Everything was ready; all I lacked was a proper route. Truly, manpower was in short supply. It seemed I couldn't afford to be impatient; I had to take things one step at a time. Once I returned, I would arrange for people to start pressing tung oil. Since we didn't have enough men, the oil was essential—it would allow us to keep working for half the night. As soon as I thought of it, I acted. Extracting oil was incredibly simple for me.
Once I finished the blueprints, I prepared to have Old Jian build the oil press, only to remember that I had left him behind to refine steel. Manpower really was severely lacking. Fortunately, the device wasn't complex. I called for Dian Wei and Zhang Fei to start forging it; they were always tagging along and helping out, so they were perfectly capable of smithing. It wasn't exactly high-precision work.
I had originally planned to send men to fell timber. Looking at the time, it was about right. We had to get the logging done so that by next summer, once the wood was dry, hauling it would be far less strenuous. Thinking of the river nearby, I wondered if we could use it for transport—water transport is, after all, the most efficient method. My current mission was to survey the terrain and see if that river could be put to use. If I could utilize it to connect these various points, transporting goods would become much easier. The main issue was that if I had to build roads, the lines would be too long—hundreds of kilometers in every directio…
Chapter 36