As we approached the castle, several Cossacks on horseback were patrolling.

One of them held his partner's knees, and his tongue curled and he didn't know what to say. After a few glances at Liu Yu's convoy, he bypassed it from the side and followed it all the way.

It may have swept the beaver fur hat that Liu Yu was wearing on the top of his head, and a Cossack suddenly grabbed a horse, and the horse seemed to grow under his legs, galloping towards Liu Yu.

The horse brushed against Liu Yu's horse, stretched out his hand, snatched Liu Yu's hat in his hand, and ran away diagonally.

Liu Yu blurted out a straight phrase "Sukabule", one of the few Russian he knew, and took out a flintlock pistol from the saddle.

When the Cossack heard the scolding, he looked back and saw Liu Yu holding a gun, but he was not afraid.

Stretched out his right hand towards Liu Yu, inserted his thumb between his index finger and middle finger, and made the most fucked up gesture in Western culture, and his thumb was still moving and poking inside.

The brown-red beard shook and let out a burst of laughter, then leaned on the horse's back, writhing and galloping into the distance.

Du Feng, who was beside Liu Yu, was secretly happy in his heart, and rode out on horseback, relying on his horse to be fast, and he was neck and neck with the Cossack.

Several Cossacks next to him gathered around, but they didn't interfere in the past, but watched the excitement with a smile, and shouted a few words from time to time that Liu Yu couldn't understand.

The Cossack, who was grabbing the hat, heard someone chasing after him, hung his hat in his hand and shook it, and circled the convoy.

Du Feng controlled the horse, and after getting close to the Cossack, he stepped on the stirrup under his feet, suddenly exerted his strength, and sinked his shoulders towards the Cossack.

With a misguided effort, he snatched back his hat, and did not immediately return to the convoy, but turned diagonally elsewhere.

After going around a few times, the Cossack stopped chasing and whistled at Du Feng. A few Cossacks who were watching the excitement next to him were laughing and muttering a lot.

I asked the old man who knew Russian. "What do they say?"

The Rakshasa man said that his horse had just run more than a dozen miles at noon, or he would have chased it back. The rest laughed at him, saying that he must have been born after his mother slept with the juggling Tsgang, and that he was so bad at riding......"

"Damn."

Du Feng, who was in the distance, circled a few times, returned to the formation with his hat, and respectfully returned the hat to Liu Yu.

"Young owner, this is the habit of these Rakshasas. If you have beaten it, they will not reason with you, and those tribes will suffer a lot; If they can't beat it, they'll be honest. The gangsters were too heavy and did not obey the control, and there were also a few households in the Acropolis of Handoli, but because of the uneven distribution of the spoils, they killed the chief and fled. ”

Liu Yu put on his hat, and when he saw that Du Feng was smart and clever, he remembered that he called himself the owner and did not blurt out the adult, and said with a smile: "I lost you just now." ”

"Don't blame the young owner. The caravan was also full of outlaws. When encountering this kind of thing, they are all snatched back, and if they can't get it back, they think they're unlucky, and if they don't grab the other side, it often gets worse. ”

After such a small episode, the Cossacks who were following did not move in this direction again, and some even leaned over and said a few words in unfamiliar Chinese, holding two silver coins in their hands.

"Wine, yes?"

Liu Yu shook his head and told the old man to say only rhubarb and tea leaves, and the Cossack shook his head in disappointment and rode away.

Rhubarb and tea cakes are both run by Russian government and are forbidden to private individuals. The money from these government camps had to be invested in military spending, and the Cossacks neither needed nor wanted to cause too much trouble.

Without the harassment of the Cossacks, the procession soon approached the castle of the Rakshasas.

Liu Yu quietly observed the castle in the distance in the team, looking at it from a distance, if it was a fortress, it was a bit too high-minded.

But if you want to say no, it seems that the protruding multilateral corners and anti-artillery slopes are indeed bastion systems, but they are a low-profile version.

