All the heavens begin with the love in the courtyard.

After Qin Shi Huang died, Hu Hai only reigned for less than three years. At that time, the Qin Dynasty was no longer able to conquer Tuan. Yu Shu's mission was also completed. Who would become emperor in the future was none of her business.

The flame of hope that had ignited in Yi Xiaochuan's heart burned ever brighter, finally providing an answer to his bewildered and helpless heart.

Chapter 22: Gem City

After leaving the cave, Han Chunming returned directly to Tianshan City.

He originally planned to go to Pei County to bring Lü Su over, but after thinking about it, he decided against it!

The great cause is not yet accomplished, and the foundation is not yet stable. It is not advisable to have women by your side now. Let's make plans when we have established a true empire!

Just as he had said to Yi Xiaochuan in the cave, Qin Shi Huang had five years left to live. Yi Xiaochuan needed those five years, but Han Chunming needed them even more.

Han Chunming returned to the Dragon Kingdom and immediately began to integrate resources. Things went more smoothly than he had imagined, but they were also more troublesome than he had expected. He had to ensure that the Dragon Kingdom had enough strength to support the motivation to continue the conquest.

These driving forces include not only military strength, but also economic strength.

He established a military base and set up several military outposts along the road from the Dragon Kingdom to Tianshan City.

At the same time, the roads were expanded and supply stations were built.

He wanted to ensure that this road was unobstructed, because this was only the first step of the plan.

He organized a large number of young and strong men from within the Dragon Kingdom to travel to Giant Stone City and begin training a large number of skilled workers, enabling Giant Stone City's industrial base to operate rapidly.

At the same time, a large number of schools and technical colleges were established in Tianshan City and the Dragon Kingdom, and simplified Chinese characters were promoted, starting the change from childhood.

The former Tuwan Kingdom was just a semi-nomadic tribe that relied on raising cattle and sheep and trading with merchants from the surrounding areas. Now, Han Chunming is preparing to change the rules of the game.

He chose a small plain on the border of the Dragon Kingdom and built a city similar to Star City, naming it Gem City.

He wants to transform Gem City into the engine of the Dragon Kingdom, bringing it endless power.

He instructed the commerce department to transport various goods produced in Giant Stone City to Gem City, presenting them as special products to attract merchants to trade.

This includes glass and ceramic products, as well as mirrors and paper, etc.

The glassware, mirrors, and paper products in Gem City are unique in the world, and the prices are quite reasonable. Thanks to word of mouth, Gem City has attracted hundreds of merchants in less than three months.

At the same time, Gem City offers a complete range of dining, entertainment, and leisure activities. Among them, there are three newly established casinos, where many kinds of games appear in this world for the first time.

At the same time, he also invited some famous slave traders from the Western Regions to go to Gem City to conduct illicit trade and build streets and markets.

Han Chunming's goal was clear: he wanted to build Gem City into the most famous commercial city in the Western Regions, and also the most notorious money pit of this era.

Glass and mirrors alone cannot support a commercial city. In Gem City, Han Chunming established a large-scale official trading market.

Relying on the market's own operation, he plans to make Gem City the largest commercial complex in the Western Regions within three years, where there are not only glass mirrors, but also goods you can't even imagine.

The world is bustling, all for profit; the world is chaotic, all for profit.

For a commercial city to thrive, the first essential element is ensuring that all merchants who come to trade make a lot of money.

Han Chunming took several measures.

Firstly, business taxes here are almost zero.

Secondly, Han Chunming established a large-scale official trading market and official purchasing stations, which were willing to purchase all goods brought by traveling merchants.

In other words, you don't need to worry about not being able to sell the goods you brought over. The official purchasing station's prices are very high because of the temporary subsidies from the Dragon Kingdom government.

At the same time, the purchasing station intentionally guided merchants to purchase some high-priced goods and come to Gem City for trading.

For example, Han Chunming needs all kinds of heavy metals, gold, silver, copper, iron and all sorts of things, as well as various seeds, grains, and even some strange and unusual commodities such as sulfur and saltpeter that many people don't even know about.

The purchasing station offers very high prices, and after you sell these goods, you start buying more goods from the purchasing station, such as glassware, ceramics, and even mirrors that you need.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Han Chunming began to establish his own mint, producing a complete range of coins in gold, silver, and copper.

