Munitions Empire

Just as Tang Mo finished writing his reply, Galsa excitedly knocked on Tang Mo’s door. Tang Mo had just folded the letter and placed it in an envelope, "Galsa, just in time! Your father has been thinking of you. In Roger’s letter, he asked me to check how you’ve been lately."

"Me? I’m doing quite well," Galsa, clever beyond his years, said to Tang Mo with a grin: "My studies are going great, and recently I’ve been learning swordsmanship from Master Wes."

"Hmm, that’s good. I also mentioned in the letter that you’ve been doing well lately," Tang Mo said, looking at the boy who had once been his young apprentice and noticing that he had grown to about 1.7 meters tall in a year’s time.

The food at Brunas was really good, plumping up the boy who had once been rather scrawny.

"By the way," Tang Mo said as he sealed the letter with his own seal and casually asked Galsa, who had come to see him, "What brings you here?"

Galsa remembered the purpose of his visit and immediately relayed the good news to Tang Mo: "My lord! That plant you wanted... we’ve found it!"

"Hmm? Which plant?" Tang Mo had people collecting seeds of various plants all over, hoping to find methods for hybrid crop cultivation, so he couldn’t immediately recall which exact seeds had been found.

As Tang Mo pondered, Galsa explained: "A merchant ship that came by recently had an old sailor whose hometown grows a plant that, when dried and ground into pieces and set alight, can be inhaled and, once one gets used to the peculiar smell, is said to be very soothing."

"He has that plant?" Tang Mo asked in surprise and then eagerly inquired.

"Plenty?" Tang Mo became even more excited, feeling his craving for tobacco kicking in.

"Yes, in his hometown, many people have the habit of inhaling the smoke from burning this plant. Every time he goes home, he brings back a lot of it and smokes it when bored at sea," Galsa continued, nodding in response to Tang Mo’s questions.

"Did he bring the stuff here?" Tang Mo asked almost without pausing for a second.

Galsa nodded again, "Yes, both the dried leaves and the ground powder are here."

"Bring it to me, let’s have a look! Go on! If it’s what I’ve been looking for, that’d be great," Tang Mo, like a smoker who had finally found a tobacco shop after searching for over a year, felt as though he finally had something to look forward to.

Tang Mo had always been in search of tobacco, a habit for him and also an incredibly lucrative industry.

Someone once joked that if a few billion people smoked a pack each, the country could fund an aircraft carrier. Although it was in jest, it spoke volumes about the profitability of the tobacco and alcohol industry.

Unlike alcohol, which involves grains, the cultivation of tobacco and tea leaves hardly takes up any good farmland, avoiding land conflicts.

Given the not-so-high food self-sufficiency rate at present, tobacco and tea are certainly more worth investing in and promoting over brewing.

Of course, before promoting it, Tang Mo needed it to soothe his own empty and lonely soul.

Soon after, he met with the old sailor and the plant the latter had brought along. As he had guessed, it was tobacco leaves—exactly what he had been longing for.

"I am glad you could offer these. They are precisely what I need," Tang Mo said, nodding as he placed the tobacco and shredded leaves on his office desk and acknowledging the old sailor.

The sailor was surprised, as he had never seen anyone outside his homeland with such an infatuation for these particular plants.

In fact, these foreigners didn’t even know what the plants were called, let alone ask about their effects or uses. Yet the young man in front of him seemed to value these worthless leaves very highly.

"This is your deserved reward," Tang Mo indicated casually, and Galsa, understanding, handed a Gold Coin from his pocket to the sailor.

For a Sailor, a Gold Coin was a substantial reward, so the old Sailor’s face lit up with joy.

"Next time you come here, bring the seeds of this plant! If possible, I also want living plants. Tell your captain I want to buy these from you..." Tang Mo said while skillfully spreading some shredded leaves across a piece of pre-cut white paper, without even looking up.

"One shipload, 500 Gold Coins! Fair and square... Do you understand? Out of the 500 Gold Coins for the whole ship, 200 are yours. I’ll make it clear to your captain... Don’t get any funny ideas, for if you switch ships, you might just end up thrown overboard halfway," said Tang Mo, carefully rolling up the piece of white paper as if he were handling a bar of gold.

"Understood... understood..." the sailor, knowing Tang Mo spoke the truth, swallowed and curbed his greed, nodding in agreement.

