The transfer orders for Liu Bei and Xu Rong were quickly sent out.

In Emperor Ling's will, in order to test Liu Bei, it was written that he should enter Beijing immediately.

Calculating the days, the messenger arrived in Qingzhou on about September 13, and Liu Bei's speed of coming to the capital must be slower than that of the messenger, and it would be good to arrive before September 20. And it's the kind that only brings a few relatives to take office, and no one of the soldiers and horses is brought.

The edict to Xu Rong, the commander of the revolving gate, was much faster, and it would arrive on the 11th, and theoretically Xu Rong would be able to return to Beijing on the 13th, and then he should follow Li Su back to Liaodong to hand over the work.

However, it will also take time for the division to take over the defense work of the pass, so it will not be a big problem to delay until about September 20.

After the will to recall Liu Bei was issued, in the past few days, Emperor Ling asked Lu Zhi on a whim how to arrange Liu Bei's work, and Lu Zhi gave the follow-up words to Emperor Ling.

In the end, Emperor Ling felt that it seemed good to let Liu Bei investigate the case of Zhang Lu's interception and killing of the Han envoy and find out whether there was any connivance from the clan, so he agreed.

At this point, the first three steps discussed by Li Su and Lu Zhi have basically been realized, and it is only necessary to officially transfer Liu Bei to serve as the Taishou of Hanzhong in the future and return to Beijing to fight for thieves.

This is the last kick in the door, and I can't be in a hurry. But the preparations before the door were also transformed into reality step by step under Li Su's secret arrangement.

……

On September 20, the day when Liu Bei arrived in Beijing, because he just caught up with the court meeting, Liu Bei couldn't catch up with Li Su for a private chat, and almost entered the palace to go through the formalities when he arrived in the capital, and went to Bi Guiyuan to face the saint after the dispersal of the court.

In the end, the imperial court unanimously approved the reappointment of Liu Bei, who had just been the Taishou of Liaodong for three months, as Zongzheng Shaoqing. Everyone also knows that Liu Bei's deputy position is a bridge, and it is a special case for Zhang Lu's rebellion, so no one opposes "Liu Bei is too young and lacks qualifications".

As for how to arrange the military in Liaodong after Liu Bei left, there were many people in the court who quarreled fiercely, and even the general He Jin had some opinions on the transfer of generals at the meeting, but they were all rejected by the emperor.

The emperor had already thought about sending Xu Rong to be the governor of Liaodong, and he had no intention of discussing it with anyone.

It is said that after the assembly ended, He Jin returned to the mansion, and he was helpless, and discussed with a group of henchmen such as Yuan Shao, Cao Cao, and other school captains, and felt that he would stop fighting with the emperor anymore.

The others didn't react, only Yuan Shao's face was gloomy and terrifying - in fact, when all the generals on all sides raised their own respect, a small part of the slanderous rumors that reminded the emperor Liu Yu and Liu Bei that they were also suspected of secession were Yuan Shao who fanned He Jin first.

Of course, I also want to say a fair word to Yuan Shao here, he was definitely not the only one who reminded him at that time, he was just a source from the General's Mansion, and at the same time, Jian Shuo and Shaofu Bing Cao also said that they had similar worries as Yuan Shao. Therefore, these words cannot be regarded as insidious in themselves, but also for the sake of the imperial court fairly.

It's just that Yuan Shao's motive for taking this eye medicine is different from that of Shaofu's soldiers Cao Shangshu and even Jian Shuo, Yuan Shao recently thought that if the center can't stand after the chaos in the world, he will occupy Jizhou, the richest city in the country, as a base, so he subconsciously doesn't want a strong neighbor to appear in Youzhou.

However, Yuan Shao actually did not affect Liu Bei, and his small actions this time were not known to outsiders. At best, this is just a spare tire in the Yuan family, with dates or not, the Yuan family's main focus is still on trying to directly control the center of the court in the future.

This can only be complained about in the last half year before the death of Emperor Ling, He Jin's words are not very effective, and Jian Shuo is effective. Therefore, even if Yuan Shao asked He Jin to be very obedient to him, he would not be able to set off a storm for the time being.

Yuan Shao's real lethality can only be exerted when Jian Shuo is punished and He Jin monopolizes power.

……

After Liu Bei faced the saint and officially got the new appointment, he had time to meet with Li Su in private and talk about Li Su's plan - the whole process was so rushed that Liu Bei was still in a state of confusion now. It was entirely by virtue of his loyalty to the imperial court, and the prestige of the imperial court is still there, that he "resolutely implements it even if he does not understand".

After the execution, I had time to listen to Li Su's analysis and relieve my inner confusion.

That night, Li Suden came to Zongzheng's mansion and had a secret conversation with Liu Bei overnight.

