Let's turn the clock back to a certain day in late April, before the Battle of Kyushu broke out in full.

An unflagged Seki ship slowly slid into the harbor of Shimonoseki Castle and came to a halt as it was greeted by several sailors with hats.

"Welcome, Mr. Onichi." A sailor saluted respectfully and helped one of the men who came down from the boat to carry the package.

The man was a little fat, tall among the Japanese people, and after getting off the ship, he stretched out and spoke in the local dialect of Kyushu: "Oh, since the outbreak of the war, the business of the Choshu Domain has been much colder." ”

The sailor smiled flatteringly: "That's, that's, many small traders don't dare to come to Xiaguan to do business, only a powerful entrepreneur like you can come here." ”

Onichi chuckled and nodded, but turned around and carefully opened the curtain of the ship, waiting for a middle-aged man to come out of it.

The man, dressed in a long robe, in his early thirties, with a long and slender body and a handsome face, stood on the deck and looked at the Xiaguan fortress standing majestically in the sun. Behind him were several Japanese men dressed as samurai, with long knives pinned to their waists, looking fierce.

The sailor saluted with his hand in his hand, and quietly looked at the man in the long shirt in front of him with his spare eyes, and his heart became a little panicked. This person is not a Japanese at first glance, and he came to Shimonoseki at such a sensitive time, I am afraid that it is not......

Thinking of this, the sailor suddenly felt that his eyes were dark, and a smiling face appeared in front of him: "Please help me bring the salute to the carriage." ”

The sailor was shocked, and hurriedly said "Hi Yi", and respectfully followed the ghost and the man in the long shirt to the carriage parked outside the port.

"No tails, right?" After driving for a distance, the man said lightly, and there was a sense of nobility cultivated by pampering and pampering between his words.

Several samurai beside him had been watching outside through several specially designed openings in the carriage, and when they heard the man's words, they replied softly, "No obvious shadow was found." ”

The man nodded, closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, and did not speak again. The samurai also remained motionless, continuing to observe the outside world in silence, like several stone statues.

The carriage eventually stopped outside a private villa near the Shimonoseki Strait. The pattern of this building is not big, but the victory is in the negative mountain facing the sea, there are blue waves in front of the sea, there are mountains and forests in the back, and the scenery is quite beautiful.

A middle-aged man in a gorgeous kimono was already waiting in front of the villa, and as soon as he saw the ghost coming, he immediately greeted him: "Mr. Kiichi is finally here, Xiao Ke has been waiting for a long time." ”

The ghost smiled and arched his hand and said, "Eh, where is it, the boss of the family is polite, it's the ghost who walks too slowly." ”

He turned sideways and introduced to the middle-aged man: "Mr. Shousui, this is Mr. Li Dan's eldest son, Li Guozhujun." ”

The person who was waiting was the Japanese handsome man who has become famous in recent years, and the "Choshu Old Man" Shousui Shinyoshi. At this time, he did not have the demeanor of a bigwig in the military and political system of Changzhou, but put his posture very low.

Li Guozhu smiled and nodded with Shousui and didn't say anything.

"Please come in, please come in." After a few words of greeting, Shou Sui Nobuyoshi affectionately pulled Li Guozhu's sleeve and brought him in, enthusiastically introducing the glorious history of this villa along the way.

"Look, that's the plaque inscribed by Lord Shaobao, the crown prince of the Ming Empire, 'Chunfan Tower'." Pointing to the plaque hanging in front of the villa's gate, Shou Sui Shinyoshi said with some reverence, "This was a few years ago, when General Huang came to the place with your country's fleet, and stayed here, and he admired the villain's mansion very much, so he gave him a name. ”

Li Guozhu still maintained a reserved smile, and naturally praised the villa in the middle of a joke - of course, this villa does have a lot of design to his heart, such as the ornate crystal chandelier on the ceiling of the living room and the precious wool carpet on the floor.

The three of them didn't stay in the living room for long, and went straight to the study on the second floor of the villa.

There was already a person kneeling on the main seat in the study, and he didn't get up when he saw a few people coming, but just nodded slightly.

Shousui Nobuyoshi first bowed respectfully, then knelt down to face the man, took off his slippers, walked into the wooden floor in white socks, came to the man and knelt down beside him, and smiled at the two who were still at the door.

