Zhu Pingjin oversaw the troops and rushed to Baoning. His mind was full of why Wang Chaoyang rebelled.

However, the poor communication of information and a little pride after the victory made him fail to realize that the situation in northern Sichuan was far more chaotic and complicated than he had imagined. Wang Chaoyang mutinied, but he just sprinkled a handful of chili peppers in the pot of boiling oil in northern Sichuan. The temperature of the oil did not drop at all, but it added a lot of spicy flavor.

Wang Xingwu, the captain of the Yilong Huzhuang Brigade, learned of the Baoning Incident only half a day earlier than Zhu Pingjian. On the morning of the 22nd, a member of the Li family of Xinzhengba hurriedly came to Jinchengzhai and brought this astonishing news and a message from the head of the family, Li Junying, requesting to send troops.

After the bloody battle of Changping Mountain, the three battalions and three companies suffered heavy casualties, Wang Xingwu led the company and the remaining two platoons into the Yilong County Zhijin Walled City, and later took these two platoons as the backbone and expanded into the Yilong County Huzhuang Brigade.

Jincheng Walled City is a mountain city, easy to defend and difficult to attack, but the terrain is deep into Bashan, and the surrounding area was once the nest of local tyrants.

After Zhang Guangpei, who is known as Bai Wuchang, led the remnants to break through from Guang'an, he returned to the old nest of Yao Yuchuan and Jiang Chengren, and incarnated as the fourth generation of shaking the sky. Its territory is in Qixingzhai in the northeast of Jincheng Walled, and the distance is less than 100 miles.

At the end of last year, a group of local tyrants who attacked Pengzhou and Yingshan also retreated north to Bashan after the attack failed. According to Wang Xingwu's investigation, the leading post of this local riot is named Yuan Keyi, and his name is "Chuang Shan Hu". Because he also has the surname Yuan, he is far away from Yuan Tao, the king of heaven. Yuan Keyi, a local tyrant, was entrenched in Renhe Village, about 100 miles southeast of Jincheng Walled, with a strength of about 1,000 and a half. Renhe Village is surrounded by mountains, a small river in the east, and the river can be directly connected to Qu County.

After Wang Xingwu was stationed in Jincheng Walled, he politely expelled Bi Jiucheng, the magistrate, on the grounds of recuperation, and took over the seal of the main hall of Yilong County. The entrustment of the prince and the severe bandit trouble made Wang Xingwu not dare to take the defense of Jincheng Walled City lightly. On the one hand, he added Ding Zhuang in the village to the village protection team, and the rest of the people formed a city protection team to organize training every day, and on the other hand, he moved all the old and weak women in the village to the Xinzheng Dam and the safe area west of the Xinzheng Dam for reclamation.

In this way, only about 1,000 troops were left in the wall, which not only relieved a lot of food pressure, but also made Jincheng Walled a strong forward base for the Protector Army to attack Bazhou. The right army of the official army Jia Deng, which attacked Bazhou, relied on the Jincheng Walled City as the rear.

The expansion of the army is inseparable from the storage of grain, and the storage of grain must ensure the smooth flow of the logistics supply channel from Xinzheng Dam to Jinchengzhai. The key point to control the road is Changping Village on Changping Mountain.

The Zhu Lao Dad family in Changping Village has been incorporated by Luo Jingyun into the Yilong County Independent County Protection Squadron. At the beginning of the establishment of this independent county protection squadron, there were only 70 or 80 Zhu Ding Zhuang, but with the large-scale assembly of officers and troops near Bazhou and the attack of the local tyrants on the east bank of the Jialing River, thousands of people in Baoning Province and Pengzhou escaped from the mountains, so that this independent county protection squadron quickly expanded to about 300 people.

The Yilong County Independent Squadron, like the soldiers of Jincheng Walled City and the 3,000 auxiliaries of the Jia Deng Coalition Division, in addition to defending the city and protecting the roads, also had to undertake the transportation of military rations. Hundreds of carts and chicken carts run around the winding mountain roads every day, bringing urgently needed supplies to the villages that have run out of food, and even sending more than 2,000 stone of grain to the 6,000 people of the Jia army every month.

By the middle of the first month of the fifteenth year of Chongzhen, Jinchengzhai had hoarded more than 5,000 stones of grain, enough for a thousand people in Wang Province to hold on for a whole year.

……

When the Li family arrived at Jincheng Walled, Wang Xingwu, Zhou Changzhong, the deputy captain of the brigade, and Deng Wenxing, the deputy supervisor of the brigade and the enlightened gentry of Yilong, were inspecting a defensive fortress under construction at the foot of Jincheng Walled Mountain.

This kind of fortress is called Dun Fort in the north, and the watchtower is called in the south.

The watchtower is built on a mountain beam that protrudes to the south of Jincheng Mountain, and it is more than 300 steps away from the south gate of Jincheng Walled City. The official road leading to Bazhou is on the west side of the mountain beam, and the thousands of acres of narrow tuntian fields sandwiched in the ravine from north to south are on the east side of the mountain beam.

