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One moment, Huang Yueying was so bashful she could hardly bear it. The very next moment, she had flung off Fei Qian's hand and gone bounding off into the distance...
This... was somewhat awkward, to say the least.
But it was not long before Huang Yueying came back, dragging something that looked rather heavy. With a resounding clang, she set it down right in front of Fei Qian. It was, of all things, a crossbow!
Fei Qian blinked. He looked down at the crossbow on the ground, then looked up at Huang Yueying. He could scarcely believe it. Could it be that she had made this crossbow all by herself?
Huang Yueying wore a hint of smug satisfaction. Her large eyes sparkled entirely with a single, radiant message: "Praise me, see how amazing I am"...
Fei Qian picked the crossbow up from the floor, turned it over in his hands to examine it from left and right, and hefted its weight. It was by no means light. A structure of wood and bronze, even without a bolt loaded, one could bludgeon a person's head into a mass of lumps with the thing alone.
Perhaps owing to the inheritance of Mohist craftsmanship, the Huang family had preserved much of the concrete knowledge concerning crossbow manufacturing—details like the graduated markings on the sighting mechanism. Without a vast amount of practical, hands-on experience, such a thing was utterly impossible to achieve. It was the same principle as the heavy bed-crossbows installed at Beiqu; only by using windlasses to draw the string and graduated sights to measure the distance could they achieve any real degree of accuracy.
Of course, the crossbow Fei Qian currently held in his hands was an ordinary one, what was known as a "tread-drawn crossbow." This was, in fact, the direct predecessor of the heavier "foot-drawn crossbow," and required slightly less strength to operate.
"You made this? It's really quite well made..." Fei Qian remarked.
Huang Yueying narrowed her large, smiling eyes and tilted her small chin upward slightly. "After I received husband's letter, I started working on it right away... I also made an even larger one, only... well, I can't draw it myself..."
Fei Qian's interest was piqued. Rising, he carried the crossbow out to the open ground in the rear courtyard, ready to test whether there was any difference between this Huang family trigger mechanism and those used in the military.
Modou came chasing after them, a string of flustered cries on her lips, still clutching Fei Qian's outer robe in her hands...
Well, this was... Fei Qian broke out in a cold sweat. Thankfully, they were in the rear courtyard...
Bows and crossbows had always been the long-range strike weapons of the Central Plains armies. Since the Qin and Han dynasties, there had been those drawn by hand and those braced with the foot. As for monstrous contrivances like the bed-crossbows, they required three to five men, or even animal power, to winch back the prod. Their power was roughly equivalent to cannons firing solid shot, but they did not fall into the category of individual weapons, nor could they be deployed in sudden field battles; they were used primarily for attacking and defending walled cities.
Individual crossbows, under normal circumstances, far surpassed ordinary bows in terms of accuracy, range, and lethality. According to what Fei Qian had come to understand within the military, the draw weight of an average bow used by a common soldier was around one shi, roughly equivalent to sixty kilograms. A weak bow of eight dou was generally used by women or children. Strong bows varied from person to person; Huang Xu's customary bow, for instance, likely had a draw weight of three to four shi.
But for crossbows, the minimum starting point was one shi, increasing incrementally. What was normally used in the army as the standard belt-drawn crossbow fell roughly in the one to two shi range. Anything at three shi or above was basically drawn with the feet. The most powerful was the ten-shi "Great Yellow Crossbow"—the very type Li Guang had used in the army to successively snipe the leading officers of the Xiongnu. Under ordinary circumstances, it required two men to span it.
Fei Qian put on his outer robe and, with his hair still loose and disheveled, took up the crossbow. He attempted to draw it, and finding the resistance not too great, hooked the string onto the bronze trigger nut.
Huang Yueying conveniently handed him a crossbow bolt and then pointed to a large tree near the rear courtyard wall. "Shoot at that tree! I often shoot at it too. There's a big wooden burl right in the middle of the trunk!"
Fei Qian cast a glance at this slip of a yellow-haired girl. It seemed her daily life was somewhat... out of the ordinary...