The location of the castle is very good, and you can see that the person who chose the site is very professional. Backed by the Heilongjiang River, the main fort is on a small hillside, and next to it is a supporting auxiliary fort that supports each other's horns.

The trading area was not inside the castle, but in a clearing outside the castle, where there were some wooden houses, and the milky white smoke could be seen in the distance.

The trade zone is still within the control of the fortress, probably for fear of providing cover for the besieging side in the event of a siege, and is slightly farther away.

Next to it is a small river that flows into the Heilongjiang River, and the Rakshasa people diverted the water from the river and built two circles of moat rivers around the castle.

The place between the moat and the river was covered with sticks, all of which were very small.

On the side of the trench near the defender, a low breastwork can be clearly seen, behind which there is a drawbridge leading to the main fort.

The surrounding shooting area is very clean, and there should be a rye field next to it, and you can see the stacks of wheat straw piled up in the field.

There is a small wharf in the Heilongjiang River at the back, and a boat is parked on the wharf. It's not big, it's not small, but it's definitely not Du Feng's so-called "birch bark boat", but like a small boat that can be navigated, and the mast can be clearly seen.

In winter, the ship was pulled to the ice, and it was fixed with wood all around, and it looked new. There is also a blue X-shaped navy flag fluttering on the mast.

It must have been built here by carpenters and boatmen, otherwise there would not have been a sea ship in such a place.

…………

In one of the rooms inside the main fort, logs burned violently in the fireplace, and the heat from the heat drove away the cold outside.

The cross-shaped window lattice is inlaid with some blue-green glass, and the image of the crucifixion has its head bowed, as if observing the three people seated in the room.

These three people are very special, in the sense that none of them are really Russians, but they all have left their names in the history books of Russia.

Abraham Petrovich Hannibal.

Curly black hair, a thick beard that stretches from sideburns to chin, and dark skin like charcoal. Standard blacks.

At the age of twenty-eight, he was already a brigadier general in Russia, and together with the surname Hannibal, he was also given by Peter I, hoping that this righteous son would build up his career like the famous generals who made Rome tremble in ancient times.

Vitas Bering.

Pale ash skin, face densely covered with freckles common to Northern Europeans, Danish.

At the age of forty-five, he will leave an indelible mark on the map of the world, and his name will be like a sword that will split Asia and the Americas.

Bunbei.

It is clear that the Japanese, by this time, had already naturalized the Orthodox Church and changed their name to Gavriel.

A shipwreck more than 20 years ago brought many unpredictable changes to the fate of this Edo merchant. Arriving in St. Petersburg from the bitter cold Kamchatka Peninsula, he founded the first Japanese language school in Russia on the orders of Peter I.

"His Majesty the Emperor ordered me to continue to investigate the mouth of the Amur River (Heilongjiang), and I hope to find a shipping route from the mouth of the Amur River to Japan and start trade with Japan."

"After exploring the Japan route, I will continue to look for a route from Asia to the Americas. His Majesty the Emperor made it clear that, if possible, an accurate map should be drawn up, and the northwestern part of the Americas should be drawn into the empire's territory. ”

Bering's emperor died of illness last year while rescuing sailors who had fallen into the water.

The female emperor who has now come to power does not have a good reputation, and it is rumored that she is a Polish military prostitute and does not have much ambition. However, it was the members of the Boys' Army who had been brothers and sisters to Peter, and Admiral Apraksin made it clear that Bering would continue his expedition.

These years of continuous southern invasion have allowed the Russians to freely use the estuary of the Heilongjiang River and no longer have to set sail from the frozen waters of Okhotsk.

This time, Denbei also had to sail with Bering, trying to find a reliable route to Japan, and at the same time determine whether Sakhalin was an island or a peninsula, and whether it was connected to Japan by land.