"The sea is a great place..." Tang Mo waved his hand to signal the dismissal, and Galsa promptly escorted the old sailor out of Tang Mo’s room.

Continuing to roll cigarettes one by one, Tang Mo didn’t stop until he had used up all the tobacco scraps.

He gathered the hand-rolled cigarettes he had made and treasured them, setting them aside as if they were precious gems.

Then, as if struck by a sudden thought, he pulled out a blank sheet of paper from next to him and began to draw something swiftly.

He was very meticulous and serious about his drawing, even shading in a quick sketch in black and white on the side.

Although his drawing skills were nothing remarkable, the effect he achieved was quite good—after all, he had been a heavy smoker for years, often sketching his own cigarette cases on scraps of paper in his spare time.

Thus, he remembered the object vividly, down to the very last detail inside it.

The metal cigarette case was of a flip-top design, with space inside to hold a row of cigarettes. Tang Mo also had the habit of placing a small knife blade inside, useful for self-defense or unexpected emergencies.

After completing the drawing of the small cigarette case, Tang Mo continued to lean over his desk, starting to sketch out a lighter—lighters were certainly unheard of in this world, but the principle of a lighter is actually quite simple.

For the lighter’s materials, Tang Mo already had kerosene on hand, and flint was not rare either; thus, a simple ignition device would be a piece of cake for his factory to handle.

As for the issue of the lighter’s air-tightness, well... it didn’t actually need to be solved. The most famous ZIPPO lighters in the United States were known for their leaking.

After stacking the hand-rolled cigarettes in a corner of a drawer, Tang Mo headed towards the noisy workshop with the two blueprints.

He handed his drawings to Mathews, who was discussing improvements to the Maxim gun with Parker, and shouted to his key technical team member, the old Dwarf, "Mathews! Take a look at these two items. Can you make them?"

"No problem," the old Dwarf glanced at Tang Mo’s drawing of the cigarette case, dismissively passing that blueprint to Parker, and then looked at the other with the lighter’s design.

Examining the strike wheel and simple airtight structure, the old Dwarf looked back at Tang Mo and said admiringly, "This is very sophisticated! Master! If it had been invented some years earlier, it could have become standard army artillery gear!"

"So you can make it?" Tang Mo wasn’t concerned about how useful the gadget would be to artillerymen right now; he was only interested in when he could have his own ZIPPO lighter.

The old Dwarf set the blueprints aside on the table, speaking with a trace of disdain, "Leave it to me! Master, I roughly understand the purpose of these two items now—one is a simple box that can hold things, and the other is an ignition device. I will make them well for you, don’t worry."

"I’m in a hurry," Tang Mo added another comment.

"Give me no more than two hours, and I will deliver them," Mathews confidently promised.

Soon enough, Tang Mo saw the two items Mathews had brought to his office, and to be honest, he was immediately stunned by their exquisite craftsmanship when he first laid eyes on them.

It was his first time seeing such a beautifully made cigarette case—crafted with metal reliefs that looked incredibly delicate.

Since it was made of two layers of metal, it felt satisfyingly heavy in his hand. The inner box fit precisely with not even the slightest gap, and the outer metal layer had been hammered into an exquisite design with a rough technique, conveying a profound sense of power and beauty.

Tang Mo caressed the twining vines of the embossed design with his fingers, his eyes fixed on the half-visible wolf head at the center of the case, his face full of satisfaction.

As a traditional blacksmith, Mathews’s skill in such artistic design really had reached mastery.

And when Tang Mo saw the ZIPPO lighter, he was even more astonished by Mathews’s sense of aesthetics.

It was also adorned with an embossed design—this time featuring the emblem of the Great Tang Group, Tang Mo’s family crest—the dragon totem.

To be frank, Tang Mo had never imagined that Mathews could make the act of smoking feel so ceremonial. He was extremely fond of the two items, even feeling an almost unreal sense of magic.

He took out the hand-rolled cigarettes from his drawer, placing them one by one into the cigarette case. Meanwhile, Mathews stood quietly by his side, waiting for Tang Mo to change the world once again with his inventions.

After Tang Mo had finished, he held the last cigarette between his fingers, and with a finger from his other hand, he struck the lighter that had just been filled with kerosene.

"Ding!" With a crisp sound, the lighter’s lid flipped open, and the flint made a gratifying scratch noise as it sparked.

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