Gao Mingheng actually dug holes in the city wall in order to deal with the Xingtian Army, and also thought of a lot of ways, digging trenches in the city, throwing fire pots on the city wall, throwing porcelain tribulus terrestris to blow up, throwing fireballs with smoke, throwing stones and grinding discs, in short, they tried their best to prevent the Xingtian Army from digging the wall, but in the end, they only killed a lot of cave cars (goose cart holes) pushed by the Xingtian Army to the city, and injured some sappers of the Xingtian Army, but they never completely stopped the Xingtian Army from digging.

Even Gao Mingheng also hung a heavy reward, snare dozens of outlaws, took advantage of the night to use a rope to tie down the city wall, trying to take a surprise attack on these excavations, and kill these thieves digging at the foot of the city wall, but dozens of people went down to the city, but a small half of them did not go down to the city desperately at all, but took advantage of this opportunity to go out of the city, and as soon as they arrived at the foot of the city wall, they went straight to the Xingtian army and clamored for them to surrender! As a result, the remaining outlaws were exposed, and they were quickly killed by the Xingtian Army at the foot of the city wall.

At present, there are quite a number of officers and soldiers in the city and the people have lost confidence, listening to the rumbling of cannons outside the city all day long, some people have long not wanted to follow Gao Mingheng and King Zhou to the death, so some of them secretly contacted, wanted to capture a city gate, open the city gate to surrender to the Xingtian Army, but unfortunately their plan was discovered by Gao Mingheng in advance, sent troops to suppress their actions, within a day, in the city caught nearly a thousand people who tried to surrender to the Xingtian Army, all of them were pushed to the city wall and cut off their heads, This is to stabilize the situation in the city.

However, seeing that the Xingtian army has surrounded Kaifeng for nearly a month, the city has been in short supply of food, and at the beginning of April, the food in the city has basically been completely cut off, and the soldiers in order to raise food, began to knock the common people in the city to knock the bones and suck the marrow of the general rope, directly broke into the homes of the people in the city to search, and found a little food to immediately snatch away, as a result, the people had no food at all, and could only eat some weeds and bark in the city. Even after the horses ridden by the generals in the city passed, some people followed to pick up the horse dung, take it back and fry it in a pot to dry it until it turned yellow, and then swallow it with water, and a large number of people were so hungry that they were not ghosts, lying at home waiting for death.

And on the night of the third day of the fourth month, the ditches on the east and west sides of the city were extremely busy, and a group of soldiers and generals of the Xingtian Army began to enter these trenches dug in advance, and a large number of soldiers carried boxes of things into the trenches, and finally filled these things into a deep and invisible cave.

At dawn, the caves were filled up by the engineer battalion with a large amount of sand, leaving only a bamboo pipe open outside the entrance of the cave, and a long twist of medicine led out of the bamboo pipe.

A large number of soldiers and generals of the Xingtian Army were neatly clothed, sitting and sleeping along the side walls of the trenches, including those elite soldiers selected from the fifth battalion of the Gezuo, they also wiped their knives and guns shiny, polished them with abnormal sharpness, and entered the trench under the leadership of Lao Huihui and others, leaning on the side of the trench to sleep, even if they couldn't sleep, they closed their eyes and recuperated, only a few people looked at the sky with their eyes open, and didn't know what to think again.

Everyone looked very dignified, except for the officers whispering some orders, there was only the snoring and breathing of soldiers in the trenches on the east and west sides of the entire city, the moonlight sprinkled in the trenches, the tips and blades of large guns flashed with cold cold light, and the black armor pieces also flashed cold from time to time, and everyone entered a state of imminent battle.

A large number of artillery pieces were also assembled in the distance, and the muzzles of each cannon were pointed at this section of the wall, and the gunners slept next to the cannons with their arms crossed, and boxes of shells were placed at their feet.

Although the night action was as secret as possible, but the officers and soldiers in the city still felt something, there was a depressed uneasiness spreading everywhere in the city, this atmosphere made many defenders unable to sleep, always felt that something big was going to happen, the number of officers and soldiers who kept vigil also increased a lot, not only Chen Yongfu and his son Chen De all walked up to the city wall, trying to look outside the city, even Gao Mingheng, who had not slept for many days, also came out of the palace in the middle of the night, climbed the city wall and looked out.

But there was basically no movement outside the dark city, but it seemed to spread a huge pressure to the city, which made the defenders have a sense of foreboding.

Gao Mingheng and Chen Yongfu both lay on the city wall inside the city wall and listened, the sound of digging the wall that had been going on for many days and nights stopped on this night, which made them feel even more nervous, the silence outside the city was a little abnormal, what was the Xingtian Army going to do? They couldn't guess for a while, but they always felt that this kind of silence was not a normal phenomenon, and the Xingtian Army must be planning some kind of conspiracy.

So Gao Mingheng ordered more officers and soldiers to patrol the city wall, and the entire Kaifeng city was under martial law, and no one was allowed to walk around the streets, and at the same time sent people to strengthen the vigilance inside several digging sites, and arranged people to listen to the sound on the city wall at all times, and many large vats were buried on the ground in the city as urns to monitor the sound underground.

In the second half of the night, under the orders of the officers, they began to fire a few cannons from time to time outside the city, and the light from the muzzles of the guns illuminated the battlefield outside the city, and the cannonballs whistled and fell outside the city, but they did not cause any commotion.

