The Courtyard House: The Little Red Devil Returning from the Peninsula

When the system interface lit up, Zhao Weiguo had just finished drawing the first line around Taiyuan.

The message only has two lines.

The proactive push notification feature is about to end.

Assist mode is being prepared.

The monk stood by the table and stared at it for a long time.

"Does it need a rest too?"

Zhao Weiguo did not answer.

From the earliest supplies of food, guns, and blueprints, to gun and cannon steel formulas, measuring standards, and mother industry process packages, the system had provided many shortcuts. But once the master plan for 100,000 people was put up, what truly hindered them had changed.

What's missing is no longer a magical blueprint.

It's the unstable lead screw, the first batch of bearing steel still being analyzed, the incomplete collection of cemented carbide materials, and the fact that the measuring tools will still break after calibration. It's the eight red tags among the thirty gun barrels, it's Han Qing and He Xiaoman who died after the stone kiln was bombed, it's a truck with a broken clutch that can block the entire bridge.

Zhao Weiguo proactively input: Auxiliary mode available capabilities.

The interface provides instructions.

The auxiliary mode only responds to explicit technical or computational problems.

It can return existing data, parameter ranges, standards, calculation results, and risk warnings.

It does not actively generate real-world finished products.

We do not provide full knowledge of the enemy situation.

It does not replace trial production, inspection, and command judgment.

In simple terms, it means not replacing command.

"Ask it where the Japanese devils will come from tomorrow?" the monk asked.

"It doesn't know."

Which bridge is most likely to collapse?

"Give it the bridge's materials, span, vehicle weight, and damage records, and it can calculate the risk."

"We still need to check the bridge first."

"right."

The monk smacked his lips.

"Then what else can it do?"

"Settle the accounts." Zhao Weiguo pushed the interface aside. "Give it the numbers, and it'll calculate. If you don't give it the numbers, it won't be able to calculate."

"What's the difference between that and an accountant?"

"The accountant calculates the grain, the bridges, the cannons, and the gun barrels."

The monk thought for a moment.

"Then it's better than the accountant. The accountant can't calculate the cost of a cannon shot."

The system compiled four types of data before the switch.

Mountain gun barrel prototype production route. Mortar shell casing material and stretching process route. Infantry howitzer concept diagram. Ordnance area expansion safety zoning map.

Not a single cannon was left in the yard.

The materials did not contain a single sentence about "simply copying the diagram." Mountain gun barrels required gun steel, long-hole machining, heat treatment, and life testing; mortar shell casings required stabilizing plates, molds, stretching, and annealing; infantry howitzers only had conceptual structures, weights, and firing range parameters, and the recoil, gun mount, sights, and ammunition all needed to be retested; the safety zoning diagrams also needed to be modified to take into account existing caves, roads, water sources, and air defense conditions.

After reviewing the documents, Zhao Tieshan asked a question.

Which one is the most urgent?

"Everyone's in a hurry," Zhao Weiguo said.

"That means they didn't line up."

He separated the four sets of materials and asked Chen An to bring blank process paper.

The process of disassembling the mountain gun barrel into materials, forging blanks, drilling, boring, heat treatment, flaw detection, pressure testing, and life testing.

The process involves disassembling mortar shell casings into plates for sampling, blanking, stretching in stages, intermediate annealing, bottom forming, dimensional inspection, and pre-loading acceptance.

Before discussing howitzer construction, let's first break down the weight, consider the load-bearing capacity of the gun wheels, recoil risk, and calculate the existing traction capabilities.

The safety zone includes underground equipment, surface dummy factory buildings, power plants, fuel plants, explosives, workers' dormitories, sanitation stations, and evacuation routes.

There are a total of thirty-seven actual work orders.

Write only one thing on each page.

Who is in charge, what materials are needed, which equipment will be used, what result is considered passing, and which step to revert to if it fails.

The work orders were not arranged in the order of the documents, but were divided into three piles according to whether the work could actually be started.

The first batch of tasks can be done immediately: safety zone verification, gauge calibration, load-bearing calculation of existing bridges and factory buildings, and design of small molds for mortar shell casings.

The second batch of materials to be prepared includes: a small bearing steel furnace, cemented carbide cutting tools, stabilized plates, and refractory materials.