The gold, silver, and copper coins forged in the Dragon Kingdom far surpassed the coins of this era in both craftsmanship and quality.

He also plans to establish the world's first bank in the future.

The prerequisite for establishing all of this is that you have sufficient military strength to protect it; otherwise, once Gem City gains some power, it will immediately become someone else's prey.

In order to quickly build Gem City and make it sturdy and indestructible, Han Chunming began to use earthen cement to build the city walls for the first time.

When the twelve-meter-high, three-kilometer-long city wall appeared before the merchants, everyone was shocked.

The wall is merely a placebo; what Han Chunming wants to build is a military superpower.

The knowledge in Han Chunming's mind cannot transform the Dragon Kingdom into a modern country, but it can create new forms of warfare.

Large-scale wars of this era also featured the practice of chariots charging into battle, with infantry swarming in from the rear, relying on sheer numbers to achieve victory.

When gunpowder first appeared in China, Han Chunming knew that this era would be changed because of him.

Of course, the current industrial base is not yet sufficient to manufacture guns and ammunition, and black powder can only be used to make explosives and for mining and other auxiliary purposes.

Han Chunming's reforms in the military field naturally went far beyond this.

In fact, the history of war has always been nothing more than a reform of weapons.

In this era, the Bronze Age had reached its peak, and the Iron Age was just around the corner, yet Han Chunming's cavalry had already begun to equip themselves with steel products.

Stirrups, saddles, and other horse tack began to become widespread, and brand-new steel longswords were produced. Iron armor and steel swords became almost standard equipment for the Dragon Kingdom's cavalry.

The major changes in the military were due to new breakthroughs in industry.

One day, eleven months after the founding of the Dragon Kingdom, one of his students ran excitedly to tell him that the first steam engine of the Industrial Research Institute had completed its second round of experiments and was now ready for small-scale industrial trials.

The original rudimentary methods of steelmaking and ironmaking were far too inefficient. Han Chunming had been thinking about how to change this. Internal combustion engines and electric engines were impractical in this era, but steam engines had a slight possibility.

Therefore, the first project of the Industrial Research Institute established by Han Chunming was the steam engine project.

Despite Han Chunming's extensive experience, it still took nearly a year of manufacturing and experimentation to complete the initial steam engine.

Three years passed in the blink of an eye, and the Dragon Kingdom operated at high speed for nearly three years.

In the past three years, Han Chunming has only conquered a few tribes along the route from the Dragon Kingdom to Tianshan City, totaling about 40,000 people, and integrated them all into the Dragon Kingdom.

Without the harassment of these tribes, a safe road from Tianshan City to the Dragon Kingdom's mainland was completely opened.

Other large-scale military operations were almost non-existent, and the Dragon Kingdom did not launch large-scale conquests against other countries.

Han Chunming originally planned to rest and recuperate for only six months before launching an offensive to sustain the war effort. However, he ultimately endured for three years before deciding to take real action.

There are two reasons. The first reason is that Gem City has made money in the past three years and does not need to fight to support itself. It has enough resources to support its army.

Moreover, once a large-scale military operation is launched, it will definitely affect the business of Gem City.

The second reason is that, as the Industrial Revolution 1.0 progressed, he realized that the key to military strength lies in quality, not quantity, and that the large-scale construction and talent training in China in recent years also required time.

Another point is that Han Chunming always felt that he was not strong enough, and he wanted to fully arm his army.

In the past three years, the army has expanded from 11,000 to 20,000. These troops have been trained for three years and equipped with new weapons and equipment before Han Chunming finally decided to launch a new campaign.

There was no other way; if he didn't launch a campaign soon, other countries would start attacking the Dragon Kingdom. The Dragon Kingdom was now a piece of easy prey.

The meat was so tempting that countless countries and monarchs were eager to get their hands on it. Even the Qin Dynasty and the Xiongnu sent a large number of spies to the Gem City.

Over the past three years, Gem City has developed rapidly and is now renowned far and wide. Merchants from thousands of miles away come to purchase and trade goods.

Gem City now has four leading products: paper, glass, mirrors, and ceramic vases.

Han Chunming never expected that paper would become the leading product of the Dragon Kingdom, and that merchants from the Great Qin Dynasty would be willing to pay a fortune for the secret formula for making paper.

