The recovery of other counties in Liaodong was progressing as smoothly as Li Su had imagined.

After the work of reassuring the people in Changli City was completed and the city was repaired. In just three or five days, Guan Yu and Zhao Yun's cavalry went out in all directions, staking their land, and recovering the three county towns of Fuli, Bintu, and Wuxian under the rule of the imperial court.

These small counties were either in a state of anarchy, or there were only a few hundred rebel soldiers stationed in them, and they did not dare to resist at all, and the imperial army surrendered as soon as they came there.

On the seventh day of the fourth month, after discussing the specific implementation of cash-for-work with Lu Su in Changli, Li Su rushed to Tuhe County, the last stronghold of the rebels in Liaodong.

The nominal supreme governor of Tuhe County is still a servant of the Wusu Tribe.

However, because of his 2,000 cavalry, he was transferred by the King of Nanqiao and was defeated by Guan Yu in the Battle of the Moon Array by the Xiaoyushui River. Therefore, the servants actually don't have much say in the defense of Tuhe County now.

Before Li Su arrived, Zhang Fei had gathered most of the infantry in Liu Bei's army to besiege the city, and it was surrounded on all sides, leaving no way to break through.

He also used a well to suppress and release arrows against the city to demonstrate the strength of the Han army in attacking the city, so that the rebels knew that "even if they fight to the death, the Han army can play a very beautiful exchange ratio, and a Han soldier can kill at least several rebels."

After Li Su came, he asked the soldiers to use long poles to carry the king of Nanqiao, the uncle and nephew of Nanlou, plus the head of the puppet military advisor Yan Rou, and scolded and hit the morale of the rebels.

convince the rebels that they have no foreign aid and that Liu Bei has completely controlled the situation in Changli; And Zhang Chunyuan was in Xiangping, and he had no intention of saving them.

After shouting like this for two days, Li Su shot a bunch of arrow books into the city in the evening, and it was nothing more than saying

"All Han officers and soldiers who send the heads of black servants to offer their heads will not be blamed for the past, and they can maintain their original establishment and not be dispersed and incorporated into the official army. At the same time, the officer himself may be formally appointed by the imperial court and conferred the post of county lieutenant or county lieutenant on the spot. ”

After these letters were shot into the city, of course, a considerable part of them were handed over to the black servants themselves by the hardcore henchmen of the Hu people at the first time, and the black servants were shocked after reading them, and immediately searched sternly and demanded that the front-line officers and soldiers hand over all the Han army surrender letters.

However, because there were dozens of letters that were shot, it was inevitable that there would be mistakes and omissions during the seizure, and the servants were nervous and suspicious, and it was inevitable that they had wronged one or two soldiers who obviously did not hide the letters.

One of the Han chiefs also got the letter at first and read it, but after reading it, he felt that this thing would shake morale, so he took the initiative to throw it under the city as soon as possible.

As a result, when the servant came to search and confront him, he said that someone next to him had reported that the tun chief had indeed taken a letter of persuasion and forced him to call out. The chief said that the letter had been lost, but the servant thought that he was lying, but in fact he was trying to plot against himself.

As soon as he was nervous, there was a misfire, and the black servant ordered the Hu soldiers around him to behead the Han commander and show it to the public and suppress military discipline.

This time the powder keg was ignited, and the Han officers and soldiers were already quite dissatisfied with the black servants, and they felt that there was no way to survive against the imperial court, so there was a mutiny that night.

The more than 4,000 Han soldiers in the city didn't know who organized it, anyway, it was one of them who took the lead in attacking the camp of the Hu people in Wufu and slashed and killed them.

When the other Han soldiers heard the shouts, they blew up the camp like flies, and they had the courage to follow behind to kill people, and some went to open the city gate to welcome the imperial army in.

A night of chaos has accumulated more than a thousand people hacked to death.

Among them, seven or eight hundred were the hardcore Hu soldiers around the black servants, and the Han people who were in the fire also died two or three hundred. There were also hundreds of innocent people in the city, who were killed in the chaos by both sides.

When Zhang Fei entered the city with soldiers and horses, he was almost bloodless.

"Boya, you are still powerful, although this Tuhe County will be able to attack sooner or later. But it was easy to take it like this by relying on the enemy's infighting, and there were still a lot of fewer deaths. ”

Zhang Fei was proud, but at the same time, he couldn't help but sigh with emotion.

