At the end of July, a fleet of several black-canopied boats linked bow-to-stern traveled from the turbulent, vast river waters upstream through Yuxi River. In the distance, Ruxu Mountain and Qibao Mountain could be seen lying quietly like black dragons on either side of the murky river.

The river valley between the two mountains, though spanning over ten li in width, appeared narrow when viewed from afar, seeming compressed by the mountain forms on either side.

Although Tangyi forces relied on sturdy, fast oared war sailing ships to gain absolute superiority in the deep and wide Chao Lake, before the northern naval camp was completed, the western flank’s naval warships—when not on patrol duty—were mainly anchored at the simple camp south of Dongguan Stockade.

This was to prevent being caught off guard if the Tower Ship Army launched a surprise attack from the waterways on Chao Lake’s northern side.

For normal cargo vessels, however, there was little need to worry about encountering enemy attacks while sailing in the southeastern waters of Chao Lake, so they could directly pass through Ruxu Pass and head straight for their destination.

According to geographical records described by predecessors, in the past when vessels passed the western cliff of Ruxu Pass, they should encounter the vast lake bay at Chao Lake’s southeastern corner. Especially at the end of July, when Chao Lake’s waters were at their most abundant, the silted beaches and low-lying areas beyond the northwestern foothills of Ruxu Pass should all be submerged as Chao Lake’s water level rose, forming an even broader lake area.

However, as the fleet passed the western cliff, Wang Jun—dressed as a man in a green cloth robe with her hair wrapped in a brocade kerchief—stood gracefully at the bow and looked to the right at a new embankment six or seven li away extending almost in a straight line northward.

This long embankment extended north for fifteen or sixteen li before connecting to the slopes at the southwestern foot of Qingcang Mountain, blocking the low-lying land on the embankment’s eastern side—stretching dozens of li from south to north—from the lake waters.

“Young Master, look at that place with rippling waves—before the end of last month, Tangyi forces excavated a water channel on the northern slope of Ruxu Mountain. The water outlet is at that position slightly south of where the new embankment extends.” A middle-aged man in a short front-closure jacket stood at the bow, pointing to a certain spot on the southern side of the new embankment as he spoke to Wang Jun.

To obtain refined iron, medicinal materials, armor, weapons, and warships produced in Xuzhou, Yangzhou also tried to gather as many scarce supplies as possible that Tangyi needed and transport them to Tangyi, Donghu, or Wushou for trade.

First, Yangzhou lacked large ships for massive transport. Second, Wang Wenqian deliberately kept trade with Tangyi fragmented in order to stay promptly informed of developments in Tangyi’s counties.

The middle-aged man Tang Shiyu was a scout leader under Yangzhou’s Military Command Office. Over the past six months, he had led a fleet back and forth to Tangyi’s counties more than ten times and was more familiar than anyone with Tangyi forces’ garrison situation and major construction projects.

Besides Wang Jun’s close attendants and maids, Tang Shiyu was the only person in this fleet who knew her identity.

However, like everyone else, he assumed Wang Jun was bored and had dressed as a man to tour Tangyi for amusement. He somewhat disapproved of this young lady being so willful, completely unaware that Wang Jun had come to arrange her own marriage.

Han Qian’s recruitment of labor force last month to construct water diversion channels and irrigation ditches along the slopes of Ruxu Mountain and Qingcang Mountain on both sides of the new embankment had already attracted great attention from Yangzhou.

Water diversion channels and irrigation ditches were nothing new. Han Qian’s early work regulating Wuliu Creek in Xuzhou had been a similar water conservancy project.

Besides allowing rainwater from between Ruxu Mountains to be promptly discharged directly into Chao Lake outside the new embankment during the rainy season—reducing waterlogging inside the embankment—the water diversion channels also ensured sufficient irrigation water inside the new embankment during autumn and winter. It could be said this was supporting infrastructure for reclaiming farmland inside the new embankment.

Such water conservancy projects typically required a locality to accumulate resources for many years before having the capacity to undertake one.

