Xuzhou, the last battlefield of the two armies, Cao Cao was unexpectedly blocked by the army led by Lu Su, who was also a fledgling, outside the county boundary of Xia Piguo, and it was difficult to move an inch outside the defensive circle arranged by Lu Su.

This was the first time that Liu Beijun failed to win directly in the face of Liu Beijun or Cao Cao personally leading the troops. In previous wars, as long as Liu Bei faced Cao Cao, he would undoubtedly be defeated.

Cao Cao also arranged his fierce generals and led elite soldiers to prepare to forcibly break through the defensive circle arranged by Lu Su, but they were all blocked by Zhang Fei and his army in time.

As the days passed, seeing the crops in the fields of Xia Pi on the opposite side rituring day by day, Cao Cao, the military advisors and generals in Cao's army were all anxious.

Cao Jun's attack on Xuzhou this time has two main purposes, the first is to completely disintegrate the military force that Liu Bei has just established in Xuzhou as much as possible, of course, if Liu Bei's army can be eliminated in one fell swoop, it will naturally be the best result.

And the second purpose, if Liu Beijun cannot be eliminated, Cao Jun will also take advantage of the war to eat the enemy and harvest all the ripe crops in Xuzhou for himself, but if the current situation continues, it is very likely that Cao Jun's military operation will not be able to achieve both goals.

At the same time, what made everyone in Cao Jun feel extremely panicked was that the locust plague came.

In the spring of May of the second year of Jian'an, the Han Dynasty finally ushered in another locust plague.

Judging from the news coming from the territories of various princes, the locust plague that mainly occurred north of the Yangtze River in the Han Dynasty this time is far less than the one in the first year of Xingping in terms of scale, and there is no great drought like the first year of Xingping in many places, but the scope of the locust plague this time is not much different from the last one.

In the history of China, once there was a locust plague. Severely damaged areas are generally concentrated in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River.

That is to say, Qingzhou, Xuzhou, Yanzhou, Yuzhou, Jizhou, and the six states of Sili are the most seriously damaged. Relatively speaking, south of the Huai River, and in Shanxi in later generations, because of the Huai River and the Taihang Mountain, the grain damage in these two areas will be relatively weakened.

Liu Beijun, who had made corresponding preparations for the prevention and control of locusts in advance, according to the method taught by Jin Jue, as soon as Xu Shu got the news of the locust plague, he promptly put all the chickens, ducks and geese collected from the people and the surrounding areas of Xuzhou last winter in the fields. Because the number of ducks is not large, the efficiency of locust control is not as miraculous as Liu An's boasting, but Xu Shu is pleased to find that this control method is still effective.

As the center of gravity of Xuzhou, eighty percent of the chickens, ducks and geese collected last winter were concentrated in the country of Xiapi, in this matter, Mi Zhu contributed a lot, no way, who made his family a rich man, as a contemporary Mi family, he privately took out money to handle this matter, and other people in the family could not say anything, at most it was just a few words of slander.

Mi Fang, who served as the Taishou of Donghai County, did not take the prevention and control of locusts to heart. On the contrary, Chen Deng, who is also a son of a family and has a stronger ability to govern than Mi Zhu, also attaches great importance to this matter, and he also pays his own money to collect a lot of chickens, ducks and geese from the people, but after all, he is not the head of the family, and his father Chen Qi disagrees with this matter very much, so the chickens, ducks and geese collected in Guangling County are far less than those in Xiapi Kingdom.

Fortunately, this time the locust plague did not have much impact on Guangling County, which is south of the Huai River, and Chen Deng could rest assured that he would hand over the work of preventing and controlling the locust plague to the county and concentrate all the chickens, ducks and geese he had collected in Wei County, as for Haixi County north of the Huai River, because it was close to the sea, there was not much land that could be used for farming, and the number of locusts that could reach the county was not much, so it was enough to rely on the people in the county to cull them.

Chen Deng himself, however, was concentrating on dealing with Yuan Shujun's attack with all his might.

In short, because of the advance preparations, Xu Shu ordered the county orders of each county in Pi State to arrange for the people in the county to participate in the fight against the locust plague in a timely manner, so the food of Xia Pi State and Guangling County this year can be regarded as preserved.

However, there are good performers, and naturally there are bad ones, and the performance of Donghai County in this locust plague is unsatisfactory. As the Taishou of a county, Mi Fang naturally can't escape the blame, even if Mi Zhu has done a lot of compensation work after the locust plague, he can only keep half of the grain harvest in Donghai County at most.

For this reason, Mi Fang had to write a letter in person to ask Liu Bei for guilt.

Now that it was wartime, in order not to affect the morale of Donghai County, Liu Bei pressed the matter and did not blame Mi Fang.

At the same time, even if Yuan Shao knew that locust plagues had occurred in Jizhou and Qingzhou, he could not do anything about it.

At this time, Yuan Shao could only continue to send troops to intensify the attack on Gongsun Zhan, who was huddled in Yijing City, and he knew very well that once he broke through Yijing City, he would definitely be able to obtain a lot of information from Gongsun Zhan.

According to historical records, Gongsun Chan hoarded 3 million grains in Yijing City.

In comparison, Cao Cao's situation has become even worse.

Last year, Lü Bu raided Yanzhou, destroying a large number of tuntians in Yanzhou, killing and driving away many tuntians. This has greatly damaged Yanzhou's grain harvest this year, and now the area under Cao Cao's control is not only plagued by locusts, but Cao's army has not been able to plunder any grain in Xuzhou to replenish it.

At this stage, although the area controlled by Cao Cao was much larger than that of the second year of Xingping, the difference in his situation now even exceeded that of the difficult period when he fought for Yanzhou with Lu Bu.

At the same time, what surprised Cao Cao even more was that the so-called 100,000 troops sent by Yuan Shu's idiot were actually stopped outside the boundaries of Guangling County by the defensive front arranged by Chen Deng.

A large area of Guangling County is south of the Huai River, where the geographical situation is very similar to that of Jiangnan, all of which are vertical and horizontal river networks, and it is difficult for the army to deploy at all, if Yuan Shujun wants to quickly break through Chen Deng's defenses, the best way is to use warships to launch an attack from the Huai River.

At this moment, Xu Shu finally showed his own ability.

Overnight, Xu Shu secretly made the discord plan successful.

Not long after the locust plague arose, in this Yuan Shu army, the three generals Chen Lan, Lei Bo, and Lei Xu were successively persuaded to surrender by the envoys sent by Xu Shu in the name of Liu Bei.

In history, these three generals did betray Yuan Shu, but the time when the three of them betrayed Yuan Shu was not so early. In this time and space, the reason why the three generals chose to betray Yuan Shu so early.

This locust plague had a crucial and decisive impact.

Anyway, as soon as the three generals heard the news of the locust plague, they immediately raised troops and surrendered to Liu Beijun.