The third stack was solely for research: machining the long barrel of mountain guns, and calculating the recoil and carriage of howitzers. No one was allowed to submit a research work order and report "manufacturing has begun" until the equipment and materials were available.

Zhao Gang added estimated grain and coal consumption, transport trips, and personnel sources to each stack of work orders. The technical department said they needed fifty workers, and they also needed to check the accounts to see which positions these fifty people were originally in and whether the old production line would stop after they were removed.

Chen An's wrist started to ache after copying the twelfth page.

"The system only provided four sets, how did we end up with so many?"

Zhao Tieshan flipped over a diagram of the body tubes.

"That line on the paper is called a deep hole. In reality, it requires drilling, guiding, cooling, chip removal, straightening, and correction. For every line it shows, the worker has to do six or seven. Do you think the system is some kind of magician, able to produce a gun barrel just by drawing a line?"

Chen An stopped talking and continued copying.

Once the work orders were completed, the difficulties also emerged.

There is currently no stable equipment available for processing sufficiently long mountain gun barrels.

Mortar shell casings can be tested in small batches using molds, but the composition and thickness of the sheet metal are unstable.

Howitzers are only suitable for parameter calculation and cannot be approved for mass production.

Safety zoning should be the first thing to be addressed. The Shiyao bombing has proven that surface factory buildings, underground core equipment, and workers' living quarters must be further separated. Oil tanks, explosives, and dormitories cannot be separated by just one wall.

Zhao Tieshan led his men to revisit the stone kiln.

The old oil tank is too close to the machining shed, and would block the evacuation exit in the event of a fire. The back wall of the workers' dormitory leads to a ravine, but is piled with scrap wood. The underground measuring room has only one exit, and if the door collapses, the people inside will be unable to get out. Wooden signs were posted for each of the three problems. The scrap wood was to be removed that day, the location of the second exit was to be determined first, and the relocation of the oil tank would wait until the transportation and fireproofing materials arrived.

The loading and unloading yard where Han Qing and He Xiaoman died was not restored to its original layout. The new unloading points were divided into three areas: steel, coal, and oil. Workers had to dig shelter trenches first. As a result, the safety zoning diagram was revised twice, and the original system diagram was not simply copied onto the wall.

Zhao Gang came in with a general ledger of 100,000.

"First, implement the safety zoning; from where should the workers and transport vehicles exit?"

"Local transportation and medical supplies are handled by adjusting bridge beams and moving equipment, without affecting the formal battalion," Zhao Weiguo said. "The workers are still scheduled by the military supply depots themselves."

Cement, timber?

"Provide according to the warehouse receipt. The 12-day emergency reserve warehouse cannot be emptied."

"Are there any existing materials in the system's database?"

"No."

Zhao Gang nodded and added a column next to the work order: Source of Reality.

Work orders without a source cannot be started based on the word "merit".

After the auxiliary mode was officially switched, Zhao Weiguo conducted the first test.

He entered a set of known bridge data: wooden bridge span, bridge pile material, recent water level, armored vehicle weight, and reinforcement records.

The system returned three risks.

The bridge deck has insufficient load-bearing capacity in some areas. The strength of the second row of bridge piles decreased after being submerged in water. The risk of vibration is higher when vehicles pass continuously than when a single vehicle passes.

It did not say that the enemy would appear here, nor did it make a decision for him to blow up the bridge, defend the bridge, or change the route.

The engineers, armed with the information, re-inspected the bridge and found that the second row of bridge piers was indeed corroded, proving the risk ranking system useful. However, a new access road had recently been opened on the adjacent riverbank, which wasn't in the system's data and needed to be added by on-site personnel.

The engineers added the width of the access road, the hardness of the riverbed, and the post-rain water level to the data, and asked again. The system adjusted the vehicle sorting, but still only provided load capacity and congestion risk. Whether to allow armored vehicles to use the access road was ultimately decided on-site by the engineers and vehicle commanders.

The second test was for wear on the throat of the barrel.

Zhao Tieshan input the material, heat treatment, number of shots, and measurement records for the first batch and twenty-two small batches of gun barrels. The system provided potentially relevant temperature windows, surface hardness, and bolt fit risks, and requested an expansion of the sample size.

It doesn't directly tell you which process is definitely wrong.

