The ninth year of Chongzhen is still an eventful year for the imperial court and local officials, and Shanxi is also one of the most serious places, although the Xingtian army and the official army fought in Yangcheng after the year, and after defeating the official army, it only robbed a grain fleet of King Fu on the Yellow River, and then did not set off too much wind and waves, but seemed to suddenly lurk, and stubbornly defended the land of several counties under control, looking content with the status quo.

But for the governor of Shanxi, Wu Fu, he could not be happy about this, Chongzhen ordered him to exterminate the Xingtian army in the jurisdiction within half a year, which was simply a joke for him, since entering Chongzhen nine years later, Shanxi fell into a great famine.

The hungry people had no food and had to eat bark and grass roots to survive, and later it developed to the point of cannibalism again, which made Wu Fu, as the governor of a province, worried.

Wu Fu is not a faint official, this person is an official who belongs to the clear stream, and he is not a corrupt official, but on the whole, his ability is very limited, in the face of such a great hunger, Wu Fu can not cope with it at all, although he also wants to help the victims, but He Nai has no food at hand, which makes this disaster worse.

Wu Fu had no choice but to plead to the court many times, hoping that the court would allocate grain to revitalize him, but now the court is also seriously short of salary, and he has long been eager to break a penny in half, where is the money to help the great hunger in Shanxi! On the contrary, in the year after the year, he once again sent silver to the provinces, and finally for Wu Fu's help, it was only to avoid Shanxi's additional salary, and allocated three thousand taels of gold from the emperor's inner treasury for disaster relief, but these three thousand taels of gold were not all used in Shanxi Province, and some of them were to be used to help the disaster in Jinan and Yang, even so, the more than three thousand taels of silver, after being transferred from the inner library, were sent to the place along the way, and they had already been stuck by the officials who were good at plucking the feathers of geese on the way. Such a small amount of silver is a drop in the bucket for such a large-scale famine, and it has no effect at all.

On the roads all over Shanxi, are covered with the corpses of hungry people who died of hunger, the scene of cannibalism caused by the drought in Shaanxi in the early years was staged again in various parts of Shanxi, and the government could not even collect it, but this is not the worst, what is worse is that after the great famine, a large number of people in order to escape the famine, became a new batch of displaced people, these displaced people in order to survive, so many displaced people have chosen to rebel, they were called up by some people, robbing caravans, beating Zhuangzi, robbing rich rich households, killing people and doing everything, Even in the northern part of Shanxi, there were more than 10,000 displaced people besieging the county seat, so that Wu Fu and other Shanxi officials had no time to look south, and they were busy dispatching troops to deal with such a situation all day long.

What shocked the government and the opposition even more was that on April 11, the ninth year of Chongzhen, Huang Taiji called the emperor outside the pass, changed the yuan to Chongde, and thought that it was the first year of Chongde; changed the country name Jin to "Daqing"; changed the name of the clan to "Manchuria"; The capital is Shenyang. In this way, it is tantamount to openly arguing with the Ming Emperor and wanting to be on an equal footing with the Ming Dynasty.

This is not the worst, after May, Huang Taiji, who had just established the country and ascended the throne, once again mobilized 100,000 troops from Jiannu to the south to enter the Kou, and first sent 100,000 soldiers from the Eight Banners of Doluo Wuying, such as Azige, the king of Doluo Wuying County, to attack Ming on May 30. On June 27, the Azig soldiers entered Xifengkou (in present-day Qianxi County, Hebei) and Dushikou (in the north of present-day Chicheng County, Hebei) by three routes.

On May 5, the Qing soldiers entered Juyong Pass in Yanqing, Gyeonggi, and on the 17th, the Qing soldiers suddenly appeared under Changping City from behind Tianshou Mountain and attacked Changping City. Surrendered to the internal response, the Qing troops fell into Changping, forced the Beijing division to martial law, and urgently ordered the ministers Li Guofu to guard the Bauhinia Pass, Xu Jinzhong to guard the Fallen Horse Pass, Zhang Yuanheng to guard the Longquan Pass, and Cui Liangyong to defend the Pass. A few days later, he ordered Zhu Chunchen, the Duke of Chengguo, to inspect the border passes.

In July, the Qing troops entered Gyeonggi and captured Changping, and then successively captured Liangxiang (now Fangshan, Beijing), besieged Shunyi (now Beijing) to take advantage of the situation, and captured Baodi (now Tianjin), Dingxing, Ansu (now Xushui, Hebei), Dacheng, Xiongxian, Anzhou and other counties of Kingi.

At the same time, Gao Yingxiang, Li Zicheng and other Lu Yi army in Shaanxi also plundered all directions at the same time, for, on May 13, the ninth year of Chongzhen, Yu Chongxiao, the general soldier of Yansui, and Li Zicheng fought in stability, and lost more than 3,000 people.

Immediately afterwards, Li Zicheng was about 30,000 or 40,000, Zhang Tianlin and Mantian Xingzhong were about 20,000, and the Mixed Heavenly King was about 20,000. to Zhang Tianlin, Mantianxing, etc., now Ben Yansui, Anding, and Ansai, you can still supervise and clean up; Breaking into the sky, breaking into the king, scorpion blocks, etc., have all come out of Yun and Xiang, have run to Xing'an, Hanzhong, enter the three Qin, retreat can be committed Chu Yu.

