Zhou Yu acted as if he hadn't seen anything, and glanced at Gan Ning who was excitedly carrying a huge stone tablet. He saw dragons and phoenixes engraved on the stone tablet that he had picked up from who knows where. Two large-character boundary monuments, and then a line of small characters in the lower corner: Gan Xingba, Commander of the Han Navy! Well, the boundary monument. Then Gan Ning, who held the boundary monument high, suddenly exerted his force and pierced the huge boundary monument towards the mine below. With a roar, the boundary monument was pierced by Gan Ning. It is said that there is an iron ore in the area, and it is very ugly. "This guy Gan Xingba" Zhou Yu, who was standing on the cliff nearby, said with a slight twitch in the corner of his eyes. This behavior was really embarrassing in Zhou Yu's opinion. At this time, a gust of wind and sand swept over, and a fishy rusty smell appeared in the smells of a few quarrelsome little old men who were squatting on the ground and suspected that there was something wrong with this place. They were conducting in-depth research. Suddenly, everyone was His face was startled. Several people looked at each other and saw the horror in each other's eyes. "Brother, I think there is something wrong with this place, what about you?" Wang Heng looked at a few acquaintances around him and asked, "It's not just wrong. The smell of rust in the wind and sand is like an open-pit mine, and it must be a very large one." Only open pit mines can do this. "I'm afraid this place is just a block of iron." The old man next to him said with the same solemn expression. You can smell the rust in the wind and sand. Looking at the fine dust on the ground, you can see a red feeling at a glance. Before, this group of people thought that the soil environment of this place was like this, but after thinking about it for a while, everyone was shocked. I am afraid that this place is no longer a problem with iron ore, but should be put another way, this place is afraid of It is a huge mine buried under sand and gravel. Seeing that several people had such expressions, Wang Heng became very confident. If it was as expected, the iron content of this iron ore might not be as terrifying as usual. "Bring Si Nan." Wang Heng waved to the boy on the side, who quickly took out Si Nan from the box on the side. And sure enough, Si Nan was killed on the spot. "Hematite on top, magnet on the bottom?" The little old man on the side carefully picked off a layer of red dust from the ground, and then slowly poured it down from his hands. The fine dust naturally fell towards Sinan, and everyone looked solemn. . "This place is full of mines, probably covering hundreds of miles" Wang Heng said with twitching eyes. Only in this way can those exposed open-pit mines become like this after years of wind and sand invasion. scale of hematite powder. "I'm afraid this is the only explanation." Wang Heng said to himself, and everyone else also looked shocked. Iron mines of this scale are simply rare in the region. Wang Heng and others climbed up a high mountain with difficulty and looked around. The red reflection made them fully understand that what they were stepping on was not earth and rocks, but iron ore. "Captain Zhou, please find a way to occupy this place." After Wang Heng and others confirmed the situation, they came to notify Zhou Yu immediately, and also took a lot of iron ore and iron ore that they knocked down from the open-pit mine with their eyes closed. Crushed ore that fell after being eroded by wind and sand. "Uh, why do you want to occupy it? Because of the iron ore?" Zhou Yu looked at a few young old men with a puzzled face. These are the older generation in Wu who understand Kanyu. Although they are not wealthy, they belong to the kind of people who are everywhere. A family that can mix well, so Zhou Yu will give him face. "You can't plant fields, trees, or even grass in this place. But based on our experience, this place is full of iron, and this iron ore," Wang Heng said, taking out a piece of iron from a box on the side. After weighing the ore, he said with an expression of disbelief, "With our many years of experience in mineral processing and forging, we can cast it directly by throwing it into the furnace." Iron ore does not need to be processed, it can be used after being peeled off. It is very difficult in the Central Plains, because the iron ore in China is basically poor ore, and the grade is not very good. Mining the ore requires a lot of time and mineral processing, which is very energy-consuming. However, in this place, Wang Heng randomly picked up a unique piece. With the influence of his family since he was ten years old and his forty years of experience in exploring ores, the moment he got the hematite, Wang Heng knew that what he touched on his hands was This ore is not so much a stone as it is iron, six points of iron! Wang Heng picked up more than 20 pieces with his eyes closed. It felt that the iron content was basically around 60%. The high ones were even close to 70%, and the low ones did not drop to 55%. "This is picked up casually with eyes closed, which means that the scumliest ore in this place can be directly thrown into the furnace for smelting. This is simply crazy. It is completely different from the ore in the Central Plains that needs to be processed after being mined. The quality of the ore here is so good that Wang Heng and others can hardly believe it. The more important thing is that several little old men have climbed mountains before.I intuitively estimated the scope of the mine, and finally came to a conclusion. The estimated value of the iron ore in this mine is probably calculated in hundreds of millions. Within the range of my eyes, almost all of it has this color. Although the value estimated by Wang Heng and others is 100 million kilograms, which is still hundreds of thousands