over the fire using a short wooden block with a ten-centimeter-wide groove.

The work on the arrowheads went smoothly; all that remained was to saw them in half lengthwise to obtain the arrow shafts.

In less than half an hour, I had already processed about a hundred arrow shafts.

Now that we have the shafts, we need to make arrowheads, but I can't bear to use rare iron to make them.

However, it can still be used to make an iron mold for an arrow. The method is similar to the previous casting method, except that the clay is replaced with molten iron.

After the arrow mold was made, I splurged a little more. I cut out a block of gold, placed it into the iron arrow mold, and with two hammer blows, a rough golden arrowhead was formed by hand-stamping.

After cutting off the excess material from the arrowheads, the arrowheads are considered finished products. The arrowhead manufacturing process is relatively easy; it took nearly twenty minutes to make more than a hundred arrowheads.

The production speed of one arrow every ten seconds on average still gave me the feeling of being on an industrial assembly line.

Next, I used a drill bit to make a groove for the arrow shaft to hold the arrowhead. Then I applied hot rosin to the connecting post at the end of the arrowhead and inserted it into the groove to secure it firmly.

Here comes the final step: attaching tail feathers to the arrows. I had previously shot quite a few swans and wild ducks, and the wing feathers of these birds were perfect for making arrow tails.

Cut the tail of a feather into a swallowtail shape, then split it in half and attach it to the tail of the arrow shaft with pine resin. This completes the making of a delicate crossbow bolt.

I assembled the remaining dozens of crossbow bolts using the same method. I used a large bamboo tube as a quiver to hold the crossbow frames.

Gold is heavier than iron, so for the same volume, a gold arrow will have more kinetic energy than an iron arrow.

I made the angle of the arrows gentler to increase the crossbow's penetration power.

I strung the crossbow, then took an arrow and placed it into the curved quiver. This time, I aimed at a tree twenty meters away and pulled the trigger.

The arrow made a piercing sound as it cut through the air, and with a muffled thud, the crossbow bolt pierced the tree trunk.

There was no way to pull the arrow out. I took out a new arrow and compared it with the one on the tree trunk. This time, the arrowhead went in about five centimeters!

This arrow is far more powerful than a blowgun; it's estimated that this single shot would be enough to easily kill a wild boar.

Great, the first powerful weapon has been completed, and I am very satisfied with its effect.

I put this new tool in my storage room so I can easily access it when needed.

Next up is the second, even more powerful thing, which revolutionized the use of cold weapons for thousands of years. Its appearance directly led to the demise of cold weapons.

Gunpowder is also divided into many types, including granular gunpowder, smokeless gunpowder, explosive gunpowder, and so on.

The most common type of gunpowder is the black powder we are familiar with. This type of gunpowder has a simple formula and a relatively simple manufacturing process.

However, I don't intend to make black powder. Its burning rate is not fast enough among gunpowders, and its power is only average. Only old-fashioned firearms would use this kind of gunpowder to shoot birds.

The next part of the project is a bit more complicated and may not be as easy to do as making bows and crossbows or other cold weapons.

While making the crossbows, I boiled down the sulfur spring water to get a lot of yellow powder. When you smelled it closely, it had a strong, pungent odor; this was high-purity natural sulfur.

Nitrates are an essential material for manufacturing high-powered propellants. Among natural materials, wood ash solution is rich in potassium salts.

Of course, potassium salts alone cannot be used to obtain nitrates; sulfuric acid, which is known as the mother of the chemical industry, needs to be produced first.

That's why I spent a lot of time bringing the sulfur spring to my residence from the beginning, so that I could extract the sulfur from it first.

Next, I will prepare distilled water without impurities. Here, I plan to make a distillation flask, some glass tubing, and a liquid collector.

The raw materials for making glass are not hard to find. The main component of the fine sand by the lake is silicon dioxide. When mixed with some calcined shell powder and wood ash, the mixture is heated in a crucible until it melts and can then be shaped.

However, glass processing is different from other materials. Its process mainly involves blowing out blanks with a mouth, so before that I had to make a metal blowpipe at least one meter long to blow these liquid glass solutions.

Metal blowpipes are easy to obtain. I simply thinned the gold and then rolled it into a cylindrical shape, making a blowpipe more than a meter long.

Once all the sand in the crucible has melted, a metal blowpipe is inserted and rotated to pick out a piece of liquid solution. Then, it is continuously rotated in the magma-like solution to coat it with more and more solution.

When it has rolled to a certain size, you can take it out and blow air into the metal tube with your mouth. At this point, the molten glass will expand like an inflating balloon under the pressure.

Since it was my first time making this, I didn't dare to blow too much air, afraid of ruining it. So the distillation flask I made was quite thick, almost as thick as a beer bottle.

Several bottles were for collection purposes. Before the bottles were fully formed, I placed a flat stone under them.

Then, by pressing down slightly on the bottom of the bottle, a flat surface is created. The bottle can stand steadily even after the metal tube is removed, and it looks somewhat similar to a conical flask.

After blowing through several bottles, my cheeks felt a bit sore. It seems that making money as a glassworker isn't so easy after all.

Next, I planned to blow out a glass tube, but this thing is not as easy to process as a bottle.

No matter how I blow on it, or how I shape the molten lava, I can't blow it into a tube shape, and it will bulge when I blow hard.

In the end, I had no choice but to give up the idea of ​​making glass tubes. If all else fails, I'll just have to use thinner bamboo as the tube.

After finishing the glassmaking, I received an oversized glass distillation flask, several collection bottles, and a drinking glass.

After finding suitable bamboo sections, I assembled the distillation equipment.

A condenser was needed in the middle of the bamboo tube, so I made a water pot out of gold. The bamboo tube was passed through the pot and covered with clay to raise it so that the cold water would submerge the bamboo tube. The water pot in the middle was supported by a tripod made of tree branches.