For a time, the entire northwest and the Jingshi area fell into extreme tension again, and there was a scene of beacons everywhere, and the local governments were even more tired of running for it.

However, in this large area in the southeast corner of Shanxi, there is another scene, after entering May, the first heavy rain of the year fell in the southern part of Shanxi, so that the original severe drought was finally alleviated, and the grain in the jurisdiction of the Xingtian Army was already long and lush in July, and all kinds of summer grain had begun to bear fruit, and the ground was full of heavy ears, which made people look good or not.

Since the robbery of King Fu's grain ship, the food problem of the Xingtian Army has been alleviated to a certain extent, so that the people in the jurisdiction of the Xingtian Army can finally obtain the minimum survival guarantee, coupled with the continuous small-scale dispatch of several battalions of soldiers of the Xingtian Army to raid the surrounding states and counties of those large villages and large households, and the food of these large families has been continuously transported back to its jurisdiction, so that the spring famine in the first half of the year can finally be difficult to survive under relatively stable conditions.

Different from other places in Shanxi, where hunger is everywhere, in the jurisdiction of the Xingtian Army, although the common people can only eat a small amount of food every day, and there are vegetables on all sides, there is basically no large number of people starving to death, which is already commendable in Shanxi and even in the entire north.

Moreover, in the jurisdiction of several counties of Xingtianjun, there was no situation where a large number of ordinary people fled the famine because of the spring famine, and the common people were basically settled in their own homes, waiting for their newly divided fields, guarding their grain fields with great expectations, and waiting for this year's harvest.

Due to the vigorous appeasement of the Xingtian Army, the common people did not have to worry about being starved to death, so no one ran outside, so the situation was unusually stable in the past few months in the jurisdiction of the Xingtian Army.

Through the efforts of Fu Deming and other civil affairs officials and local security chiefs, the people of all townships and villages were called together to survive in the form of work-for-relief, and at the same time, they also dug a criss-cross and perfect irrigation channel for their fields, and introduced rivers and streams into the fields, so that there was no major disaster in the year of great drought.

The Xingtian Army treats the people in the jurisdiction like this, what else do these people have to say! Even a small number of wealthy families in the jurisdiction of the Xingtian Army have also benefited a lot from the overhaul of water conservancy facilities, and the harvest of this year, which they thought they had no hope for, not only did not fail due to the severe drought, but instead introduced the canal water that could not be connected for many years into their own fields, so that their fields not only did not end the harvest, but grew better, so they also had to admit that under the control of the Xingtian Army, their lives were better than those under the control of the previous government. As a result, the idea of thinking about change gradually faded.

At the same time, because of the influx of displaced people, the labor force in their jurisdiction has been completely abundant, and it is often possible to recruit enough labor force to do things for the Xingtian Army at a very low cost, which is not only reflected in the abundant supply of soldiers, but also the production of various handicrafts has been greatly developed.

Yangcheng was originally an important iron producing area in Shanxi in this era, after absorbing a large number of craftsmen and laborers, the iron production of Yangcheng Dongye Town almost climbed geometrically, in addition to the coking workshops that began to appear in the territory, there will be new iron furnaces put into production almost every few days, and the iron furnaces built are also larger than one another, the output is higher than one another, the continuous output of iron has greatly enhanced the armament of the Xingtian Army, and at the same time greatly improved the agricultural tools, so that the productivity has been greatly increased.

While satisfying their own use, these iron have also become an important economic pillar industry of the Xingtian Army, which can be continuously transported out in exchange for other required materials, so that the expenditure of the Xingtian Army is also balanced, so that the Xingtian Army gradually began to gradually get rid of the dilemma of relying on looting to obtain resources, and began to enter a virtuous circle of self-sufficiency.

Of course, the beneficiaries are not only Xingtianjun himself, but also the Fan family in Taiyuan has also made a lot of profits, making the Fan family become the largest iron supplier in Shanxi after entering May of the ninth year of Chongzhen, and they have made a lot of money.

At the same time, the Xingtianjun took iron as a pillar industry, but also greatly promoted the development of the handicraft industry in the jurisdiction, among the large influx of displaced people, there were quite a lot of artisans, these craftsmen were concentrated after entering the jurisdiction of the Xingtianjun, and placed in the old site of Yangcheng County and Dongye Town, under the support of Xiao Tianjian, dozens of large-scale workshops were opened in the form of public offices, both iron factories, carpentry factories, and even paper mills were built in Yuanqu County, and the products in the jurisdiction were not only supplied for their own use, He also began to resell it to earn funds for the Xingtian Army and maintain the operation of the Xingtian Army.

In short, after the war at the beginning of the ninth year of Chongzhen, the affairs of the Xingtian Army developed very rapidly with the support of abundant labor, whether it was industry, agriculture or even animal husbandry, they all developed rapidly, and faintly began to gradually form a self-sufficient balance.