An explosion ripped through the mine tunnel. Thirty Danish nitrators wrapped in polar bear skins leaped out from an ice fissure, the forged patterns on the brass fractionators in their hands identical to the gunpowder purification diagrams recorded in Song Yingxing's Exploitation of the Works of Nature from the Chongzhen era. Shen Xitang's silver silk shredded a condenser tube, revealing a fallen scrap page of the "Copenhagen Secret Pact"—next to the official document reading "False report of 800,000 catties of saltpeter production," Old Norse characters noted: "Resold to the Swedish army as siege gunpowder stabilizer!"
"Reporting to the Assistant Commissioner!" A personal guard pried open a hidden compartment in the frozen earth, "Buried in this permafrost..."
Amid flying ice chips, fifty Danish four-wheel cannon carriages disguised as "ice-sculpted reindeer" gleamed into view, the Krupp hallmarks on the inner sides of their wheel hubs overlapping precisely with the tea-horse secret tallies of Shanxi merchant Fan Yongdou!
Chapter 181