Li Su asked He Jin for leave on August 7th to delay the date of leaving Beijing.

Because I have to wait for Zhen Yan to go to Beijing in person to discuss marriage with the Zhen family, and it will take at least another five or six days.

Considering that the journey to Sichuan is now long, Li Su estimated that maybe Zhen Yan had already made preparations during the negotiations, such as allowing the Zhen family's business to take the opportunity to enter Shu, and transfer some asset personnel to develop.

As a wealthy merchant family at the end of the Han Dynasty, the Zhen family must have been very well-informed. They knew that the business in Shu County had been very developed in previous years, and the four Shu Confucian sects and other local tribes had long been mixed up and were not allowed to intervene outsiders.

However, the variables caused by Liu Yan caused great damage to the Ren family school, which ranked second among the four major sects. Although Dong Fu's family was treated well by Liu Yan, as long as Liu Bei came in in the future, he would definitely destroy the Dong family of Shu County for instigating the rebellion of the main evil. The four major sects of Shu Confucianism were killed, and the business vacuum and power vacuum that were vacant were very considerable.

More likely, Zhen Yan had already let one or even a few sisters move to Yecheng in advance from Wuji's hometown in advance, so that after the negotiations, he would directly send some sisters to Hanzhong to settle down with the business manager, and buy a property first and live another-

With the Zhen family coming out of the council period in March this year, Zhen Yan's filial and honest position was officially requisitioned. Now he is a grassroots worker in Yecheng and has bought several properties in Yecheng. It is very convenient for his family to move to Yecheng in advance.

Zhen Yan's younger brother Zhen Yao is two years younger than him, only fifteen years old this year, and has not officially become an official. Maybe he will be able to become a clever rabbit in his burrows and go to Liu Bei to become an official.

Yecheng is still relatively close to Luoyang, and the fast horse travels around eight days. But the lady and her family have to take a bus to travel slowly. By this calculation, the person who reported the news arrived at Yecheng for four days, and the return journey slowly took seven or eight days, but it was not around August 25th before everything could be done.

I have been helping Li Su to drag her for a long time.

The next day after taking leave, on the eighth day of the eighth month, before Zhen Yan arrived, Li Su took advantage of the three or four days to help Cai Yong take care of it first.

After all, he and Cai Yong still have a teacher-student relationship, so even if the relationship between father-in-law and son-in-law is kept confidential, it is quite legitimate to help Cai Yong on academic issues and not to be conspicuous.

After traveling to Dongguan and Lantai twice, Li Su also found that it was really difficult to move many things away. The main reason was that there were too many ancient silhouettes and so heavy. There were at least tens of thousands of bamboo slips in Lantai. There were many sets of silhouettes. It was not an exaggeration to say that they were hundreds of thousands of silhouettes.

You should know that in history, when Luoyang was destroyed, Cai Yong's own private collection had 4,000 sets of books and tens of thousands of compilations. Lantai was equivalent to the national library of the Han Dynasty, and it was very easy to have dozens of times larger than Cai Yong's personal collection.

Of course, there are many duplicate contents. For example, the reason why Cai Yong wanted to compile the "Xiping Stone Sutra" was that the Four Books and Five Classics copied by each school had dozens of versions because of the different descriptions. You have to archive these versions in Lantai, but the Taixue Stone Sutra only selected the most authoritative and recognized versions to engrave, while the other versions were left in Lantai for academic research and comparison.

The reason why the story of "Wen Ji Returns to Han" in later generations was mainly because after Cao Cao brought Cai Yan back, he asked her if she could retrieve the lonely ancient books from Cai Yong that year. Cai Yan replied, "My father collected 4,000 sets of lonely ancient books and miscellaneous books, which were scattered and had no place. I only had to recite one tenth of them." Finally, he wrote down the 400 sets of lonely ancient books she had memorized, so that those books could be passed down to the world.