Zhao Tieshan cut samples from the two previously disassembled gun barrels; one was used to examine the microstructure, and the other was used for further dimensional remeasurement. With only two samples, the entire batch of heat treatments couldn't be disregarded based on this alone. Several relevant factors listed in the system were then transferred to the next batch's inspection items.

"That's more like an assistant," Zhao Tieshan said.

"Didn't it look like that before?"

"Before, we were like a rich man. He gave us things, and we just had to figure out how to use them. Now we're like a master craftsman; if we can't understand something, he won't do it for us."

The system did not respond to this statement.

The push notification bar is now grayed out.

The previous process packages are still in the cabinet. The lead screw grinding has not yet been successful, the first batch of bearing steel is awaiting analysis, the carbide cutting tools have only completed material collection, and the gauge calibration process has just been rotated among four points.

Four new types of materials were also locked in the technical archives.

Equipment must be registered upon receipt, modifications must be kept in the old version, and trial production results must be written back to the work order. System data is not absolute; if real-world data proves that a certain parameter is unsuitable for the existing equipment, the reason must be noted before adjustments are made.

The archives provided a results page for each work order. Success, failure, paused, and insufficient conditions were separated into four states. Pause does not equal failure, and insufficient conditions cannot be disguised as progress. Chen An only updated the changes each day to avoid turning thirty-seven pages into a pile of neat daily reports.

Only nine work orders were actually started in the first week. Three obstacles were cleared in the safety zone, two damaged calipers were returned for calibration, only wooden prototypes of mortar shell casings were made, and the bridge load-bearing tables were completed for four old bridges. The remaining twenty-eight work orders still had signs indicating they were pending materials, equipment, or testing.

Zhao Weiguo did not urge him to turn the sign over.

The work order isn't about turning every item on the wall into "completed." It's about letting everyone know whether the current shortage is steel, coal, machine tools, skilled workers, or an experiment that hasn't been conducted yet. If the conditions aren't right, staying put is better than presenting a mere prototype as a success.

Zhao Weiguo asked about the risks surrounding Taiyuan again.

He only inputs the known map, roads, bridges, enemy outposts, and his own transport limit.

The system provides information on road congestion, bridge load-bearing capacity, artillery repositioning, and the risk of detours for sanitation lines.

There were no secret enemy deployments. There was no probability of victory. There was no "best solution."

The operations team copied the system's order onto one sheet of paper, and reserved another sheet for manual judgment. Both sheets were tucked into the contingency plan, and neither could cover the other.

If two documents reach different conclusions on the same issue, the staff officer must write down the reasons. All details—which maps and data the system used, and what enemy situation and experience were added through manual judgment—must be documented. Only after the battle can these details be reviewed to determine which item was overlooked.

Zhao Gang looked at the thirty-seven work orders.

"The system's shut down, but I've got more work to do."

Zhao Tieshan pinned the last security zoning diagram to the wall.

"There used to be this many. They just hadn't been opened; they looked like a sentence."

Outside the window, the newly installed electrical wires at the stone kiln were not yet fully laid.

One was locked in the cabinet, twenty durable gun barrels were scattered in different positions, and eight red cards were still placed on the failure shelf.

It can be built by itself, so the system stops talking.

Even after it stops talking, the furnace, lathe, workers, and tents can still continue.

Zhao Weiguo took one last look at the grayed-out push notification, then reached out and closed the interface. The only sounds in the room were Chen An's pen scribbling as he copied work orders and the shouts of someone connecting wires at the stone kiln outside the window.

He picked up his pencil and returned to the map of the outskirts of Taiyuan. The first line of defense was still blank, waiting for him to draw it himself.

The monk leaned closer and glanced at the picture.

"The system's gone," he said. "You'll still be fighting?"

Zhao Weiguo placed the pencil on the drawing.

"The system taught me how to do the accounting," he said. "I fought the battle myself. The system didn't fire a single shot for me."

The monk thought for a moment, then picked up the straw.

"Then I'm relieved," he said. "I was worried that if the system shut down, you wouldn't even know how to fire a gun."

Zhao Weiguo glanced at him but didn't reply.

He lowered his head and drew the first defensive line around Taiyuan. The pencil tip paused on the paper, then moved forward an inch.

This inch is something the system can't provide.