MLMD – Chapter 22 Still Very Poor

Seeing Jia Wenmao coughing nonstop, Yue Yang quickly reached out and patted him on the back for a while, then asked with a laugh, “What’s wrong? Why are you so shocked?”

“Cough, cough, cough…”

Jia Wenmao coughed for a bit longer before finally widening his eyes and saying in astonishment, “Boss, what do you want so many suits of armor and longswords for? Are you trying to start a rebellion?”

“Rebel, my ass!” Yue Yang immediately flicked him hard on the head and scolded with a grin. “If I gave you a thousand suits of armor and told you to go rebel, go ahead and try—see if the government wouldn’t roll up in tanks and mow you down with machine guns!”

After getting smacked on the head, Old Jia finally came to his senses. In this era of hot weapons, even if you wore a hundred layers of armor and wielded the Dragon-Slaying Saber and Heaven-Reliant Sword, you still wouldn’t stand a chance against machine guns and artillery. Embarrassed, he scratched his head and laughed awkwardly. “Well… I was just startled by you, boss. But really, why do you want to make so much armor? And swords are controlled weapons too—if we get investigated, it could be pretty troublesome.”

“What trouble?” Yue Yang waved his hand dismissively. “At worst, we’ll just get fined a bit. Aren’t there tons of merchants selling swords and blades under the banner of ‘crafts’ these days? If they can do it, why can’t we? Don’t you think?”

Jia Wenmao thought about it and realized that was true. These days plenty of people were doing this kind of business. If you didn’t do it, someone else would. Besides, it wasn’t something harmful—just selling to those rich fools with more money than sense. Why couldn’t they do it?

Thinking this through, Jia Wenmao flicked away the cigarette butt he had almost finished smoking, stomped on it hard, and said, “Alright, we’ll take this job. Boss, when do you want to start?”

Without hesitation, Yue Yang replied, “Of course, the sooner the better! Tell me—how long will it take to deliver a thousand suits of armor and a thousand longswords? Oh right, don’t forget the shields too. That way it’s a complete set!”

Jia Wenmao thought for a moment before answering, “Boss, if you really want to do this, we’ll need to reopen molds. That alone will take around ten days to half a month. Add production time, and we can deliver everything in about a month.”

Next came the issue Yue Yang cared about most—the cost. “Old Jia, help me estimate this. If we make a full set of Gothic armor with shield and longsword, how much will it cost per set? If it’s too expensive, that’ll be hard to handle.”

At the mention of cost, Jia Wenmao laughed. “Boss, don’t worry. This stuff doesn’t have much technical content—it’s just heavy, bulky items. Mainly steel, electricity, and labor costs. Once the machine presses it, everything’s solved. It really doesn’t cost much. A full set—armor, shield, and sword—will be under three to four thousand yuan.”

“What? That cheap?” Now it was Yue Yang’s turn to lose his composure. He asked in disbelief, “Old Jia, we can’t make fake junk to fool people. You have to put some care into it.”

Before coming here, Yue Yang had done his homework. In the Ming dynasty, forging a suit of armor was an enormous task—more than ten craftsmen working for ten days or half a month just to finish one set. As for the cost, it went without saying—without dozens of taels of silver, it simply couldn’t be done. And now Jia Wenmao was telling him that even top-tier Gothic plate armor with swords and shields only cost a few thousand yuan to make. How could he not be shocked?

“Boss, what kind of talk is that?” Jia Wenmao was clearly displeased. For a technical person, nothing irritated him more than having his professionalism questioned. “Boss, how am I fooling you? Think about it—once the molds are ready, the machine presses it, and in a few seconds the plate armor is formed. Same with the shields. As for swords, even though heat treatment is a bit more troublesome, with mechanical processing it’s still very fast. Of course the cost won’t be high. Unless you’re planning to make those armors out of titanium alloy or something?”

Even though Jia Wenmao, his subordinate, had just lectured him, Yue Yang wasn’t angry at all. Only then did he remember—this was modern society, not the Ming dynasty. The two were worlds apart. Things that were priceless treasures back then were no big deal at all here.

In his good mood, he casually asked, “By the way, Old Jia, what else can you make? Can you make guns too?”

“Guns?!”

Jia Wenmao stared at Yue Yang with eyes as wide as copper bells for a long while. After a moment, he cautiously said, “Boss, making swords and shields is one thing—the government usually turns a blind eye. But making guns is completely different. That’s life-or-death stuff!”

“I didn’t say modern firearms!” Seeing Jia Wenmao’s face gradually turn pale, Yue Yang quickly reassured him. “I just want to make some antique-style firearms, like muzzle-loaders for show, that kind of thing. There’s a market for those too.”

“But muzzle-loaders are still guns…” Jia Wenmao said with a bitter face. He was finding this new boss more and more incomprehensible. Making armor, shields, and swords was one thing, but now he even wanted to make firearms. Weakly, he continued, “Making guns actually isn’t that hard. The hardest part is the barrel and the rifling inside it. Nowadays, there are four main methods to make barrels: button rifling, broach rifling, electrochemical machining, and cold hammer forging. I don’t recommend button rifling—it’s too outdated and has a high defect rate. Electrochemical machining is used for large-caliber artillery barrels. Cold hammer forging is the most advanced, but our small factory can’t do that. So we’d have to use broach rifling, which is already a very mature method. As long as the barrel is done right, everything else is easy.”

“Oh, I see! So can we do it now?” Hearing that the technical difficulty wasn’t high, someone couldn’t help but feel a bit excited.

“No,” Jia Wenmao shook his head. “We don’t have the machines. To make barrels, we’d need to buy an extrusion machine.”

“How much?” Yue Yang asked immediately.

“About three million.”

“Hmm, that’s still something we need to buy…” Yue Yang pondered for a moment, then shook his head again. No, it wouldn’t work—he simply didn’t have the money right now. Although he had earned eleven million by selling gold, eight million went into buying the factory. Now his card only had the two million left from the last gold sale and the three million remaining from this one—five million in total. But that money still had to be used to buy raw materials, pay workers’ wages, and keep some as working capital to maintain operations. The money he could actually move freely was at most a little over one million—barely a drop in the bucket.

“Sigh… still too poor,” Yue Yang couldn’t help but sigh toward the sky.

Since Yue Yang couldn’t stay at the factory long-term to keep an eye on things, he had no choice but to appoint Jia Wenmao as the factory director, responsible for production and operations. Appointing someone he wasn’t familiar with as factory director was originally a major taboo for a businessman, but Yue Yang had no better option at the moment—he simply lacked talent. This was a choice forced by circumstance. Besides, it was just a small factory worth a few hundred thousand; nothing major would go wrong for now. When the scale expanded in the future, he could hire professional managers to run it.

After instructing Jia Wenmao on a few matters, Yue Yang drove his truck back to the city. Next, he still needed to purchase some essential supplies for the military camp.