Before continuing our story, let's take a look at the current situation in the Eastern Continent.

In the north, the Jurchens, who had experienced a Tatar raid, could not hold back the tyranny in their hearts, and acted first to pour out their full anger - not the Tatars, nor the Han, but the hapless Goryeo .......

At the beginning of May, the Jurchen Dajin Kingdom of the five Bo Jilie suddenly led tens of thousands of troops, crossed the Yazi River, and marched straight south.

The Goryeo army was defeated in successive battles and lost two capitals within two months, and the king and his small court had to flee to Jeju Island.

At the end of June, the king of Goryeo made a statement to Daejin and promised to pay the Jurchens an annual tribute: 100 taels of gold, 1,000 taels of silver, 100,000 stones of grain, 1,000 catties of ginseng, and 100 women.

Subsequently, the Jurchen army returned to Liaodong with 100,000 looted Goryeo slaves, as well as countless other goods, cattle, horses, livestock and other booty.

This large-scale raid injected a shot in the arm for the Jurchens, who had suffered heavy losses, and the fields that had been barren due to lack of labor were now available to be cultivated, and the extremely scarce grain and grass were partially replenished—at least in September and October, when they went south to plunder the Han military rations.

While the Jurchens were plundering Goryeo, the Dangxiang people in the northwest were approached for help by the Western Regions states farther west, such as the Göchang and Uighurs, which were in danger of being attacked by an extraterritorial power, Pars.

The devout Buddhists sent 70,000 troops to cooperate with the allied forces of the Buddha countries in the Western Regions to repel the Pars army, but the losses of the Dangxiang people in the battle were not small, and they had to get some reinforcements elsewhere because they were already weak.

In addition, the party members also need some extra wealth to maintain their position as suzerains of the Buddha kingdoms in the Western Regions.

Therefore, in the summer of this year, the party members made a plan to enter the customs and plunder the Han people.

In the previous robbery of Liaodong, the Tatars, who had made a lot of profits, appeared to be more honest this year.

But robbers are always robbers, let them taste the sweetness, and they will not stop if they don't eat each other alive.

The Tatars had already come to a conclusion from the raids at the beginning of the year: instead of robbing the exhausted Han Chinese, it was better to rob the Jurchens when they returned from plundering.

In this way, the Jurchens' mink, horses, ginseng, deer antlers, and the wealth of the Han Chinese they plundered could fall into the hands of the Tatars.

It's a double win.

Like a pack of resilient wolves, the Tatars are patiently waiting for another chance to eat black.

Looking south, perhaps the Jurchens did not perceive that the Tatars were still trying to raid them again, but Yanyun and the Han warlords in the Shaanxi and Gansu regions had almost guessed it.

These warlords were different from the landlord-centered dock forts in the Central Plains of the mainland, they were originally the border army generals of the Great Zhou Dynasty, and they were originally considered to be strong and strong, and after the collapse of the Great Zhou, these Jiangmen groups became independent into warlord groups.

Gold comes to gold, and Tartar comes to tartar.

Dajin canonized several Han Chinese among the warlords in the Yanyun area, and the Yanyun warlords happily accepted it.

The Tatars canonized the Han warlords of Shaanxi and Gansu as the Han military princes, and the warlords of Shaanxi and Gansu also thanked their lord Longen.

These Han warlords followed their respective masters to fight each other, and also followed them south to plunder the Central Plains.

For the common people of Jiangbei, they are not gentler than the Tartars (by the way, the two masters of the Xu family also wanted to take refuge in the Jurchen and become a Han Chinese, but they did not succeed by mistake).

Perhaps seeing that the Jurchens were gradually showing their decline under the attack of the Tatars, the Han people in the Yanyun region repeatedly proposed to attack the Han army in the Shaanxi and Gansu regions in order to cut off the important infantry and food sources of the Tatars.

Unfortunately, the Jurchens were not very interested in this, they did not want to confront the powerful Tatars, and only thought of robbing the weak Goryeo and the collapsed Han people of Jiangbei.

This is the character of a robber, bullying the weak and fearing the hard.

The Han people were deeply helpless about this, and they were afraid that once the Jurchens were defeated, all their previous investment and humiliation would be in vain.

Our gaze is further south from the territory of the Han people or the Han army, and there is a depressed Central Plains.

Dotted with countless bunkers, each of which is home to a population ranging from a few hundred to a thousand, they rely on cultivating the fields around the fort to survive in the troubled times.

Of course, the so-called dock fort in this plane is not only a kind of powerful clan in the Great Zhou region in the past, which formed a village to protect itself.

Broadly speaking, the bandits' cottages and the makeshift fences built by the homeless can also be regarded as dock forts - because the dock fort is essentially a situation of self-defense of local people (bandits and haoqiang often make cameos with each other).

In addition to the local tyrants, bandits and homeless people, there is also a special dock fort in Jiangbei that depends on a special situation to survive - the canal fort along the canal, with slender men and their families as the main body.

Unlike other dock forts that often had to face Tartar raids, the dock forts along the canal were small in number, but they were independent small forces that existed by the Jin army by default, and the Jurchens would consciously avoid these dock forts every time they entered the pass to plunder, and at most let them provide a little military rations or civilian husbands.

The reason is very simple, the annual annual coin of 200,000 taels of silver and 200,000 horses of silk paid by the Great Zhou to the Jurchens had to be transported to the Yanyun region through the canal, and then transferred to the Jin State.

More than ten years ago, the Jurchens were still a group of fishing and hunting robbers who came out of the deep mountains and old forests, and after the annexation of the Khitan, they had suitable agriculture and craftsmen for the first time, but their own economic foundation was still weak, and they could not maintain the luxurious life of the Jurchen aristocracy.

Therefore, the annual 400,000 silver silk coins were very important to the Jin Kingdom, so important that they would rather suppress the desire to plunder in their hearts and let go of these canal docks, so that when they needed it every year, they could pull fiber for the fleet transporting the coins.

Due to the fatigue of the Central Plains, the canal and shipping have become the only communication line between Jiangnan and Liaodong, and merchants with connections can set off with the fleet of New Year's coins to transport the silk, tea and other goods produced in Jiangnan to Liaodong, and exchange materials such as Dongzhu, ginseng, mink, and deer antler with the Jurchens.

The merchants who can do this business have strong backgrounds, and the canal dock fort does not dare to extract tolls from it, but the fleet can also provide them with a lot of benefits, plus there is no need to worry about the Tartar raids, the life of these canal dock forts is relatively rich.

The so-called Jianghuai area, which has not yet reached the Yangtze River, has a much stronger population density than the north of the Huai River, because it is the only way for the Central Plains displaced people to go to the south of the Yangtze River, but there are very few displaced people who can find the opportunity to cross the Yangtze River, so there is a relatively large population here.