Compared with the difficulty of planting spies in the Wa Kingdom and the Qing Dynasty, the difficulty of Hongmen planting spies in North Korea is more than a step lower, and now there are more than 40 spies in Hanyang City in North Korea alone, and they are always collecting North Korean intelligence for Hongmen.

However, some difficulties are that there are very few spies planted by Hongmen in North Korea who have status and strength now, and the Korean aristocracy is deeply rooted, and it is really difficult to break the deadlock controlled by the aristocracy, but it is not as easy as the vigorous expansion of the Qing Dynasty.

Therefore, after several years of struggle, the Hongmen spy in the Korean Kingdom spy, the highest status is only the middle and low-level military attache of the newly established imperial camp army and the guard hall of the DPRK, and has not yet opened up the high-level of the DPRK.

However, this did not prevent the Hongmen generals from quietly delivering the information collected by the Qing Dynasty to the high-level people in North Korea, attracting their attention.

In fact, at this time, the Joseon lord Injo Li Liang was also full of fear and vigilance towards the powerful Jurchens, and since Ding Mao was forced to sign the Pyongyang Entente to the Qing people, he was even more hostile to the Jurchens.

However, the strength of the people is strong, even if there is a lot of dissatisfaction in the letter of the king of Renguo, he can only use some dark tricks to deal with the barbaric Jurchens.

However, in the following days, King Injo was tactful with the Jurchens, and on the other hand, he mobilized the efforts of the whole of Korea to build fortresses and the Great Wall in Pyongan Province and other places, and actively prepared for the possible invasion of the Jurchens.

At the same time, the DPRK actively learns advanced science from the West, has a strong pursuit and adaptation to Western artillery, musket and other technologies, and invests heavily in musket technology every year to create a large-scale musket army.

Therefore, when the detailed military information of the Qing Dynasty carefully collected by Hongmen was sent to the Korean high-level one by one, King Injo and the important ministers such as the leader of the council, Kim Jin, attached great importance to it and began to actively prepare.

King Rendong is not unaware of the strength of the Qing people, when Ding Mao was chaotic and there was a Ming Dynasty Mao Wenlong Governor Marshal from the side to contain the actions of the Qing people, still killed a person in their Korean kingdom on his back, and now just from his own and Hongmen to get the information, the Qing Emperor Huang Taiji even wants to personally conquer Korea, how can he, the king, not know that his own strength and the Qing people, can be regarded as hitting a stone with an egg!

However, he had to do it, at this time, the Korean Kingdom, which had been influenced by Chinese culture for hundreds of years, had a natural affinity for the Ming Dynasty, so that the Korean government and the opposition all had a hostile attitude towards the Jurchens of the Qing Dynasty.

Not to mention the brutal banditry of the Jurchens during the chaos of Ding Mao back then, until now, no one at the bottom of North Korea has changed their fingers, and their hostile attitude towards the Jurchens has never disappeared.

Therefore, unless it is really the time to destroy the country, if his ancestor Li Liang wants to grovel to the Qing people, he must risk being impeached and mutiny by the courtiers in order to do so.

The lesser of the two phases is weighed, and the king of Injo himself ascended the throne through mutiny, where is it not clear that the Korean nobles really have the strength to depose the king, and it is not easy for him to sit on this golden dragon throne, how can he give up easily!

In the Kingdom of Korea, the movement of troops and horses has gradually become more frequent since October, especially the western road of Ping'an Road to guard against the Jurchens of the Qing Dynasty, and countless soldiers have been reinforced to go to the major cities, relying on the already established system of muskets and troops to defend the city.

However, King Injo also prepared a retreat early, and while he was in full swing to dispatch troops, he quietly moved the palace concubines and ministers' families to camp on Ganghwa Island, and he was also secretly preparing, and when he saw that the situation was not good, he sailed south.

In addition to providing information to the Koreans, Hongmen also established relationships with important ministers such as Kim Young, the leader of the Joseon Kingdom at the time, and obtained the opportunity to meet King Injo of Joseon as a capital for his advancement.

In fact, although Hongmen's reputation is not thunderous in the Korean Kingdom, it is also a powerful group familiar to the ministers of the DPRK and the King of Joseonjo.

Although he didn't know why Li Tianyang, the admiral of Fujian in the Ming Dynasty, was so concerned about the affairs of their kingdom, he showed that he had the intention to help Korea when Hongmen was in danger, which was also accepted by Joseon Injo and his ministers.

No matter how malicious the Hongmen retained, in the face of the powerful Jurchen invasion, King Injo of Korea had no other choice.

It is impossible to know how many soldiers and horses Hongmen will send to support, or how much strength the other side will contribute, but when Hongmen proposed to aid the Korean Kingdom in exchange for an alliance with the Korean Kingdom in the future and low-cost access to Korea's precious resources, it was quickly approved by the King of the Korean Kingdom and others.

Of course, this group of scholars in the Korean Kingdom is naturally not stupid, although they agreed to the various conditions put forward by Hongmen, but in fact, most of them are measures that can only be completed after the war, which makes Hongmen have to make more efforts to achieve these conditions, so that the whole Kingdom of Korea has some trust in this team that suddenly appeared to help them.

However, it was the first batch of materials from Hongmen that made the Korean Kingdom feel more confident in the face of the Qing army: two large ships and nearly 100 tons of sulfur resources were transported to the Korean Kingdom by Hongmen from Dayuan Island, which was really a charcoal in the snow for the Korean Kingdom, which focused on the development of muskets and artillery, but because of the lack of sulfur and saltpeter resources, it was really a carbon-like act in the snow, and it won the favor of the North Korean high-level Hongmen.

You must know that the North Korean ambassador went to the Ming Dynasty countless times, hoping that the Ming Dynasty could lift the ban on the sale of Korean sulfur, saltpeter and other military supplies, but unfortunately it was always in vain.

Although these gifts cost the Joseon Kingdom tens of thousands of taels of silver, they were of great military significance to the Joseon Kingdom.

On the second day of the ninth lunar month of Chongzhen, it was really consistent with the information collected by Hongmen, and the emperor Huang Taiji, who ascended the throne of Daxin, immediately issued an order to personally command an army of 100,000 troops to cross the Yalu River and kill it towards the Korean Ping'an Road after returning triumphantly from the Jurchen raid on the Ming border in the middle of the year!

At the same time, Wu Jie and Shang Kexi of the Hongmen Hongtang Fleet led 30 main warships and 40 auxiliary sea ships of various types, carrying more than 6,300 Hongtang people, set out from Huludao, raised their division to the north, and marched towards North Korea, where the sound of war was gradually approaching.

(End of chapter)