"This is Chaoyang, the state city of Chaozhou,"

Zhou Huai'an stood on the wall of the small north mountain outside the city and looked out.

"It still looks like it's a bit of a trick."

This irregularly shaped city with a particularly protruding south and east end of the north circle looks smaller and more compact than the city of Xunzhou Prefecture, but the city wall is much higher, reaching more than two zhang; The city itself is built by relying on the mound called Linkun Mountain (also known as Gushan Mountain or Gonggu Mountain, the southern foot of Xiaobeishan at the junction of Tongyu and Heping Towns), which has a condescending natural advantage;

Moreover, the north and northwest of Chaoyang City are large areas of mountainous areas that are difficult to pass and trek, and there are no city gates; The east and northeast corners are surrounded by the northern branch of the Longjiang River, which flows through the Chaoshan Plain, and are only connected by a few ferries and pontoon bridges near the city gate. Therefore, in the end, the rebels were able to devote most of their forces to attack, in fact, mainly facing the south of the open plain, and the southwest and southeast corners of the city.

This requires re-making a sufficient number of long ladders of appropriate size and the genus of looking at the car and rushing the car, and then clearing and filling the obstacles and barriers on the terrain little by little, and slowly advancing to the bottom of Chaoyang City, in order to form a joint breakthrough momentum.

Fortunately, now that Zhou Huai'an has come, there is no need to rush to pile up with human lives just with some rudimentary equipment as in the past. As the general manager of the rear office, he also has the responsibility of leading people to explore suitable locations, raise materials and arrange manpower on the spot, and build the corresponding siege equipment.

Of course, in front of the city wall of Chaoyang City, the bamboo catapult that was originally used to hit the earth fence and the wooden village is not very effective, and the stress strength of the bamboo is limited after all; Although Zhou Huai'an is also a metaphysical network theorist in terms of siege methods and technology, he still has extraordinary vision and knowledge, right? With the current situation of relatively sufficient time and resources, he can try them one by one.

Of course, this is also a kind of disguised relaxation and pastime for Zhou Huai'an to temporarily get out of many complicated affairs. Most of the time, as long as he explains the general meaning and direction, he can be busy under his subordinates, thinking about problems as his life, looking at the scenery, and letting off steam.

For example, on the hillside outside the city, there are many groves of citrus, sweet, bayberry, banana and olive trees, and it is now approaching the olive harvest season, so many green and yellowed olives are hanging fruit on the trees.

In the corners and corners of the orchards and gardens on the hills, there are miscellaneous crops such as taro and potatoes with large leaves, coix and weeds from small seedlings.

In the large areas of flat fields on the outskirts of the city that have been carved out by the fire cultivation and water raking method, the regenerated rice with low local plants is mainly planted; That is, on the two-thirds of the broken plants left after the harvest of early indica rice, the second crop of grain ears is produced by topdressing and irrigation.

Moreover, according to the soldiers from the local farmers, there is also a local dwarf rice variety that has been passed down from the Zhancheng country by sea, which is called "cicada rice"; One is "drought tolerance". The second is strong adaptability, "born regardless of location". Third, the growth period is short, only more than 50 days from planting to harvesting, and it can be harvested at the beginning of the cicada.

It's just that the yield is not high and the taste is very poor, and it is not easy to store for a long time, so it is basically only used as an analogy to taro and yam, and it is a last resort to choose and supplement the first aid.

However, the so-called salty and upland rice grown by local farmers are mostly so-called salty and upland rice, that is, saline-alkali and impregnated tidal flat rice varieties and mountainous barren xerophytic varieties. As a result of years of land annexation, the better local fields, such as those located on time-saving flat land, or on the edge of rivers that are easy to irrigate, are almost all in the hands of the powerful and powerful;

Even if ordinary villagers have worked hard for several generations, and have carved out a little rich and good land from the desolate and unsightly wilderness, most of them will not be able to keep it for long, and they will be forcibly seized by these opposing forces.

If the means are more tactful or decent, they will use all kinds of roundabout lending methods to set up tricks, and create daily opportunities for farmers to have to incur debts, such as illness and injury, home fires and field disasters, and even gambling and relationships between men and women as temptations; Then, when the popularity of debt collectors came to the door to persecut, he came forward to solve it as a good person who rescued the emergency, and justifiably took the reason of the villagers to do the robbery while the fire was in his pocket.