"Yes, yes. It would be extremely advantageous to open a trade route from the Amur River to Japan. His Majesty the Emperor had already ordered the carpenters here to build a ship a few years ago. ”

"I hope that while you are exploring the sea routes, you will also be able to survey your counterparts on the Amur River, measure the depth of the water and draw a complete map of the route."

"If it were possible, I would also like you to discover a route from here to the Americas. As you know, there are very few sables and beavers here, and the north of the Americas should have the same expensive and beautiful animals. Without fur, the Cossacks did not want to be in such a place. Without the interest of fur, they prefer to return to Ukraine to farm. ”

Hannibal used a term that was distant in Russian, but was supportive of Bering's expeditions and route mapping.

The ship on the pier outside the castle, which has just been completed this year, can accommodate forty or fifty people for sailing, and reach the Pacific Ocean directly through the Heilongjiang River.

As a close attendant of Peter's side, he was well aware of the current financial situation in Russia, and he understood why these Cossacks had traveled thousands of miles to come here to suffer from the cold.

They don't have any ambition to expand the country, all they do is the fur here.

A full sable can be sold for £3, or an ounce of gold; The price of a full beaver pelt is doubled.

The European beaver is extinct, and the sables and black squirrels in the forests on the shores of Lake Baikal are on the verge of being killed. In recent years, it is rare to see beavers that used to be ubiquitous and dammed everywhere on the banks of the Heilongjiang River.

At one time, it only took a small amount of money to tempt hundreds of Cossacks to throw away their hoes and ploughshares and come here to make a fortune.

And now, the Cossacks are also reluctant to come to such a place, because there are fewer and fewer stories of getting rich overnight, there is no money to be made, why come to such a ghost place?

Isn't the Ukrainian, fertile black soil as fatty meat fragrant? Is the warm wind blowing from the Sea of Azov bad? Why come to this kind of place?

Furs, rhubarb, and tea accounted for more than a third of the revenue of the state treasury in Peter's time, and Peter was able to raise a huge army on the basis of these three things.

If a route could be found to the north of America, where beaver skins, sables, and black squirrels would allow thousands of Cossacks to travel with dreams of making a fortune, and would also increase the income of the treasury.

More importantly, there are Western legends about Japan. It is said that there is Treasure Island, which is full of gold and silver.

Peter, who had worked as a carpenter in the Netherlands, had always been attracted to the Dutch trade in Japan, so when the Cossack fur dealers in Kamchatka found the shipwrecked Bunbei, Peter immediately asked the Bunbei to open a Japanese language school.

Before Peter's death, there was a plan. Sending troops south from Heilongjiang, pushing the border closer to the Chinese capital, forcing China to sign a trade agreement: no more tariffs on rhubarb and tea, no more sales to the Dutch and the Portuguese rhubarb.

If a route from Heilongjiang to Japan can be found, then the cold East should become a trade zone like Arkhangelsk, if not St. Petersburg.

Only in this way, without the temptation of fur profits, can a sufficient population be attracted here. Without a population, this is just a desolate frontier after all.

Although Hannibal was relegated to the court struggle against the courtiers who had installed their mistresses as tsaress, the powerful ministers continued Peter's policies and no one died. He was relegated here because of his superb military engineering skills, and the old people of the "Peter Gang" hoped that he would be able to preside over the construction of a fortress fortress strong enough to serve as a forward base to prepare for future conquests in the south.

The new route from Siberia to the Americas, the trade route from Heilongjiang to Japan, and the new border to the border region of Korea in the south are all mutually reinforcing oriental plans, all of which are indispensable.

Hannibal stood up and looked through the green glass on the window lattice at the new caravans in the trade area in the distance, ambitious.

"In the future, there will be Korean businessmen, Japanese businessmen, and more Chinese businessmen. And here, too, should not be our natural frontier with them. ”

After studying in France for a long time, I opened my mouth with a fantastic word like "natural frontier". Hannibal was convinced that the army, which had only thirty years of war on the opposite side, was vulnerable.