For the development of the cottage, Bai Lijian and Liu Jing discussed in the tent all night, and finally had a preliminary plan.

The development of cottages is divided into two paths: inside and outside.

One is to explore the potential from within, adjust the personnel structure, let the right people do the right things, and then build the cottage to accommodate more people. This is a long-term project that requires a huge investment of manpower and materials, so we can only take our time and not rush.

The internal development is mainly carried out from the aspects of clothing, food, housing and transportation.

Clothes, the inside of the cottage is now relatively large for the gap in clothes, and robbery alone is completely unable to meet the needs of clothing. But fortunately, winter is coming, and there are animal furs to replace it, and it can survive for a while.

Food, the cottage now has enough things to eat for a few months, and counting the daily hunting catches, grazing cattle and sheep, and horse bandit teams going out to raid, should be able to support until next spring. In addition, the old Han farmer had already brought a few farmers who were familiar with the fields and began to try to grow barley, wheat and other crops in the mountains. If God gives face, there should be a certain harvest in the spring, which can make up for some food consumption.

Most of the people in the cottage can still only live in tents, a small number of built houses are used as warehouses, and only a very few special people are qualified to live in the newly built wooden houses.

Well, in terms of travel, the only people who can travel at present are horses. However, the number of horses in the cottage is really limited, and in order to maintain a team of 80 horse bandits, a staggering amount of grain and grass is consumed every day. This is not enough to satisfy the eighty people who go out to plunder at the same time, and must go out in batches, so as to ensure that the horses can be effectively rotated and not used up.

The other is to develop from the outside.

For Shanzhai, the development potential of internal tapping is limited, and it is impossible for Shanzhai to achieve a qualitative leap. Therefore, the planning of external development is particularly important.

In fact, a long time ago, Liu Jing and Bai Lijian discussed the direction of development, that is, the plain east of Helan Mountain. If you can occupy it, the land there alone will be enough to feed hundreds of thousands of people and maintain an army of tens of thousands of people.

But now that it is occupied by a larger tribe, Bailijian's current strength alone is not enough for people to stuff their teeth. So Bai Lijian and Liu Jing set their sights on Helan Mountain.

The strongest in Helan Mountain now is the flag village and Bailijian's own cottage, although there are not many other large and small cottages, but all the cottages combined, there are tens of thousands of people, and these people are mostly young and middle-aged. If you can integrate so many people together, then you can completely form a team of thousands of people, and unless there is a large army to encircle and suppress it, some small tribes around it will not be enough at all.

It's not easy to integrate all the cottages, and just one flag-planting village is enough for a headache. Even if they clean up the flag village, how to subdue the rest of the cottages is also a big problem, after all, they are too widely distributed, and the number of people is small, once they drill into the mountains and forests, Bailijian has no way to take them.

Fortunately, the cottages here have the habit of clinging to the strong, so Bailijian plans to start from this aspect, first show his strength with the help of the alliance conference held by the flag village, and then use other means to slowly annex other small tribes.

In this way, they can slowly increase their strength in advance before they don't use the sword soldiers, and by the time others find out, the cottage has already grown to the point that they can't compete. At this time, these small cottages have no second way to choose except to surrender.

According to the plan, the early stage will be based on the construction of cottages, and the external will be soft first.

Li Lingfeng is under a lot of pressure now, and Bai Lijian's order to him is to do his best to find out the distribution of all the forces in the entire Helan Mountain, and the more detailed the information, the better.

For a newcomer who is new to the work of spies, such a request is indeed a bit difficult for him. Of course, Bai Lijian was also deliberately creating problems for Li Lingfeng, wanting to see how much potential he could have.

Bailijian is now consciously subdividing the army according to different functions. Although the total number of troops is now only more than 200 people, it has been subdivided into several branches for now.

The pro-guard team is a combat team set up by Bailijian, and it is also a law enforcement team. Just like this fight, Bai Lijian did not dispatch a large number of horse bandits, but chose a small number of pro-guards, and the strength shown by the pro-guard team did make Bai Lijian very satisfied.

The horse bandit team is actually the embodiment of cavalry, and now Liu Jing is also consciously strengthening their militarized training, so that they will no longer be like before, and they will only rush forward in a swarm when they encounter battle. Learning to charge as a whole and coordinate operations is not only to improve their combat effectiveness, but also to save their lives.

The archery team that Han Yu had just taken over was selected from the reserve team, and the number was about thirty people, and half of them were from the original Feiyu Village. In normal times, some of these people were responsible for monitoring the work of the prisoner camps, and the other part was responsible for training, and they rotated every three days.

The rest of the reserve is the infantry. But for now, this is the weakest team in the entire cottage. Because these people are usually mainly responsible for work, there is only a half-day training every three days. Even many people are not fully equipped, so they can only use some wooden knives to make up the number when they train.

Except for the reserves, the rest of the teams are fairly well equipped.

The equipment of the guards must have been the best, with a piece of leather armor, a scimitar, a horse and a bow. The equipment of the horse bandits is not bad, almost the same as that of the pro-guards. Although the remaining archery team is only equipped with bows and arrows, they originally put cold arrows at a distance, and the requirements for equipment are not particularly high.

At present, there are not many fighters in the cottage, and the equipment is barely enough. However, as more and more people from the horse bandits went out to plunder and returned, the expansion of the combat team was inevitable, and if the equipment could not keep up, it would inevitably affect the overall combat capability.

As for the equipment problem, Bailijian doesn't have a very good way now. There is no blacksmith who can make iron inside the cottage, and those broken weapons cannot be repaired, so they can only be temporarily left in the warehouse to rust.

The only thing that can be done now is to tell the bandits who go out to plunder to give preferential treatment to those who have skills. If the cottage wants to be self-sufficient, these craftsmen are indispensable.