Many merchants from afar brought local specialties from their countries and traveled to Gem City. Upon entering Gem City, they were subjected to a thorough inspection. Gem City prohibited the carrying of any weapons, and the weapons checkpoints would register them, which would be returned on their return journey.

After passing the inspection, they will receive an identity document, which is required for transactions and purchases in Gem City.

Merchants visiting Gem City for the first time will be guided to the trading market by designated personnel. In the market, they have two ways to sell their goods: they can sell them to other merchants in the market, or they can sell them directly to the official purchasing station in bulk.

After selling their own goods, they can purchase the supplies they need at any time, or they can go to the market to buy specialties from other countries.

Of course, the vast majority of traveling merchants chose to purchase goods and make transactions through officially established purchasing stations.

Because official purchasing stations, in addition to buying goods, also sell a large number of unique products in the world.

Among them were bundles of paper, even bundles of books, though the books were printed in simplified Chinese characters, as well as glass, mirrors, exquisite ceramics, and so on.

The official purchasing station offers a wide variety of high-quality items at very low prices. For example, a small mirror sells for three silver coins from the official station, while a thousand miles away, the same mirror would cost three gold coins and would require pre-ordering.

One Dragon Kingdom gold coin can be exchanged for one hundred Dragon Kingdom silver coins, which means there is a profit of ten thousand percent. With such a high profit, how could it not attract those merchants to go crazy?

In fact, the technology for making a mirror is now quite advanced, costing no more than thirty copper coins, and selling it for three silver coins still yields a substantial profit.

Han Chunming's goal is to use low-priced goods to attract merchants from all the Western Regions to Gem City, and to make Gem City a unique commercial capital of this era.

Besides its high-profit goods, Gem City also offers an attractive all-in-one service for eating, drinking, and entertainment.

Novel foods and a new-style gambling city where you can get rich overnight, top beauties from various Western countries, and even a kind of herb that can make you feel like you're floating on air, and strong liquor that costs two gold coins a pound—this is the real den of iniquity.

Six months ago, a prince from a small kingdom in the Western Regions lost 14,000 gold coins in a gambling city overnight. Afterwards, the prince was furious and personally led more than 1,000 cavalrymen on a raid of more than 600 miles, intending to plunder the gem city.

The final result was that over 800 of the thousand cavalrymen were killed, and the prince was seriously wounded by an arrow. This incident almost triggered a war between the two countries.

There have been no fewer than twenty such frictions and conflicts in the past three years, but that one was just the biggest.

This outcome was exactly what Han Chunming had anticipated. Gem City brought a large amount of fiscal revenue to the Dragon Kingdom. Except for the first year when the revenue was low, the annual revenue in the past two years has exceeded ten million gold coins.

Ten million gold coins are enough to arm a 100,000-strong cavalry force with full equipment; one can imagine how huge the profit is.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the Dragon Kingdom is now incredibly wealthy, and Gem City is like a special zone, completely isolated from other cities in the Dragon Kingdom.

No goods are produced here. All goods are produced in cities within the Dragon Kingdom and in Tianshan City or Jushi City, and then transported here.

In this way, although it increased transportation costs significantly, it also completely prevented other citizens from being corrupted by the Gem City.

Because citizens of the Dragon Kingdom, except for special personnel, are prohibited from going to Gem City and from contacting those merchants, this effectively prevents spies from other countries from infiltrating.

As the saying goes, "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down." The Dragon Kingdom's upheaval in the Western Regions naturally attracted a lot of attention, including from the most powerful Xiongnu and the Qin Dynasty.

Fortunately, information was not readily available in that era, and the Dragon Kingdom was located in a remote area; otherwise, it would have been conquered by other countries long ago.

Even so, many countries are now eyeing the Dragon Kingdom behind Gem City.

Among them were his two neighbors, who had already signed a joint defense treaty with the Dragon Kingdom.

However, this treaty is now practically worthless. In the past six months, both countries have been mobilizing their armies, and it seems that they have joined forces.

This is normal. The prosperity of Gem City meant that the two nations could practically watch the Dragon Kingdom devour the spoils while they themselves couldn't even get a sip of soup. How could they not be angry and anxious?

The treaty had previously promised to establish small markets for trade in the border regions where their countries shared territory, and Han Chunming had indeed done so.

However, after those trading markets were established, there was almost no foot traffic. People preferred to walk a longer distance to the Gem City to trade rather than trade in those markets.