Moreover, the defenders kept firing rockets outside the city, trying to illuminate the farther place outside the city, so that they could see the movement of the Heavenly Army outside the city, but what came into view was only a black patch, and they could still see those vertical and horizontal ravines, but they could not see any movement on the ground.

Slowly passing through the strong uneasiness of the defenders overnight, Xiao Tianjian personally came to the traffic trench in the east of the city and personally inspected the subordinates who were ready to attack the fortification.

This is a huge scale of the battle, in which the arrangement of the offensive order of the generals is a very huge work, a few mistakes, it may cause chaos during the attack, it is likely to affect the progress of the entire battle, and if you are not careful, you may even lose money, so for this day, whether it is Xiao Tianjian or the generals of all departments, they have been busy for a long time, constantly discussing this final blow.

However, the busiest is not Xiao Tianjian and the generals, but the busiest person is Li Xin, in fact, Li Xin is busy, Xiao Tianjian through this period of observation of Li Xin and Li Xin's own performance, has found that Li Xin is not only a general, but his strongest point is not to lead troops to fight, but his courage and carefulness, very good at planning many things, such a talent is also the talent he needs most, do not let him do anything else, just be a staff officer.

A person has to take care of such a big thing, both civil and military, since Xiao Tianjian occupied Jinnan, he began to feel that sometimes he would be too strong to be busy, and he often consumed a lot of energy in the military, and he was in no mood for civil affairs.

So from a long time ago, he began to think about the establishment of the staff headquarters, for this reason he selected and transferred a group of capable civil and military personnel from all over the guard battalion, and let them start to do some staff things, as for the performance of these people, Xiao Tianjian was a little helpless, they are always used to obeying orders, but rarely take the initiative to consider the problem, just passively obey the arrangement, so these people are qualified officers, but they are not qualified staff officers.

Xiao Tianjian has been looking for this kind of person for a long time, Niu Jinxing is smart, but after observation, this person is too utilitarian, and he can handle civil affairs, but it is not suitable to take care of military affairs as a staff officer, Li Jinde is also a candidate, but Li Jinde likes to consider problems from the big picture more often, but always ignores the details, plus he is not an expert in military affairs, so he cannot become a qualified staff officer.

It wasn't until Li Xin's appearance that Xiao Tianjian found that the staff officer he had been looking for finally appeared, and when Li Xin followed Li Zicheng in history, he had already shown a quite extraordinary command level, and he was also very forward-looking in strategy, and he was also very good at controlling the army, so under Li Zicheng, Li Xin was a good general, and it was precisely because of this that Li Zicheng made Li Xin an army by himself, so that he later found that Li Xin's prestige was getting higher and higher, which threatened his status a little, plus Niu Jinxing was jealous of Li Xin, slandered Li Zicheng, which made Li Zicheng finally dizzy and chose to kill Li Xin.

But as everyone knows, Li Xin's strength is not to be a handsome talent, but to be a staff officer is more suitable, everyone has their own strengths, the key is to see if you will use people, Li Zicheng is obviously far inferior to him Xiao Tianjian in this regard, although he will attract people, but in terms of employing people, he is far behind, he is even more unlikely to be like Xiao Tianjian, know the role of staff officers, so Li Xin is also doomed to the tragedy of his life.

Now that Li Xin has returned to Xiao Tianjian, then Xiao Tianjian will not let Li Xin repeat the mistakes of the past, he only needs to arrange him in the position he should do, and Li Xin can play a greater role, so after returning from the Northern Expedition this time, Xiao Tianjian clearly told Niu Jinxing in Luoyang that in the future, let him intervene less about military affairs and focus all his energy on civil affairs, and this goods in the province deliberately misled him because of jealousy.

As for Li Xin, before Luoyang sent troops, he had publicly announced that Li Xin would be his chief of staff in the future, and no one else had the right to transfer him except for being directly responsible for him, so that Li Xin had a transcendent position in the army, but he would not directly control an army, and more often Li Xin would accompany Xiao Tianjian to give advice to Xiao Tianjian and plan and arrange details.

So this time to attack the Fengfu, speaking of which Li Xin is one of the busiest people, he not only has to plan various things according to Xiao Tianjian's ideas, but also cares about many logistical things for Xiao Tianjian.

And Li Xin is very grateful to Xiao Tianjian for being so important to him, as the saying goes, a soldier dies for a confidant, Li Xin devoted himself to his current work after being ordered, it can be said that he is taking a group of staff officers to follow him to make various plans and arrangements day and night, this month, the eyes are black, and people have lost a few pounds of meat.

Therefore, although Xiao Tianjian is busy, but because of Li Xin, the chief of staff, he is not as busy as before, and more often he can go to the army to inspect and cheer up the soldiers of various departments and mobilize morale, so that Xiao Tianjian's prestige in the army is even more prosperous, so that Li Xin, a person who worries about him, appears.

Li Xin did not live up to his trust, many things were only taken care of by him, and the detailed plan was handed over to Xiao Tianjian yesterday, and Xiao Tianjian found that this plan was quite perfect after review, and the things that should be taken into account were basically taken into account, so even if he approved this set of battle plans, he immediately summoned the generals to arrange this set of battle plans.

(Yesterday there were a lot of flowers, of course, there were a lot of rewards, according to the promise, today and tomorrow are seven more to return to you!) This is the first update on the 17th, please support more, so that the red ticket and reward will come more violently! ）