"What's this, the good fighter is good at using power. Our army came with the righteousness of the imperial court, and destroyed the main force of Chief Hu with a thunderous offensive, and the remaining Han soldiers could have been shaken and fought for. If it weren't for the difficult tricks of Uncle Wang's nephew on Changli's side, it wouldn't be so easy here. ”

Li Su did not take credit for it, and said that Guan Yu and Zhao Yun fought well in the main frontal battlefield to create excellent external conditions.

Zhang Fei sighed: "That's it, this time the eldest brother asked me to garrison the Tunliang Water Village and monitor the side of the Tuhe River, but I didn't get much opportunity to fight, the second brother and Zilong will both make meritorious contributions, and Zilong will rise higher than me if he goes down." ”

Li Su laughed and patted Zhang Fei on the shoulder: "Is the official position of the imperial court so important?" The key is who the big brother trusts more. The army has not moved, the grain and grass go first, and the land and grain road to protect the grain are not easy to shine, but they are not the most trusted people, how can they receive it? It's also about making you grind patience. ”

The two of them cleaned up the city, counted and reorganized the soldiers, and the matter here was over.

……

In the rest of April, the duo of Lu Su and Tian Chou continued to deepen the post-war work of Qi Min's household arrangement, Tuntian land reclamation, and work for relief, and became the busiest people in Liu Bei's army.

Mi Zhu also increased his horsepower and sent all the fleets of the Mi family to transport grain from Liaodong Bay to continue to provide support for Liu Bei's great cause.

Of course, Mi Zhu could not work in vain, and in the process of transporting grain, he sold some of the horses captured in the Liaodong battlefield to the south to subsidize the military expenses of buying a large army to fight.

However, because there are too many horses that suddenly poured out, there is no war in the southern market now, and as a result, the horse prices in Xuzhou and Yangzhou have fallen, and they are only two or three percent higher than Qingzhou. The business will soon become unprofitable in the second half of the year.

At that time, Liu Bei could only sell the extra horses to the Zhen family in Zhongshan, because only the Zhen family mastered the trade route relationship of selling Liaodong horses to Luoyang.

Although Luoyang has now built the Xiyuan New Army, Jian Shuo, Yuan Shao, Cao Cao and others have just changed their new official positions in March this year and have become the eighth lieutenant of Xiyuan. However, there is still a small gap in the cavalry horses needed by the Xiyuan Army, and it can swallow thousands of horses and thousands of shipments from Liu Bei's side.

Because Mi Zhu actually assumed the role of the "water master" of the imperial court at his own expense, he also made a great contribution to ensuring the logistics of the army in the battle.

Liu Bei naturally did not hesitate to show Mi Zhu's merits in various recitals to the imperial court and documents to Liu Yu.

Before the battle of Liaodong, Mi Zhu had already had an official body of more than 600 stones because of sponsorship funds, and this time he was exceptionally promoted to the false title of Liaodong Juncheng.

Mi Zhu was not afraid of losing his reputation as a buyer, so he was generous and clearly marked the price, and asked his family to go to Luoyang to make up for the difference of several millions, and then took office in peace. It's just that he doesn't care about the actual civil affairs work, and continues to be his logistics captain, and the government affairs will be handed over to Lu Su to help him.

Mi Zhu also gave Lu Su an extra salary very generously, which is equivalent to Lu Su taking two Yu Lu in office: one from the imperial court and one overtime pay from Mi Zhu.

Fortunately, with the support of Mi Zhu, Lu Su's "cash-for-work" was very fortunate to be successfully implemented - cash-for-work is really when it comes to operation, it is still very cumbersome, mainly because it is necessary to consider the supply and demand relationship in the labor market and set a reasonable wage price, so as to ensure that the number of people who come to work will not be too much, and the government's money and food can sustain it.

The first time Lu Su did it, he had little experience, and set the wage at the same rate as in previous years: each person was in charge of food every day, and there were two extra liters of coarse grain to take back to subsidize the family.

This salary would certainly not make people go crazy in a normal year, but last year was the year of the catastrophe, and there were too many strong laborers who had no food to eat, and as a result, there was a surplus of people who applied for the recruitment all of a sudden, and it was not necessary to repair the city wall and repair some of the mansions in Changli City. I had to start the work of repairing the irrigation canals along the rivers in Chongqing, so that I could barely absorb so much labor.