Tangyi at this time had only over a hundred thousand attached residents. Even if the population doubled, there would be sufficient farmland north of the Chuhe for cultivation. Not only was there no urgent need to construct such complex and costly water conservancy projects, even building a new embankment along Chao Lake’s eastern shore was something that could be postponed for a few years.

However, from the perspective of maintaining stable water flow differentials to facilitate the operation of hydraulic machinery, constructing water reservoirs, diversion weirs, and irrigation channels along the northern and southern slopes of Ruxu Mountain and Qingcang Mountain became extremely important.

Therefore, after Yangzhou noticed this sign, they tended to believe Han Qian intended to abandon Tangyi and focus on developing the Donghu Great Camp.

Using village settlements abandoned by fleeing residents to build garrisons and settle soldiers’ families was much more concentrated near Liyang City, especially on the western side adjacent to Donghu Great Camp, than elsewhere.

Wang Jun very much wanted to have the boat sail directly to the new embankment so she could go ashore and look at the newly built irrigation channels there, but knowing that if she truly proposed this, those around her would make a great fuss trying to dissuade her, she had to first patiently and curiously observe everything along the shore without saying anything.

The fleet continued sailing north parallel to the new embankment.

Outside the embankment were large areas of beaches and low-lying land submerged by lake water, uneven in elevation. Rashly entering, several black-canopied boats in the fleet with deeper drafts would very likely run aground. They had to follow the dry season bay and continue north to a creek mouth now submerged by lake water, then turn east along the deeper creek channel toward the dock built outside the new embankment.

At several key positions, before the lake water rose, watchtowers had been built with logs. At night, oil lamps were lit—if vessels entered Chao Lake after dark, they could follow the guidance of the watchtowers’ giant oil lamps to navigate at night to their destinations without worrying about mooring on beaches where they might more likely be attacked by enemy warships under cover of darkness.

After over an hour, the fleet docked at the designated pier outside the new embankment to unload cargo. Wang Jun, along with her maid Xiang Yun—also disguised as a man—plus two guards disguised as boatmen and the fleet manager, went ashore.

At this point, they could completely see the condition of the new embankment.

The new embankment stood about six chi above the ground on the inner side, yet its top was a full zhang wide. Judging by the slope, the bottom was also fully two zhang wide.

Although river embankments didn’t need to be compacted like city walls, extending north-south for sixteen or seventeen li in total, it was still hard to imagine that in just three or four months after the warfare ended in the third month—without delaying settlement of attached residents—this embankment had been completed before the lake waters rose.

Inside the new embankment were large cotton fields.

By chance, two sailing ships had just docked at the pier before they arrived.

These two sailing ships were now unloading batches of what appeared to be spinning wheel component parts, but Wang Jun noticed these mechanical components didn’t look newly made. They seemed to have been disassembled from somewhere, then transported by ship to Tangyi forces’ Donghu Great Camp.

“These past two months, Xuzhou has concentrated on shipping many used spinning wheel parts over. I heard Xuzhou built hydraulic spinning wheels last year that require far fewer workers but spin much more yarn. Perhaps that’s why they can eliminate some used spinning wheels to send here for use.”

Seeing Wang Jun stare at those two ships with a puzzled expression, Tang Shiyu explained.

“But regrettably, the recruitment review at several newly built textile workshops under Xuzhou’s Manufacturing Bureau’s jurisdiction is extremely strict. What it’s really like inside is still unknown. I was thinking that if Marquis Qianyang also builds hydraulic spinning wheels in Tangyi, it would be more convenient to investigate…”

The military and civilian population now gathered in Tangyi was relatively complex. Besides a small portion from the Left Guangde Army’s old troops, they were mainly refugees who fled south from the shores of Hongze Lake when Shouzhou forces besieged and annihilated the Right Divine Martial Army at Zhongli.

These refugees not only had spies infiltrated from Huaidong, but inevitably also had agents infiltrated from Shouzhou forces—difficult to purge in the short term.

However, Wang Jun was also very curious about what Xuzhou’s newly built hydraulic spinning wheels looked like.