of times different from the tens of billions of tons estimated by later generations, hundreds of millions of kilograms of high-grade iron ore is enough for these people to make up their minds. They understand This, so they understand the importance of these ores. "After all, this is high-quality iron ore that can be stripped off without beneficiation and thrown directly into the steel furnace. What's even more frightening is that this is an open-pit mine. The difficulty of mining is how to remove it. To put it simply, just build an ironworks here, pick up ore on the spot and throw it into the furnace to make steel. As for technology, the iron content of the ore here has exceeded 60%. If you want some crazy skills, basically Pieces of iron oxide! Zhou Yu was stunned when he heard this. Since the smelting technology has been improved to the point where it can cast iron, things like iron are very important in any era, so Zhou Yu also understands how high-quality the iron ore is that can be thrown directly into the furnace. The problem is that no matter how high-quality it is, it is of no use. It is no joke that this poor place is thousands of miles away from the Central Plains. If it is near the South China Sea and does not cross the Strait of Malacca, Zhou Yu thinks that a casting point can be built on the spot, and it will be built after a while. The significance of transporting finished steel back to this place is nearly 20,000 kilometers back and forth! In Zhou Yu¡¯s opinion, at this distance, not to mention the possibility that there might be a Kushan fleet squatting in the middle, even without this fleet, it¡¯s not worth it. Although it is indeed easy to smelt high-grade iron ore on-site to obtain finished iron, but with this terrible distance, it is of no use. Even if the iron is produced, there is no way to transport it back. The transportation costs have exploded. All right. ¡°Besides, even if iron is smelted on-site, it still requires a blast furnace and coal. This is the most sophisticated technology obtained by the technicians recruited from Chen Xi. It can easily smelt steel on-site. However, even so, coal is needed! This is not a place like the Central Plains. You can pull out briquettes very close by just pulling twice. You can't play with the blast furnace without briquettes. Without the blast furnace, it's impossible to produce steel on a large scale. You can't just transport the ore back. This It¡¯s more of a trap! Who is so stupid to transport ore back to the Central Plains? Don¡¯t you know that most ships now have a carrying capacity of several hundred tons? Including drinking water, dry food and other things, the designer of this plan is simply transporting ore from a place 10,000 kilometers away. He is mentally retarded! " Transporting hundreds of tons back is simply a sinkhole. There are no people in this miserable place. Do we have to transport people here? Are you kidding me? The cost exploded instantly. Zhou Yu decisively rejected this mentally retarded plan. As for the seventh-generation ship, the carrying capacity is calculated based on three to four thousand tons. Including smelting, it can barely cover the cost. The problem is that a seventh-generation ship costs 100 million. With such a large cost and such low efficiency, Zhou Yu said Just take a shower, the costs will explode. "But such a high-quality mine is wasted here, which is a pain for those of us who are worthy of the land!" Wang Heng said, touching his conscience, it was really painful. Although Zhou Yu was somewhat interested, he still refused after calculating the cost. In his opinion, even as he became familiar with shipping, ships were traveling faster and faster, and it would take nearly a month to get here from Jiangdong. Drinking water and dry food required for a month's shipping, Zhou Yu said to just go to bed. Today's small boats cannot afford ocean-going ore transportation. Although Zhou Yu's mathematics is not very good, but with a rough estimate, he also understands that unless the carrying capacity It can exceed 10,000 tons, otherwise if you want to transport iron ore from Australia to Jiangdong, you should just sleep. Of course, if Lu Bu's move to tear apart the space can be done at a certain point, Zhou Yu will not mind occupying this place at all, but it is enough to think about opening a channel to connect the Central Plains and Australia. In short, Zhou Yu decisively vetoed the proposal of a group of people who were in agreement with each other, but Gan Ning became interested. As the saying goes, thieves never leave the country empty-handed, so Gan Ning decisively asked his pirates to disembark and move the ore. After all, Gan Ning still has more than 30,000 pirates. The plan to annihilate the entire army failed. The Kushans only killed more than 40,000 pirates, and only about 200 of the more than 600 pirate ships were sunk. There was also some spare carrying capacity. Tens of thousands of tons. What's more, after the war, although half of the sixth-generation ships were sunk, there were still a dozen ships left, which had a carrying capacity of just over 10,000 tons. Gan Ning¡¯s current advantage is that the ship has a small number of people. A retired warship that is equivalent to a fourth-generation ship has a carrying capacity of about one hundred tons as long as it is not loaded with anything. So Gan Ning drove all the pirates off the ship and ordered them to dig out the open pit. Each of them needed to dig out two thousand kilograms, which is one ton of the new weights and measures. Fortunately, there are many people, and the mine is open-air. Legions attack everywhere, cutting open the open-pit mine, and there is no need to screen.It took more than 30,000 people to fill the empty ships of the fleet with iron ore in two days. Gan Ning expressed satisfaction with this speed, and Zhou Yu once again expressed helplessness to Gan Ning.