Warring States Survival Guide
Chapter 74 - 45: She has waited for this day for such a long, long time!

Chapter 74: Chapter 45: She has waited for this day for such a long, long time!

After meeting Oda Nobunaga, Harano felt that long-term survival in Owari Province was no longer a problem for him. After all, he had gained prestige, self-defense skills, bodyguards, and had met both the Hosokawa Family and Oda Danjo Chonosuke, the two major lords—there was nothing left that could threaten his personal safety.

Of course, if something like a meteorite suddenly fell from the sky and killed him, that would count as force majeure and have nothing to do with personal effort; he’d just have to accept it.

So as long as he didn’t get killed by a meteorite, his survival problem was basically solved—ahead of schedule by quite a lot. Suddenly, he actually felt a little lost. For a moment, he didn’t even know what he should be doing, feeling a bit empty inside.

He couldn’t help but start calculating what else needed to be done urgently—maybe it was time to begin his living-improvement plan ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, Ah Man had already switched into energetic mode—Oda Nobunaga had just tossed over the matchlock, but things like bullets, matchcord, ignition powder, and gunpowder were all missing. If she wanted to use the matchlock and eventually master the "All Living Beings Equal Cannon," she still needed to gather all this equipment.

She was really good with her hands, and once she decided to do something, she got right to work—immediately roping the Momoi brothers into scraping some soil nitrate from the latrine, running out herself to ask the villagers for stuff, and coming back with some ceramic jars, fine hemp rope, castor oil, and black vinegar. She didn’t stop for a second, stripping rope into threads and soaking them separately in black vinegar laced with soil nitrate and in castor oil.

"You even know how to twist matchcord?" Harano watched her bustling in and out, filling the room with strange smells and totally disrupting his train of thought. He couldn’t resist coming over to take a look.

"Of course!" Ah Man said proudly. After soaking the hemp threads seven or eight hours before twisting, they turned into matchcord—each foot could burn slowly for about an hour, perfect for use with a matchlock—she’d been dreaming of mastering the "All Living Beings Equal Cannon" for ages, and all the technical details were already clear to her. She just couldn’t afford a matchlock before. Now that she could hand-make some expendables, it was just like a dung beetle rolling a ball of poop—completely natural!

Harano wasn’t too surprised. After all, this wasn’t exactly cutting-edge tech. But his engineering side started acting up again; after two glances, he began pointing things out, trying to improve the process. "You should purify the soil nitrate first and filter the black vinegar—that way you wouldn’t need castor oil, and you could cut down the soaking time or even soak everything together. The result would be better than what you’re doing now."

"As long as it works, who cares!" Ah Man ignored him, finished soaking the hemp threads, and rushed out again.

She had black gunpowder, took a little out, added some sulfur powder to it, and that was her fast-burning primer—and as for the sulfur powder, Harano had plenty in his pharmacy, since he sometimes used it to smoke-dry medicinal herbs. Taking a bit for her use was no problem. The trickier issue was the lead for making bullets—she’d have to go out and search for that.

Oh, and she still needed to make "Early Union Bottles," so she had to fetch some bamboo, too. In any case, she was super busy—no time to waste chatting with Harano.

She’d waited for this day, far, far too long!

......

Ah Man was really capable, and her execution skills were top-notch. After tinkering with things for most of the day, by the afternoon of the next, she’d managed to gather all the ingredients needed to fire the matchlock. She dove right in, ready to practice her "All Living Beings Equal Cannon."

Harano had to admit, he was impressed. Honestly, even if you handed an eleven- or twelve-year-old kid from modern times this stuff, they wouldn’t be half as resourceful as she was.

Of course, to prevent her from accidentally shooting a villager and ruining their reputations, Harano had to stop her from just firing a couple rounds in the courtyard—seriously, people in this era had absolutely zero sense of safety, it was unreal—so he made her leave the village and they hiked out some distance to practice instead, to avoid disturbing the peace or terrifying the local chickens into not laying eggs.

Aqing, Yayoi, and the Momoi brothers were also super curious—matchlocks were still a huge novelty in Owari at that time, so they tagged along to enjoy the show.

Once they were far from the village, Ah Man picked out her target—a small stand of trees some thirty paces away.

She stared at it silently for a moment, ran through the steps in her mind, then pulled out a sharp-tipped bamboo tube, planning to pour the primer powder into the match pan. But she hesitated, realizing this matchlock seemed off compared to the intel she’d scraped together before—maybe she should’ve loaded the main charge first...

"You sure you know what you’re doing?" Harano came over for a look, worried she might mess up and blow herself sky-high.

"I should be good, let me think—I’ll definitely get it to fire today!" Ah Man said this, but her face was still hesitant. In the past, she’d been obsessed with these powerful, advanced weapons, always circling around the topic, squeezing people for any tidbit of info she could get. But she’d never had a chance to actually try one herself, and now this matchlock’s design didn’t quite match any of the info she’d collected, so she felt a bit lost.

"Let me handle it!" Harano had never played with a matchlock himself, and he was itching to try, so before he knew it, he’d taken the matchlock from her to fire off a shot himself.

Ah Man didn’t object; after all, Harano was the so-called "matchlock expert." She figured she could just learn by watching first anyway, so even before practice began, the roles switched—now Harano was doing the hands-on work, and Ah Man watched him carefully from the side.

Harano looked carefully over the shoddy matchlock and became even more convinced it was a knockoff of a knockoff—a piece copied and slightly modified over multiple generations, with each iteration scrapped some more details, or maybe, if you wanted to think the worst, someone teaching others had purposely left out info, and now what was left was this fake matchlock missing its cover.

No one could tell which idiot had modified it during the process—for the sake of saving a bit of iron, they’d removed the match pan cover. If you loaded the primer first and then tilted the gun up to load the main charge, half the primer would spill out. Even if you loaded the primer afterward, with no cover in place, if your match wasn’t top-notch and sprayed sparks, it could accidentally go off early—basically turning it into an "automatic weapon," letting you skip even pulling the trigger.