Li Guozhu bowed with a smile, gently took off his boots and placed them in front of the door, adjusted the head of the boots outward, and then entered with Oniyi.

He walked to the low table in the center of the room, sat down cross-legged, and saluted the person opposite: "You are Lord Xiu, contemptible Li Guozhu, polite." ”

Even though he was in front of him a famous foreign daimyo, the eldest son of Mori Terumoto, the general of the Western Army in the Battle of Sekigahara, and the master of the most powerful power in western Honshu, the lord of the Choshu domain, Mori Hideyoshi, who was born into a merchant family, and even the ghost eye that he bought his surname through his godfather still did not show any fear. Curiously, the Maori Show himself does not seem to be outraged by such a disrespectful act.

Without him, there is a behemoth-like empire behind him.

The lord smiled and took a document from Li Guosuke's hands, opened it in the morning sun, read it carefully, and then handed it to the attendant beside him.

Outside the door, the royal family members dressed in clean formal clothes gently closed the door, blocking the words of the four people in the room.

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At almost two o'clock in the afternoon, the closed door opened, and Li Guozhu and Mao Lixiu walked out hand in hand, smiling warmly all the way, as if they had not seen each other for a long time.

What no one knows is that a treaty that played a huge role in the First Song-Japanese War has been signed and sealed, and it is now in Xiu's arms.

Because it was signed at the city of Shimonoseki, the treaty was known as the Treaty of O-Song-Choshu Fan-Shimonoseki. According to this treaty, the Choshu domain officially broke away from the shogunate camp and joined the anti-shogunate united front led by the Ao-Song.

Of course, pulling the Changzhou Domain into the united front of Australia and the Song Dynasty within a few hours is of course not the credit of Li Guozhu's mouth, otherwise he would have been able to directly use this merit to be subordinated to the baron...

On the one hand, the Choshu Domain had already accumulated friendship and trust over the years of trade between General Huang Sitong, who followed Nobuyoshi and the Dongjiang Army, and on the other hand, there was a two-generational grudge between the Choshu Domain and the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Alas, all of this has to start with a man named Yuan Shi Tianzun... The man named Maori Terumoto said.

Maori Hui Yuanjun is the grandson of Maori Yuan, the "first wise general of the Warring States", and the performance of this person can be summed up in one sentence in general, the heart is higher than the sky, and the hand is softer than tofu. Because of the low hand of the eye, from time to time there are all kinds of bad luck.

One of his most famous defeats was the Battle of Sekigahara between the Tokugawa Eastern Army and the Toyotomi Western Army after the death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in order to fight for the world.

At the time of the decisive battle between the Eastern and Western armies at Sekigahara, the total number of the Western Army on the battlefield reached about 100,000, of which the strength of the Mori family and the Kobayakawa family and the Yoshikawa family were 30,000 or 40,000 troops alone - but these 30,000 or 40,000 people were unable to unite at all due to the perennial incompetence of the Mori Hui Patriarch and the contradictions and divisions between the three families, and they were either onlookers or defected on the battlefield.

After taking over the Mori Monarch's invariance, he even listened to the advice of the Yoshikawa Hiroke family, who had been bought by Tokugawa Ieyasu, in order to preserve the territory of the Mori family after the war, and passively avoided the war against the Eastern Army. In addition, the Kobayakawa family simply surrendered to the Eastern Army, which directly led to the collapse of the Western Army on all fronts.

However, at that time, Mori himself led more than 10,000 people to be stationed at Osaka Castle, which was known as the "first in Japan" at the time. If he listened to the opinions of Tachibana Somao and others in the city, he would defend the city to the death, and he might not be able to drag it out until there was a change in the world.

As a result, the capitulationist sentiment in this man's bones rose again, and he surrendered to Tokugawa Ieyasu again...... Then Tokugawa Ieyasu showed the face of a politician on the spot, cutting the fiefdom of the Choshu Domain from 1.2 million koku to 300,000 koku.

Since then, the Choshu Domain has lost the strong foundation of its leader, the Western Kingdom, and has also planted in his heart the "hatred of the shogunate in one day, two lands, three rivers and four seas".