Never mind that.
Fei Qian pressed the bolt into the flight groove, raised the crossbow, and aimed for a moment. Then, he slowly pressed down on the crossbow's trigger, known as the "hanging blade."
This was one of the great advantages of the crossbow: it provided a stable aiming window. If one were holding a fully drawn bow, the arrow had to be released within an extremely short time, otherwise it would place an immense strain on both the bow itself and the archer's body.
With a sharp "thwack," the bolt flew out smooth and steady. In the blink of an eye, it struck the unfortunate tree. However, it did not, as Fei Qian had wished, hit the wooden burl itself, but landed roughly three to five centimeters below it.
The Huang family's crossbow—or rather, the crossbow made by Huang Yueying—was still exceptionally accurate.
The wood seemed to be jujube. The bronze alloy—he could not tell its exact proportions—had a somewhat dark, dusky cast to it. Upon the trigger blade, there were even some fine engraved lines. A closer look revealed the pattern to be a flower in full bloom. This...
Well, fine. It had, after all, been crafted by a young woman.
During his time in the military, Fei Qian had come to understand a great deal. There were many reasons for the crossbow's gradual retreat from the battlefield, and one rather cruel reason was that... people were cheap.
In the Han people's long-standing conflict with the Xiongnu, the barbarians' armor had never progressed much; it was almost as good as nonexistent. Therefore, there was simply no great need for more powerful, armor-piercing long-range weaponry. The more conveniently carried ordinary bow and arrow were perfectly adequate for the task.
Against fast-moving mounted targets, high-volume, high-rate-of-fire volleys were clearly far more lethal than the slower-firing crossbow.
What was more, crossbows cost significantly more money...
Thus, within the military, bows had gradually become the primary weapon, with crossbows playing a supporting role. It was even common for units to be armed entirely with bows.
But Fei Qian wanted to use crossbows once again.
Because the wars to come on this land would no longer be primarily against the barbarians, but conflicts against their own kind.
Infantry battles would account for the vast majority of engagements. And against the dense formations of shield-bearing axemen and swordsmen arrayed on the front lines, ordinary bows were, for the most part, pitifully ineffective.
But if they were replaced with powerful crossbows...
Fei Qian had conducted experiments. A four-shi bow, at a range of fifty paces, could penetrate seven layers of ordinary leather armor, or even three layers of lamellar armor. Beyond a hundred paces, the decay was more severe; it could only penetrate three layers of leather armor and a single layer of lamellar.
But the most basic foot-drawn crossbow started at four shi. If one were to use a six-shi foot-drawn crossbow, then within a hundred paces, no piece of standard military equipment—be it armor or shield—could withstand the shot...
Unless it was a specially constructed great shield.
But a specially constructed great shield would naturally be of a specially heavy weight. In the vast majority of situations, it could only be used for defense; mounting an offensive with it was a vastly more difficult proposition.
A crossbow formation, with a solid defensive position, could render an enemy force several times its size completely helpless. Moreover, even the slower-firing crossbow, when employed well, could leave cavalry utterly frustrated and impotent.
Fei Qian's teacher, Cai Yong, had once spoken of a Han general who had surrendered to the Xiongnu—Li Ling. Using a wagon-fort formation with only five thousand troops, he had held off over a hundred thousand Xiongnu. He had doggedly held on until every last crossbow bolt was spent, and only then was he forced to surrender.
In that campaign commanded by Li Ling, through over ten days of high-intensity combat against a hundred thousand Xiongnu riders, the Xiongnu cavalry had never once managed to break through his position. Aside from the factor of command, this likewise demonstrated the critical importance of the crossbow.
Now, for Fei Qian, if he wished to place the crossbow back onto the battlefield as a weapon, there were two urgent problems that stood before him demanding a solution. One was the rate of fire, and the other was cost control...
And this was precisely the reason Fei Qian had deliberately taken the risk, making a detour to the Jing-Xiang region, hoping to leverage the strength of the Huang family.
Of course, there were also some other reasons.