If it weren't for this merit, Cai Yan's other cultural achievements would not be enough to be praised by his subordinate Zhao.

Now that there are so many things that Li Su has to face in such a short time, he has to follow the rules in an emergency and cannot really pay attention to "take away the original works and leave behind the copy".

The five hundred cavalry outside the city, plus the large carts accompanying them, were not enough to transport hundreds of thousands of bamboo slips. Even if they could transport them away, it would be too conspicuous and would be suspected.

Li Su thought to himself: I am just here to preserve cultural content, not cultural relics collection. As long as the content of those isolated books is passed on, as for these bamboos... if they were not buried underground, they would have decayed for hundreds of years.

Even if it is paper, the papermaking technology in the Sui and Tang Dynasties was nothing more than "paper life is only a thousand years". The Li Hou paper he made now, which was improved from Zuobo paper, is even less than that of the Sui and Tang Dynasties rice paper. Therefore, these copied contents will definitely be transcribed in the future.

"It would be better to copy all the words that only exist on the bamboo slips on paper. At least the transportation weight can be reduced by a hundred times. Hundreds of thousands of rolls of paper will not be so conspicuous when taken out.

Having all the contents is considered a great merit. At worst, these bamboos will be remotely controlled to bribe some of the Tai students and disciples who stayed in Luoyang in the future, so that they can find ways to spend money to make money when they encounter great disasters. When Dong Zhuo left, he would definitely steal the tombs of more than a dozen emperors of the Eastern Han Dynasty to loot gold, silver and treasures.

But after the search, there is no need to destroy the tomb building. At that time, Cai Yong's disciples took the risk of asking for trouble and buried the bamboo slips that were to be burned back into the imperial tomb where the property was hollowed out. Then, they would also agree with the excuse of piled up soil to bury the coffins of the previous emperors. Dong Zhuo probably would have agreed - Dong Zhuo just wanted money, not just for the sake of a tyranny. The bamboo slips were really buried in the imperial tomb with good airtightness. Maybe it would be longer than stored outside. Later generations had archaeologists who were destined to find them. If they could not find them, the content was not lost anyway."

Li Su finally decided on the case in this way, asking the people of the Zhen family to arrange and raise personnel according to this idea.

Cai Yong organized thousands of relatively reliable students to copy day and night, and the Zhen family also produced a group of copywriters.

In addition, the Xiping Stone Sutras engraved by Cai Yong two years ago, the Zhen family copied and carved a few of them that were sold and sold for profit. This time, regardless of the cost, they carved all three of the seven classics on the stone sutras, and then transported the wood-carved versions away.

The entire project will be basically completed within half a month, at most twenty days.

After rough calculations, there were about 100,000 scrolls that needed to be copied, and several thousand printed and engraved plates were printed. Cai Yong found that the rest were not repeated. The students who were called to copy books had to copy three or four scrolls a day.

During this process, Li Su also discovered another difficulty in transporting large quantities of scroll books, and wanted to improve it.

However, when he had only thought about it, he encountered some private matters.

...

On the tenth day of August, on the third day after coming to Lantai, Cai Yan suddenly found an opportunity to help his father organize the books he needed to go to Ba County. While there was no one on the left and right, he blocked Li Su in a library, and there was no one on the left and right.

Cai Yan was very disappointed and panicked. He caught Li Su and asked, "Senior Brother, some people outside know the reason for your leave to the general. Do you... do you want to marry Zhen Jiang, or do the General of the Western Conference want to marry Zhen Jiang? You marry Zhen Tuo? Because your engagement with me cannot be made public, so you want..."

Li Su felt warm in her heart, and hugged the girl to comfort her: "What do you think? It has nothing to do with me. It's the matter between General Guan and General Guan and General Zhang. I'm just a matchmaker."

Cai Yan's eyes flashed and he was a little wet: "You are a 21-year-old general and you are about to add another county magistrate, but you have always claimed that you have not been engaged. If the Zhen family wants to marry, they are willing to let you go?"