There is no great Zongzheng in the imperial court now, and Zongzheng's mansion is temporarily used by Liu Bei, the young secretary.

Liu Bei was treated to wine, and after a little drink of two glasses, he couldn't wait to grab Li Su and asked, "Brother Xian, what happened in Beijing?" Why is everything so urgent? ”

Li Su: "Brother, don't be disturbed, and listen to me......"

Li Su roughly relayed the parts of his plan that he could say to Liu Bei at present. It's just that when I told Lu Zhi, I had more arrangements for Mi Zhu and Xu Rong.

It took Liu Bei a long time to digest before he roughly understood what he should do.

Liu Bei didn't have a clue about the case of Zhang Luzhan Hanzhong's interception and murder of angels, so he asked Li Su some questions about grasping evidence.

But for a person like Li Su who knows the outcome of history, the work of "investigating the case" is too easy, because Li Su can directly report the answer to report what bad things Liu Yan and Zhang Lu have done in history.

So Li Su doesn't need to say too much, just mention a few points, such as checking whether Zhang Lu's mother had an improper relationship with Liu Yan before, whether Liu Yan had other crimes that might involve remote control of Zhang Lu, and even whether Liu Yan had colluded with the four families of Shu Confucianism when he was the pastor of Yizhou......

Even, when Li Su read the Book of the Later Han Dynasty in his previous life, he knew that Dong Fu in the service had said to Liu Yan that "Yizhou has the spirit of a son of heaven". Therefore, the easiest way to investigate the case is to directly find a way to defraud Dong Fu, who is currently lying on the hospital bed and almost dying.

Dong Fu is still a servant, although he is sick and dying, he has not quit his job, and has always stayed in the capital. If he could take out even a little confession from Dong Fu's mouth, it would be enough for Liu Yan and Zhang Lu to drink a pot.

In this way, Li Su hastily sorted out some clues that he felt could be used, and provided Liu Bei with the parts that explained the sources and speculated reasons.

In this way, even if Liu Bei has never been a civil affairs official and does not understand criminal investigation and judgment at all, he will definitely be able to do a decent job and have a good political performance in dealing with the collusion case of Liu Yan and Zhang Lu.

Anyway, Liu Bei has not been working in Zongzheng Mansion for a long time, as long as this big case is handled well, it is enough.

As for how to deal with the other daily management work of the Zongzheng Mansion, Li Su also has experience - didn't he follow Liu Yu to be the "princess" of the Zongzheng Mansion for a few months?

The reason why he could only be a princess at that time was not that Li Su was not able to work, but on the one hand, his rank and rank were not enough, and secondly, he was not surnamed Liu, so according to the laws of the imperial court, he could not manage the affairs of the clan, and could only manage the affairs of his relatives.

But Li Su got a lot of training in those months, and those Zongzheng officials surnamed Liu who had no ability to organize and did not give the specific work to Li Su, a capable temporary worker, to do, and Li Su also figured out how to manage the work content of these people and evaluate their KPIs.

Talking about these tricks with Liu Bei in detail in the middle of the night was enough for Liu Bei to resist for a few months.

……

"Thanks to the virtuous brother who is clear about government affairs and knows so much about Zongzheng's affairs, alas, it would be good if the virtuous brother could stay in Beijing, and he would be able to 'rule the arch' for his brother in the past few months, so that he would not be in a hurry."

After listening to Li Su's explanation, Liu Bei knew a lot, but he still regretted that he couldn't be a shopkeeper.

However, it is good to be able to complete the task, Liu Bei is not a tangled person, he knows that time is precious, and hurriedly asks Li Su for more important questions.

He tilted the topic to the arrangement of Zhang Lu in the future:

"Brother Xian, since in the end, Your Majesty may let me find out Zhang Lu's crime and go to crusade against him. Then you must want me to use Youzhou soldiers, right? It is impossible for the imperial court to send me another army. I, a Youzhou soldier, how much can I bring to Hanzhong in the future?

How should Yu Tu be scheduled? How should we deal with the soldiers in the past few months, and how should I hand over the troops and horses with the new Liaodong Governor Xu Rong? How many soldiers and horses are handed over? I was completely unaware of this when I first arrived. ”

Li Su shook the folding fan lightly: "Brother, don't worry, I haven't eaten rice in Beijing these days, and I'm trying my best to plan for my brother every day." Let's start with the delivery of soldiers and horses, my brother wants to ask Zhang Lu, and the imperial court with the headquarters of soldiers and horses will definitely agree.