She naturally understood in her heart that Han Qian couldn’t possibly abandon building these new spinning wheels that could operate on a large scale using water power in Tangyi just to guard against possibly infiltrated spies. She thought perhaps somewhere in Tangyi, related workshops were already being built—it was just that Huaidong’s agents hadn’t detected them yet.

Looking at the cotton fields inside the new embankment, it was very clear how enthusiastic and passionate Han Qian was about planting cotton.

The Battle of Puyang River Valley had just ended—they hadn’t even captured Tingzi Mountain, much less Liyang City—when Han Qian couldn’t wait to organize women, youths, and even children to reclaim cotton fields south of the Chuhe.

By mid-March, newly reclaimed cotton fields in Tangyi reached three hundred thousand mu.

Of course, this had a direct relationship with Xuzhou already having a cotton cultivation industry of substantial scale.

Otherwise, how could they obtain seedlings for planting cotton fields on such a large scale all at once?

Although cotton—commonly called “white pile”—had been introduced to the Central Plains since the Qin and Han dynasties, the cultivation scale was extremely limited. Even now, many Central Plains regions still treated it as ornamental flowering plants.

Even though Chen and Xu prefectures had long traditions of growing cotton, weaving cloth, and even paying tribute in cotton cloth to the Central Plains dynasties, in reality before Han Qian, Xuzhou only had a scattered three or four thousand mu of cotton fields, accounting for merely two or three parts per thousand of Xuzhou’s total cultivated area.

It was only after Han Daoxun governed Xuzhou that over several years, cotton fields in Xuzhou and surrounding prefectures rapidly expanded from thousands of mu to three or four hundred thousand mu. When Han Qian governed Xuzhou, counties and townships even made expanding cotton cultivation area an important performance evaluation standard.

Without this foundation, Han Qian would have had no way to immediately transfer two hundred experienced cotton farmers and agricultural instructors from Xuzhou to Tangyi to teach soldiers’ families how to plant cotton fields hand-by-hand.

Even if other families knew all the methods of planting cotton and spinning yarn, to expand cotton cultivation scale they would have to walk the same path Han Qian had walked before—impossible to achieve comparable results in just three to five years.

Han Qian’s large-scale reclamation of cotton fields in Tangyi was even more convenient than reclaiming grain fields. The scale of newly reclaimed cotton fields indeed exceeded the grain land reclaimed in the fourth and fifth months.

In another month, the three hundred thousand mu of cotton fields would enter harvest season, after which cotton ginning, spinning, weaving, and dyeing would necessarily need to be promptly coordinated.

Even if Tangyi transported several thousand manual spinning wheels from Xuzhou, they wouldn’t be enough.

Moreover, the vast majority of women in Tangyi still had no experience in spinning cotton and weaving yarn. Even with a batch of agricultural instructors and experienced textile workers transferred from Xuzhou to provide guidance, it would be extremely slow—they actually lacked the capacity to process such a large yield of cotton seeds and weave it into cloth.

Although Han Qian could also transport harvested cotton seeds to Xuzhou for processing, this wouldn’t fully utilize Tangyi’s slack agricultural labor.

Given Han Qian’s meticulous calculating mindset, Wang Jun speculated he would most likely rush to build several hydraulic textile workshops before winter.

Although when she left Fanchang, the “Textile Production Volume” Han Qian left her didn’t include diagrams or construction methods for hydraulic spinning machines, it was nearly certain that Xuzhou had already built such labor-saving hydraulic machinery. Wang Jun only regretted never having seen it with her own eyes.

These past two years, Wang Jun had experimentally planted five or six hundred mu of cotton fields at the estate at the foot of Shugang Mountain. Though she still followed the diagrams in the “Textile Production Volume” to build manual spinning wheels and looms for slave servants to use in weaving cotton cloth for market sale, she discovered that even with cotton cloth prices reduced to equal those of hemp cloth, the output from one mu of cotton field still far exceeded that of grain fields.

She thought to herself—if the output from Han Qian’s nearly three hundred thousand newly reclaimed cotton fields in Tangyi reached twice that of grain fields, the gap in military maintenance funds could be filled from this by year’s end, couldn’t it?