Yunqin’s ordinary standard black painted leather armor, despite being considered an extremely normal consumable good, an armor that even the most ordinary border army soldier would be given two to three sets of, a large quantity didn’t mean that the craftsmanship was simple, nor did it represent that it was cheaply priced and lacking in defensive ability.

The leather used to make this black painted leather armor mostly came from Linchuan Black Bulls and Beilong Green Bulls. The leather of these two types of bulls was naturally extremely sturdy. This was especially the case with Beilong Green Bulls, there was always the old expression of ‘Beilong ten bulls wears down a blade’.

Great Mang’s leather production first used smoke to make the leather tough. However, it was comparatively more brittle and it increased the difficulty of later processing, the time it took to make leather armor longer than Yunqin.

Yunqin standard armor was first washed with cold spring water, and then steamed with medicinal material, borrowing the heat to trim it. Then, all of the following processing work would be completed within seven days, since if it exceeded seven days, the leather armor would become too hard from being air-dried, difficult to process then. The bits and pieces that were trimmed off were slowly...