Chapter Thirteen: Galleons
Looking at the ship that Ximan had put together, Qin Mo sighed inwardly. This would be the first main warship he would use to dominate the seas in the future. In another world, he had a resounding name—the Galleon.
Galleons were developed from the Spanish carracks. The mainstay of the Spanish Armada, which dominated the oceans for over a century, was the carrack. It was the English light galleon fleet that defeated the Armada. From then on, galleons and other warships developed from galleons ruled the seas for three hundred years.
The most distinctive feature of galleons is that the traditional forecourt was moved below the deck. Galleons have a straight bow and only a forecourt protrudes from the deck at the stern. The entire ship has a low center of gravity and uses a large number of ribs to support the hull, resulting in a strong hull structure. The interior is flat and spacious, making it easy and convenient to carry cargo or load cannons.
The only area where galleons fall short compared to Chinese sailing ships is the maneuverability of their sails. Chinese sand barges and Cantonese ships use stiff sails, making them easy to maneuver, requiring fewer sailors, and, more importantly, allowing them to sail against the wind at greater angles. Galleons, on the other hand, use soft sails, requiring many sailors to operate them. Even with longitudinal sails, they can only sail with crosswinds, so when sailing against the wind in a zigzag pattern, the sailors have to constantly adjust the sails.
However, galleons could have very high masts and large sails, so overall they were much faster than Chinese sailing ships. And on these turbulent seas, carrying more sailors was actually necessary. With too few people, they wouldn't dare to board pirates, and with too many people... well, who knows who the pirates are! Hahaha!
"Syman, you're such a versatile alchemist, haha! When can I go out to sea and test this ship? I can't wait!" Qin Mo didn't care whether Syman liked hugging or not, and went up to hug and kiss him.
"Perhaps only we elves can operate this kind of sail; it's too complicated!" Seaman muttered as he pushed Qin Mo away. The elves' moonships with their pointed prows also had soft sails, but they were far less complex and difficult to operate than the sails of the galleons.
"No, Seaman, we need more sailors, we need to earn more money, so we can find our way home. That's our common wish, isn't it?" Qin Mo corrected Seaman's bad idea. In his vision of the future, there must be more than two hundred main warships to dominate East Asia. Each ship would need at least a hundred people. Could all those ships be piloted by the elves? That was obviously impossible.
"Okay, I'll select a few people to test it out in the near sea first. If there are no problems, we'll go out to sea for testing."
“Very good. I will set off for Fusang in half a month. This time I will use it as my flagship and have a competition with your Moon Ship.”
As the departure date drew closer, Qin Mo discovered that the amount of unfinished preparations was piling up. The long-term plan for an iron smelting furnace was out of the question; refractory bricks hadn't even been tested, let alone manufactured—the materials were nowhere to be found. And what he'd overlooked was a crucial issue that made him want to bang his head against the wall.
Qin Mo cultivated the *Mingxin Jing*, a top-tier mental cultivation method in the Great Xia Dynasty. Its initial stages could temper the body and cleanse the marrow, while later stages could even lead to transcendence and sainthood. He and Allen were injured several times during their duels, but the wounds healed on their own within a day, and even the scars disappeared without a trace after several days. Furthermore, the powerful subordinates like Uncle Lin and Uncle Wu led him to mistakenly believe that all soldiers in the world were cultivators who could heal themselves after injury as long as they didn't die.
But when Lin Bo and others who died on the battlefield were considered lucky, while countless others succumbed to festering wounds and died, he realized that not everyone had the opportunity to cultivate. While the various powerful families of the Great Xia Dynasty did indeed possess unique cultivation methods, it was extremely difficult for ordinary people to cultivate. Essentially, the only path was to exchange military merits for cultivation methods from the imperial family.
If you accumulate enough military merits, you can apply for a "vital energy" potion and a rubbing of the "Breaking Technique". The "Breaking Technique" is said to originate from ancient ruins, possessing immense power and an incredibly fast cultivation speed. It is said that most of the cultivation methods preserved in aristocratic families today are perfected based on the "Breaking Technique".
The Vitality Elixir is refined from a variety of rare medicinal herbs and works synergistically with the "Breaking the Technique" rubbing. It allows one to sense the vital energy between heaven and earth, guiding you onto the path of cultivation. Of course, your luck and aptitude must be good enough; otherwise, it's normal to not sense any vital energy even after using three to five doses of the elixir and the rubbing.
Countless civilian soldiers spend their entire lives in a cycle of accumulating military merits, exchanging them for military merits, accumulating more military merits, and exchanging them for military merits again, until they fall, all in the hope of finding that sliver of opportunity to change their own and their family's fate.
Without the "Yongyao" medicine and the copybook, unless a high-level cultivator is willing to expend their hard-earned vital energy to guide you in your enlightenment, and you rely on the methods recorded in "Breaking the Technique" to sense the earth's vital energy and successfully absorb it for your own use... then you are not just talented, but a monster.
Qin Mo was guided onto the path of cultivation by Qin Lan. Even many of his generals quickly became cultivators with Qin Lan's help. However, human strength has its limits, and Qin Lan couldn't turn every soldier into a cultivator. Therefore, not every soldier possessed the robust physique of Qin Mo. In such cases, modern first-aid kits with sterilization and stitching techniques became essential items for raiding and battlefield combat.
Qin Mo summoned Uncle Lin again, asking him to find some reliable men. Hearing Qin Mo's attitude again, Uncle Lin's eyes began to gleam with the light of money. He was almost oblivious to silver these days; he was making over ten thousand taels of silver a month, and that number was still increasing. He was becoming numb to it all.
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