Because the most fearful thing about cash-for-work is that after the news is released, hungry people come over only to find that there is no work to do and no people are accepted, which can easily cause chaos and civil unrest. It has to come as much as you want to arrange it in order to maintain stability.

It is necessary to raise these tens of thousands of people who are working for relief until the autumn harvest, and as a result, if the accounts are calculated, if the wages are lower and the scale is smaller, at least 10 million or 20 million yuan can be saved.

It is equivalent to this pilot of Lu Su and Tian Chou, and Liu Bei lost one or two hundred million - he had been the county magistrate of Jixian County for more than half a year, and he was not familiar with money and food government affairs, and Lu Su only lost a few million, and now he has expanded from being in charge of the civil affairs of a county to a county, and the deficit is directly tens of millions.

Lu Su was very guilty and asked Liu Bei to admit his mistakes and repent. Liu Bei just looked at the accounts and confirmed that Lu Su was not greedy, but because he had no experience and mismanagement, he didn't blame him, and said very generously:

"Zijing, it's normal to do it badly for the first time, write down the experience of managing work-for-relief, revising wages, and publicizing and recruiting manpower, and I'll take a look at it with Boya, or as a teacher for the future, this matter will pass."

Lu Su was very grateful and said that he would definitely sum up the lessons learned and think that he would be a teacher for the future.

Lu Su's internal affairs experience can be said to be fed by Li Su's occasional whimsical new ideas and Liu Bei's bold atmosphere of losing money casually. After two years as an internal affairs officer, he lost a total of 20 million dollars.

However, in the process, the county seat of Changli was also renovated, and many irrigation canals were also repaired, and the watersheds between the two rivers were all reorganized into fertile tuntian.

At the same time, for the rest of April, Guan, Zhang, Zhao, and Zhou were not idle on the frontal battlefield, and successively recovered the last county seat of the Liaodong vassal state that had originally fallen into the hands of the enemy.

He also crossed the mouth of the Liaohe River and penetrated deep into the southern part of Liaodong County, which was controlled by Zhang Chun, and recovered Fangxian, Wenxian, Pingguo, and all the way to Yushi County, all of which were on the Liaodong Peninsula, and from Xiangping to the south through the mountainous areas of the Liaodong Mountains, it was difficult for Zhang Chun to control these marginal areas.

However, because the Han army had Mi Zhu's ships to respond, they could control the tip of the peninsula along the sea, so it was much more convenient for these counties to respond to supplies than Zhang Chun, and Zhang Chun did not come to fight for these mountainous counties on the peninsula.

In any case, each of these counties has a scale of less than 5,000 households, and in those days they were all small existences where only county magistrates could not set county orders, and the total of the four counties was only 13,000 households and more than 40,000 people.

After all this, the vanguard of the Han army had already arrived in Liaojiao County in the southern part of the Liaohe Plain at the end of April to confront the last of Zhang Chun's main rebel forces. Zhang Chun's remaining men and horses are also based on the Liaohe Plain as the core, and are stationed in two places: Liao Tunnel and Xiangping.

At the same time as Tuntian and cash-for-work, Liu Bei's troops were also greatly expanded.

Of the previous 5,000 horse troops, only 2,000 were considered professional cavalry, and the other 3,000 were "horse infantry".

After more than a month of intensive training, and many of the people in Youzhou had a good equestrian foundation, Liu Bei finally turned all these people into just qualified cavalry.

In this way, the cavalry unit was officially expanded to 5,000 people and 10,000 war horses, which could ensure one person and two horses.

The infantry unit was also expanded from 10,000 to 20,000 - of the extra 10,000, 3,000 were adapted from the Han rebel soldiers who surrendered in Tuhe County, and 7,000 were scattered soldiers and selected from tens of thousands of hungry people.

And the weapons didn't cost much, after all, more than 20,000 rebels had been annihilated before, even if a considerable part of them were not well-armed, and there was damage in the battle, but it was still easy to pick and choose the weapons of 10,000 new soldiers.

With a little training in this new army, it will be able to launch an attack on the final fortress of the Liaohe Plain.