Li Su scraped Cai Yan's nose: "That's because I completely resolved the Zhen family's show of goodwill. Only three sisters in his family are almost as old as they can get married. I have arranged it clearly. They no longer have a sister of the right age, so of course there is nothing they can do."

Cai Yan stared at Li Su for a long time, carefully pondered Li Su's eyes, and gradually shed tears. I believe what he said was true: "Senior brother, you are so nice to me, but I can't be your good wife, and I can't help you recently.

What are you doing these two days? Let me help you. As the noble person of your identity, you don’t have to copy it yourself... Besides, your handwriting is still the same, and no one will believe it if you say it."

As he spoke, Cai Yan's expression became lively again, as if he had completely escaped the worries and subsequent touches. It can only be said that the fifteen-year-old girl's emotions fluctuated quickly and was very popular in three minutes.

Li Su said, took some paper rolls and signaled the girl to show his work he had been busy these two days:

"I have been thinking about the past two days that I have to transport more than 100,000 scrolls to other places. It is very difficult. I wonder if I can change the book to the loading method, remove the handle of the scroll and stack it directly, so that I don't have to roll it in a circle. When stored in the box, it takes up several times the space, and it is not easy to be conspicuous."

It turned out that because woodblock printing has only appeared for two years, the shape of books in this era has not yet completely emerged from the evolutionary inertia of old-fashioned bamboo slips. The Zhen family and all other booksellers sold books like the calligraphy and paintings of famous people in later generations, with a long scroll with two shaft handles at both ends. If the scrolling is rushed and rolled very fluffy, it will take up even more space.

You can imagine how much space a famous painting should take up if it is rolled up, how many spaces there will be in the middle, and if it is folded or even formed into a thread-bound book, the volume will definitely be several times smaller.

This indicator is not important in normal times, but since Li Su tried to transport so many books as low as possible, the volume suddenly became important. Because after changing to a thread-bound book, assuming that one box was transported out, there could only be two hundred scrolls in it, but now it might be five hundred books. In the eyes of the generals and soldiers in the capital who guarded Lantai and Dongguan, and even when leaving the city gate, they would be underestimated several times.

Li Su discussed with Cai Yan: "Junior sister, do you know how to needle and thread? If you know, let's try cutting this book into narrow pages one foot wide. The original eight-foot long scroll turned into eight pages, add a page of the cover in front, and then sew it with needle and thread."

Although Cai Yan is a literary young woman, well-behaved girls know how to do needlework. Of course, she can do it. After listening to her senior brother's advice, she thought it was fun and meaningful, so she helped cut and sew a book.

However, she was not satisfied with the sewing and suggested: "Since it has been cut, it is still so thin that it is in your hand. It's awkward. This is the first volume of the Analects of Confucius, with more than 3,000 words and divided into eight pages. There are four volumes in the Analects of Confucius. Since you have to cut it, then sew the four volumes of the Analects of Confucius together.

"Mencius" was originally an eleven-foot long scroll, cut into eighty-eight pages per foot, and the thickness was just right. "Zuo Zhuan" had 200,000 words, sixty-seventy-seventy-and-sixty-page, and six hundred pages, but it was too thick to sew together, and it was divided into six books, and each book should not exceed one hundred pages."

Li Su had just thought about this and didn't think about it deeper. Seeing that his fiancée was careful, he was of course good at doing things. The couple was in the same library, and the single man and widowed woman invented the binding model of thread-bound books.

After sewing a few samples, Cai Yan also felt that Li Su's idea was a bit of a rubber column, and put forward two improvement suggestions:

"Senior Brother, "Miscellaneous Notes of Xijing" and other short books are only a few thousand words, and it is too thin to make it into a binding. It takes too much effort to sew hands and feet, and it is not good to sew with other books. I think it is not necessary to bind it if you want to remove the shaft handle to save space. I don't have to bind it. Isn't it convenient for us to fold it directly and seal it?

