A part of the Zhou army bravely met the Chinese army in a white-handed battle, and the two sides fought fiercely on the narrow slope formed by the collapse of the city wall.

The Chinese soldiers rushed up the slope in waves, the sound of killing shook the sky, the bayonets swallowed like the letter of a poisonous snake, and the soldiers of the Zhou army were constantly stabbed and rolled down the slope.

Facts have proved that the Zhou army was not the opponent of the Chinese army in the confrontation, and the white-knuckle battle was not.

The Chinese army had a record of defeating the Jurchens and the Dangxiang in white-knuckle battles, and their morale was high, covering each other in groups of three or five and stabbing each other, and the Zhou army, which could not form a formation and had low morale, was almost no opponent at all.

It's just that the Zhou army has a certain advantage in strength for the time being, and at the same time, it can also be supported by bows and arrows on the walls on both sides of the gap, so it can hold out for the time being.

But the balance was quickly upset.

More Chinese sampans approached, and some soldiers stood on the sampans and fired at the city walls with rifled guns, bullets flew sideways, and the crossbowmen on the walls on both sides fell one piece, and the Zhou army was easily suppressed.

The newly arrived soldiers threw a large number of light "10,000 enemies" and improvised grenades at the other end of the slope through their own people, and the explosions rang out, and the acrid white smoke and screams were endless, and the Zhou troops near the slope were finally driven away by the Chinese troops.

The mortars on the south hill began to suppress the city, and more and more large sampans were getting closer, and this time it was the engineer troops, who skillfully connected the sampans horizontally, put up wide planks, and nailed them together with iron nails and ropes, and quickly built a pontoon bridge over the extremely wide moat.

Within half an hour, a pontoon bridge leading to the city wall had been erected, and the main force of the Chinese army was able to quickly cross the moat through this bridge and attack the city through the slope controlled by their own side.

The Zhou army in the city carried out a final counterattack, and the Chinese army occupied the top of the slope, taking advantage of this geographical advantage to condescendingly kill the Zhou army with a platoon of guns.

Twenty minutes later, the Zhou offensive was exhausted, and the Chinese army was able to control the access to the city.

The battle that followed was easy, as the Chinese army advanced rapidly along the cross street to the state government in the center of the city, the Zhou army had no ability to fight in the streets, and the soldiers also thought that they had done their duty for the Great Zhou court.

Since the Chinese army entered the city, the surrendered Zhou army has continued to appear, and compared to the battle for the city wall, the Chinese army has almost no resistance.

In the evening, the Chinese army dispatched blasting boats to blow up the pontoon bridge between Xiangyang and Fancheng, and then carried out continuous blasting near the east gate.

After that, the Chinese army obtained a second place to enter the city, and at about 18 o'clock in the afternoon, all the gates of Xiangyang were controlled and opened by the Chinese army, and the city's defenses collapsed.

At 19:10, the Chinese army completed the encirclement of Xiangyang Prefecture.

The state government was surrounded by thick walls and improvised watchtowers, and Lü Wenhuan deployed a large number of musketeers and various shotguns at the head of the wall and the four watchtowers.

Theoretically, Lü Wenhuan could hold out for a while, and the Chinese army was not in a hurry to attack, but first occupied the warehouses and other important departments in the city separately to receive the treasury of Xiangyang City.

At 19:50, the Chinese army transferred field artillery from outside the city, preparing to pry open the last turtle shell of the state government by virtue of the advantage of artillery range.

However, the Chinese army had not really opened fire, and after only one round of test firing, Lu Wenhuan lost the will to resist and ordered the last 500 or so soldiers who followed him to open the gate of the state government and surrender to the Chinese army.

After Xiangyang changed hands, the small Fancheng became an isolated city, with no defenders inside, no reinforcements outside, and even insufficient grain and grass reserves.

The next day, the Chinese army sent people into Fancheng to persuade the defenders to surrender.

Fan Tianshun, the defender of Fancheng, refused to surrender, but the Chinese army did not launch a final assault on the small city, which had become easy to grasp, and continued to maintain the siege of Fancheng.

Fan Tianshun's father was Fan Wenhu, the envoy of Fuzhou, and he was the number one general under Tong Guan.

Sun Li, the commander of the Third Army of the Chinese Army, believed that Fan Wenhu would not easily give up his son, while Xu Shisong would not easily give up Xiangfan, whose geographical location was crucial, so keeping Fancheng would help attract the Zhou army to take the initiative to come to the decisive battle.

In fact, ten days after the Chinese army conquered Xiangyang, the Zhou army learned that Fancheng had not yet fallen.

Xu Shisong suspected that this was a conspiracy of the Chinese army, and he hoped to retreat the main forces of the new army and the forbidden army to the south of the Yangtze River before the Chinese navy completely blockaded the Yangtze River, so as to prepare for the next battle.

However, Tong Guan, Fan Wenhu and other forbidden army generals were opposed to abandoning Fancheng now, and Fan Wenhu even claimed that he could defeat the Chinese army with tens of thousands of forbidden troops and recover Xiangyang.

Xu Shisong didn't know where Fan Wenhu's confidence came from, but Tong Guan had the support of Emperor Longdao, who began to doubt Xu Shisong's ability and loyalty, as Xu Shisong's previous strategy had proven completely useless in front of the Chinese army.

So, the emperor crossed Xu Shisong and directly ordered reinforcements to Tong Guan and Fan Wenhu, Xu Shisong angrily declared that Fan Wenhu would lose this battle, but this was useless, Fan Wenhu still set off.

Sure enough, as Xu Shisong said, Fan Wenhu led 60,000 forbidden troops to advance by land and water to Xiangfan.

Fan Tianshun, the defender of Fancheng, led the Xiangfan Naval Division (Xiangfan's dock was on the Fancheng side, so the Han Naval Division was in Fancheng) to attack eastward, trying to join Fan Wenhu's division.

However, Fan Wenhu's troops were stopped by the Chinese army two hundred miles east of Xiangyang, and the Third Army concentrated all its artillery to bombard Fan Wenhu's sailors, after which the Chinese army's small inland water fleet descended from the upstream and directly attacked the Zhou army.

The Chinese inland river fleet used muskets instead of cannons, firing volleys in turn, and the sampans were like pocket-sized sail battleships, and the two sides of the ships were constantly spitting out tongues of fire, turning the small boats of the Zhou army into colanders.

Fan Wenhu sent arson boats to launch a counterattack against the Chinese army, which was the reason why he dared to speak out generously, believing that he could use these arson boats to destroy the Chinese army's small Han Shui division, and then save his son by virtue of the superiority in the number of ships.

It's a good idea, but it's actually useless.

The Zhou arsonists attacked upstream, as slow as a turtle crawling, while the Chinese artillery on both sides of the strait and the musketeers on the sampans continued to fire at the Zhou sailors, and soon ignited the ignition on the arsonists before the enemy approached them.

The fire ignited in advance, and the sailors on the arsonist ship screamed and jumped into the river, and because the ships were too close, almost the entire Zhou fleet was caught in flames.

Fan Wenhu's hopes of victory were dashed, and then the pre-war Zhou general made a decision that stunned both sides of the battle - he fled in a small boat with full sails and a sweep of smoke down the current!

Fan Wenhu abandoned the army and absconded!

Losing the main general, the Zhou army naturally collapsed, and the Chinese army immediately pursued it in an all-round way, and on the same day, it completely annihilated the 60,000 Zhou troops under Fan Wenhu!