This is indeed to confuse and deceive most people, and in the local public opinion, the formation of the parties is just bad luck, or unfortunately there are children and losers, etc., non-subjective general perception and atmosphere, and the old men are always anxious for justice and justice to help the needy, out of helplessness to accept the other party's property, but also accept the other party as tenants and slaves as compensation.

Many so-called "great good people", "big landowners", "good gentry" and so on who have made a fortune by doing good deeds in the world are such a rather deceptive and hidden routine, which has been slowly born and created from generation to generation.

And those who are not so particular will directly collude with the officials sent by the government to fabricate all kinds of crimes and faults for the victims, and then intimidate them to sell their worth to settle and make up for it; If the other party is more stubborn, then he will be caught and tortured in the name of resisting taxes and donations, until the family takes out the goods to redeem them;

If you encounter a tougher and somewhat basic family, such as a farmer with more brothers, and then spend money to buy the public to come directly to the door, it is obvious that the gains outweigh the losses. This is where another trick comes in handy; First of all, there are those city foxes, stove rats, rags and other door-to-door nuisances, non-stop disgusting people, and even day and night followers to disturb and intimidate their families.

Once the victim is overwhelmed by his anger and takes action, he will naturally fall into his case and suffer a lawsuit, and begin to constantly toss and consume his net worth; But if the victim still doesn't accept this set, and instead takes a hard line, then it's the turn of the last resort.

At the same time, they have something to do with the thieves and bandits in the mountains, and even the barbarian villages in the mountains; So, I don't know when the owner of the bad thing will suddenly befall the sky overnight; Either he or his family was robbed and killed, kidnapped on the way out, or the whole family was wiped out by a roaming thief.

In this way, even if there are remnants of the dead who survive, they will not be able to compete with the wealthy families who have mastered most of the social resources and connections and public opinion, and even if they want to sue the officials for their grievances, it is still a question whether they can get out of their hometown alive without any accidents on their own strength.

Therefore, many medium-sized families who are still relatively prosperous or barely able to survive in disaster years have gone bankrupt and become slaves of others in this merger game of big fish eating small fish. After the rebels defeated these large families and ensured that they could not turn over in a short period of time, they dared to stand up and speak out one by one to expose them one by one.

Then some people voted for the righteous army for the hatred of the destruction of their families, on the one hand, to seek justice for more people who suffered the same thing, and on the other hand, to get away from this sad place; It's just that, in the eyes of Zhou Huai'an, who knows these methods and the inside story, what a desperate and suffocating reality and situation this is.

But it also made him inevitably give birth to a sense of dislocation and immediacy that was suddenly separated from the world, isn't this the role played by those half-gray demolition companies and debt collection companies in the demolition projects at the junction of urban and rural areas in later generations under the remote control and captivity of laundered social capital? It's just that after more than a thousand years, it's still a similar routine and technique of changing the soup and not changing the medicine.

It's just that under the red flag and signboard of socialism, those capitals have no official means to dare to openly collude with them for the time being; Therefore, they can only desperately buy all kinds of unscrupulous literati, public knowledge, and experts, and advocate everywhere the return to the "rule of village sages" in the countryside to replace the authority and use of grassroots party organizations; Then, in the cities, the benefits of small government are propagated to make room for "dynamic non-governmental forces" to assume more "social responsibility" and "value orientation".

Therefore, under this desperate and numbing social reality, ordinary people basically have no motives, spare efforts and conditions to continue to improve planting methods or adopt improved seeds; If you can't even fill your stomach, you can't talk about emancipating and developing the productive forces;

Therefore, only those wealthy families who sit on large fields have the conditions and leeway to decide the specific types and diversity and richness of crops to be planted at will; Based on this, we will maintain a variety of eating habits and daily enjoyment. But they are often also the leaders and beneficiaries of conservatism and solidification, and they can't wait for all this to continue forever in front of them for thousands of generations.

In addition to intensifying the means of pressing, there is naturally not much basic motivation and desire to break with the familiar status quo and improve the level of agricultural production technology.

Therefore, the fields in the vast fields outside Chaoyang City are almost concentrated in the names of a small number of upper-class people in the city; Although they tried their best to prepare for the clear field and fortified walls, in fact, before Wang Pan's main formation arrived, they only destroyed the fields within more than half a mile of the city wall.

Therefore, after the brigade brought by Zhou Huai'an joined, they began to harvest and harvest on a large scale, and these half-ripe and unripe products outside the city, and cut down all the suitable trees and other firewood and grass materials on those hills for use.

(End of chapter)