Also, even if those long scrolls are sewn, there is no need to cut them. After cutting, each piece of paper will turn over and have characters on the front, and the back will only seep ink stains, which will make it ugly. It is better to fold them directly and sew the backs of the two pages together and not tear them apart. This will also reduce the number of times readers turn the books half, and there are characters on the front and back."

Cai Yan's two inspirational ideas also surprised Li Su.

He then realized that he had preconceived ideas, because later books were printed on both sides, so they had to be sewn into thread-bound books, of course they had to be cut.

But now there is only one-sided printing and one-sided copying technology. The back of the paper does not need to be exposed, so isn't it enough to just fold and sew it?

As for those books that are too thin, they are stored directly without sewing, just like butterfly-clothed booklets. People who have been married in later generations should be familiar with those who have given wedding invitations, which are folded and can be opened like an accordion.

Sure enough, when it comes to making handmade gadgets, girls are more skillful. At best, Li Su only provides some ideas of foresight, and Cai Yan thinks more beautiful and practical than him.

Butterfly binding books, folding page books... were all invented in this library in Lantai, the National Library of the Han Dynasty.

The couple sewed, cut and folded books together, and tinkered with the craftsmanship of the cultural industry. They were in a good mood. They didn't know that time passed, but they just felt that they had a good understanding of each other and had a common language.

While fiddling, whenever there was a new idea, Li Su would find Zhang Liang, the manager of the Zhen family business, and ask him to dispatch craftsmen to carry out these rough work in the production process. Li Su and Cai Yan gave them samples to teach them how to do it, so that the craftsmen could punch holes in batches, bind and sew, cut and seal.

"It's so happy to be able to work with my senior brother to help the literati in the world. I didn't expect that I would have such a useful day, and I look forward to the days after I arrived in Bajun." Cai Yan's heart was filled with sweet fantasies.

Good days always pass quickly. Three days later, Zhen Yan arrived in Luoyang and formally talked with Li Su about the large-scale marriage between the Zhen family and Liu Bei's camp.

Anyway, the Zhen family has many daughters, and Zhen Yan accepted all the conditions as Li Su expected, and prepared to send them to Hanzhong as part of the property that disguised as dowry.

At the same time, Li Su promised to let his second brother Zhen Yao be a free chief clerk by Liu Bei's side to learn first (Liu Bei will have a chief clerk in different places, otherwise there would be only one newbie as a chief clerk and would not do anything, which would be a misleading matter. Zhen Yao could be the chief clerk with another disciple of Zheng Xuan)

After the negotiation was completed, Zhen Yan arranged to pick up his sisters from Yecheng. Around the time when Zhen Yan's messenger returned to Yecheng and the young ladies of the Zhen family were about to set off from Yecheng, several more news came from Luoyang.

"Dong Zhuo's army finally left Hongnong County and entered Henan Yin! Hangu Pass, one of the eight passes in Luoyang, has passed!"

"I heard that the general seemed to be soft-hearted and had some regrets before. He sent the new Shizhong Zhong Shao to stop Dong Zhuo from stopping and was not allowed to cross Mianchi. Now that he has passed Hangu Pass, Mianchi has been left behind for a long time. It seems that Dong Zhuo dares to disobey his orders!"

"Fortunately, the general sent the Zhong Shizhong to scold Dong Zhuo for the second time. This time he asked him to stop in Gucheng County, forty miles away from Luoyang. I don't know if Dong Zhuo dared to resist the order again."

Everyone in the capital was nervous.

——

PS: There will be three updates today.

After thinking about it, under the three free update conditions that day, I would add one more: the days when there are emotional scenes, the third update will be added free of charge. Because emotional scenes are more serious than background farming, wars and fights, and the side plots are more helpful to the main line.
Chapter completed!