Because the imperial court gave my brother a quota of soldiers before, but only 5,000 people, and the extra ones were all my brother's own grain and grass in Liaodong, or relied on Mizhu to resell the spoils of war to support the war, how could the imperial court recover these surplus soldiers and horses? When the time comes, Xu Rong will be handed over 5,000 soldiers and horses, even if it is a new soldier, and it will be reasonable on the books of the imperial court. ”

Liu Bei was right when he thought about it, and it was really the truth.

A large part of his soldiers are non-staff personnel who eat the military salary he pays for the war, and the money is not the imperial court, why should he take it back when he goes out of the imperial court!

It is precisely because of this that Liu Bei had to fight for years before, and after the battle in Liaodong, he came to rob the Qingzhou Yellow Turban to eat, because of the grain to the enemy. Otherwise, if the idler is not seized, his finances will soon be broken.

If you count 30,000 people at your peak, it will be 300 million yuan a year! If you eat Qingzhou people's grain for three months, you can save yourself 50 million yuan in grain purchases! (The troops' expenses are not only food and pocket money, but also other things, and military salaries and rations account for almost two-thirds)

"Even so, it doesn't matter, 5,000 people were selected from the prisoners of war of the Qingzhou soldiers, trained in discipline a little, and handed over to Xu Rong. Before becoming a brother, they all followed the guidance of their virtuous brothers, and the elite pro-army selected young and brave soldiers. The Qingzhou Army prisoners of war who were over 25 years old were kept as preparations.

These physiques are not bad, even if they are older, they can still fight with a little military discipline. Xu Rong definitely won't feel that we are prevaricating with the old and weak. ”

These reserve sources are still good in the eyes of other warlords, but Liu Bei and Li Su are mentally prepared for perennial warlord melee in the future, and only for the sake of the army's sustained combat capability can they ensure that the source of soldiers is younger.

In this way, Liu Bei can at least transfer 20,000 people from the Youzhou army to Hanzhong, and if the Qingzhou soldiers are recruited a little more, it is also possible to make up 30,000 - originally, if Liaodong is used as a long-term base, it is not so urgent to "loot", but since Liaodong will only be placed in the future to close itself, and the farming results left here will not be able to change cash flow for a while, which is equivalent to "precipitation assets", so it is better to take more this time.

In addition, in terms of horses, Liu Bei has now hastily expanded the cavalry to about 10,000 people, including 5,000 Han elite cavalry and Wuhuan Tu cavalry, half of which are perennial horseback fighters, and half have just been trained for less than half a year.

And the war horse is very rich, the 10,000 cavalry can usually be matched with 20,000 horses, and one person can change the horse for riding, who makes Youzhou not much more than horses. Killed Zhang Ju and Zhang Chun, and also slaughtered several Xianbei and Wuhuan tribes, and it was easy for each of them to make a net profit of more than 5,000 war horses.

Now that we have to make plans to transfer the base areas, we can still do it by scraping again, getting 30,000 horses, and ensuring that 30,000 soldiers and horses are on the march.

It's just that the 10,000 horses that were scraped out in the end may be of poor quality, and they are not "war horses", but can only be said to be able to ride people to the road. And the 20,000 infantry who rode on horseback would not be directly converted into cavalry, and their ability to fight on horseback was not specially trained.

The end result was 30,000 men and 30,000 horses.

In terms of ethnic and geographical composition, these 30,000 people are about 10,000 Youzhou local infantry, 5,000 Youzhou Han cavalry, 5,000 Wuhuan Tu cavalry, 5,000 Qingzhou soldiers, and 5,000 Danyang soldiers - in the last Qingzhou thief war, some of the prisoners captured were also some Danyang soldiers, mainly those who were lost and captured when Tao Qian had just been sent to fight against the Qingzhou army.

Then he was captured by Liu Bei again and went back anyway, plus the original Danyang soldiers and Jiujiang soldiers, about 5,000 people can be made up of sword shields/hammer shields, and troops who are good at water warfare.

However, how to get these 30,000 people and 30,000 horses to Hanzhong became another problem in Liu Bei's heart.

From an economic point of view, the most cost-effective route for transporting troops is, of course, to take the Yellow River water transport.

But foreign soldiers can't enter Luoyang, and even the eight passes of Sili are very sensitive, of course Liu Bei knows this common sense, and he didn't expect to land in Mengjindu by boat.

Fortunately, Li Su knew how to deal with this problem - and it was also blamed on the later generations that Dong Zhuo provided Li Su with experience and provided a marching route of "how to approach Luoyang without entering Luoyang".

Li Su said bluntly: "Brother, don't worry, I have made a plan in the past few days, asked someone to greet Jian Shuo, dredge the joints, and in the few months that my brother served as Zongzheng Shaoqing, I temporarily transferred Yun Chang from the position of Governor of Liaodong to 'Captain of Hedong'."

The reason is also ready-made, and there are now Yufuluo raids and white wave thieves in Hedong. At that time, Yun Chang can temporarily deter Fu Luo and the Bai Bo army and share the worries of the imperial court.

And in this way, Yun Chang can lead his troops to march along the Yellow River. When you arrive in Jinai, do not land at Mengjin on the south bank, but take Anyidu on the north bank and bypass the Shaanxi Gorge by land to Hedong. And for the first time, you don't need to bring all the troops, you can go to Hedong in a group of 5,000 people.

lest the imperial court find out that the scale of the private soldiers raised by the elder brother is so huge, and it also prevents Hedong from being a thief everywhere and having no food to feed the army for a long time. Leaving the main force in Qingzhou, which is rich in grain, and eating Qingzhou grain for two or three months more is just to avoid the labor of transshipment.

This route has three advantages: First, it avoids the suspicion of foreign troops entering Beijing, and does not land on the south bank of the Yellow River from beginning to end, so it will not deter Luoyang and will not fall into the hands of others.

Second, I remember that Yun Chang's ancestral home is Xie Liang in Hedong, Xie Liang and Anyi are in the same county, but they are separated by a salt lake.

Third, when we want to continue westward in the future, we can find a ferry boat along Puhanjin in Hedong County to cross the Yellow River, go around Tongguan, and go straight to Weishui. Weishui all the way to Chang'an, Chencang, take this road the army can go straight to Chencang city to rescue the Huangfu Song who was surrounded by Han Sui in the city. ”

Li Su said as he took out a map to compare.

Liu Bei didn't read much and didn't know much about the geography west of Luoyang, but after listening to Li Su's detailed interpretation, he immediately realized that Li Suxuan's excuses and geographical routes were very good.

Here we must mention a little geographical common sense: during the Han Dynasty, the Yellow River could not be navigable all the way, and the downstream ships had to land near Luoyang, with Mengjin on the south bank and Anyi on the north bank. Because there is "Shaanxi Gorge" in Hongnong County further west, the water flow is very turbulent, and the drop is huge, that is, the Sanmenxia in later generations.

Sanmenxia was to be navigable, and it was almost not until the 20th century that a series of water conservancy projects in Sanmenxia and Xiaolangdi were built before ships could sail. Otherwise, you will have to bypass Sanmenxia by land and find a new boat. After crossing Sanmenxia, there is another important ferry port on the south bank of the Yellow River, which is called Xinfengdu, and the one on the north bank is called Puhanjin, both of which are the gateways of Chang'an.

The first person in Chinese history who did not change ships in Sanmenxia and drove the ship all the way from Luoyang to Chang'an will not appear until another two hundred years, that is, the later Emperor Liu Yu of the Song Dynasty - the peak of Liu Yu's life in history, was to rely on the north bank of the Yellow River with a large number of slender men to pull fiber, the Eastern Jin Dynasty's building ships and other heavy warships, forcibly pulled across Sanmenxia, and finally attacked Ke'an by land and water. It can be called a feat in the history of human warfare that is parallel to Mehmed II's fleet pulling the fleet into the Golden Horn and conquering Constantinople, the thousand-year-old imperial capital.

The important reason why Liu Yu's previous Huanwen Northern Expedition failed was that he could not advance by land and water when he fought Chang'an, and finally hit Bashang and returned without taking Chang'an. Including Liu Yu's Moon Formation on the north bank of the Yellow River, the Murong cavalry was also to protect the slender man on the north bank.

Therefore, in the Han Dynasty, no one would have thought that the Yellow River could be navigated directly to the vicinity of Chang'an without changing boats, and even if you want to pull the fiber, you have to pull it on the north bank, because the south bank is the steep mountains of the Kuohan Road, and the reason why the Cuishan and Hangu Pass are the Qin and Han dynasties is because they have been blocked to the bank of the Yellow River, and there are Sanmenxia to prevent you from bypassing the Hangu Pass from the Yellow River - if the Yellow River can go directly, the Kwantung Six-Nation Alliance still needs to "ambush millions of corpses and be at a loss" in front of the Hangu Pass?

After thoroughly understanding these geographical elements, Liu Bei can fully understand the soundness of Li Su's layout.

In the few months that he himself was in Luoyang, Guan Yu took Liu Bei's soldiers to look at Luoyang on the north bank of the Yellow River, and there were white wave thieves who could fight a dozen as an excuse for delay.

And this can be regarded as a chance for the old murderer Guan Yu to return to his hometown. Guan Yuguang killed someone in Xie Liang and fled his hometown during the reign of Guanghe, and this time he finally came back with the imperial army.

"Brother Xian is in Beijing, I really can't be idle for a day, I'm afraid I'm thinking about the march and the excuse of name these days, it's really hard Brother Xian, this plan is wonderful."