With the help of the high in the north and low in the south, and the slope of the east and west, build a fortress on the ridge line of the mountain, which can not only block the road to the mountain under the mountain, but also control the official road in the west, and also cover the soldiers to the nearest tuntian.

The watchtower is built on a whole rock at the mountain beam, and the shape from a distance is a hexagonal platform cone with a large bottom and a small top. If you look closely, you can see that it has six sharp corners that stand out distinctly.

If you look down from the sky, the watchtower is like a scraping D emblem that protrudes six sharp corners. The only difference between the two is that the D emblem of scraping people D has twelve sharp corners, and the watchtower is less than half. In addition, in the middle of each protruding sharp corner, there is a flat wall more than three feet wide. According to its appearance characteristics, the soldiers called it "hexagonal block", and also nicknamed it "dogtooth block".

The design height of the hexagonal tower is five zhang and four feet, each zhang is a layer, and the ground is paved with square wood. The top is open, there is a canopy to shelter from the rain, and the breast wall can be equipped with cannons. The second, third, fourth, and fifth floors below are all equipped with gun eyes and tiger squat muzzles. The left and right corners of the six corners and the recesses of the corners are equipped with guns and tiger squat muzzles, so wherever the enemy attacks the hexagonal block, it will be fired from two or three sides by the defenders.

The lowest layer is four feet at the narrowest diagonal point and five feet four feet at the widest point. In order to prevent the enemy from blasting with a large amount of gunpowder, three layers of stones and rammed earth were used: two layers of sandstone strips of one foot square formed the outer wall, and inside the outer wall was five feet thick gravel rammed earth, and inside the layer of gravel rammed earth was another layer of stones, so the total thickness of the lowest layer of the wall had reached eight feet, and the six corners were filled with solid fill.

After the first floor was built, Wang Xingwu used a 50-pound black powder bag to blast it, but it was difficult to move the foundation of the wall. The bottom is sturdy, but in order to save labor and materials, the upper layers of the hexagonal towers have thinned the exterior walls. The second layer of the wall is also a stone, but it is reduced to a single layer, and there is no rammed earth. On the upper floors, the walls were built with the fire bricks that had been removed from the houses in the city, supplemented by sandbags, which could block the fire and lead.

The designer of the hexagonal fortress is none other than Zhu Pingjian, a famous architect who is famous for his "erudition and Confucianism, and no knowledge".

In the hexagonal fortress, two concentric circles need to be drawn on the ground with sticks and ropes (as compasses), and then they are divided into twelve equal parts, and the bisecting points are connected in a straight line through the center of the circle, and then the inner and outer circles are alternately connected with the intersection points of the connecting lines, which will form this hexagonal protruding shape.

During the training camp in Songlin Mountain, Miss Luo used to use compasses and rulers on black lacquered wooden boards to demonstrate live for the officers of the caravan. When Miss Luo demonstrated, Shizi explained on the side that some of the Tusi stone towers in the mountains west of Dujiangyan now adopt this construction concept. The advantage is that each corner can be flanked by bows and arrows, so there is no dead end. Enemy soldiers who climb walls with ladders either expose their backs, their sides, or even their backs to the defending side. Second, the anti-artillery performance is better. Because the protruding sharp corners can make the cannon ricochet and cushion the momentum of the gun. Of course, there are pros and cons to everything, this peculiar configuration of the hexagonal watchtower is relative to the square and round watchtower, costly and labor-intensive, and the construction is time-consuming.

During the training camp in Songlin Mountain, most of the officers of the caravan guard did not seem to understand the lectures of Shizi and Miss Luo due to their weak cultural foundation, but Wang Xingwu, who was smart and had a cultural foundation, immediately understood the essence of knowledge. With an attitude of awe, he applied all the knowledge he had learned to the construction of the watchtower.

In the construction of watchtowers, Wang Xingwu also used another knowledge he learned, that is, soil cement.

The production of this cement is very simple, it is burned in a kiln with limestone and coal from the mountains. The limestone reaches the kiln body, and the belly is filled with coal. The kiln was dismantled after the coal was burned out, and the limestone was burned into quicklime. The quicklime block and the cinder inside are crushed and finely stirred, and then some plaster powder is tripped on to become cement powder (Note 1). When the cement paddle dries, it can replace the glutinous rice paddle to play a bonding role and be used as a joint material for stone bricks.

Gypsum is the most common mineral among the people and is not uncommon. Outside the doors of the houses of the Beiyuan Temple, there are often a lot of condensed residues taken out of the brine. The main component of these residues is gypsum.

……

When the Li family climbed up to the third floor of the hexagonal watchtower through the corner staircase on the bottom of the watchtower, the third floor had been paved, and the outer wall more than four feet high had been erected around it. The watchtowers with a limited area are crowded with people, carrying bricks and bricks, carrying water and mud.

Amid the cacophony of sounds, Wang Xingwu, Zhou Changzhong, and Deng Wenxing stood at a gap in the outer wall, pointing to the distant hill to discuss how to build a few lookouts nearby.

The family Ding hurriedly finished explaining the end of Wang Chaoyang's mutiny, and said: "Captain He has rushed back to Hejiazhuang from Beiyuan Temple overnight yesterday!" Captain Xu led two squadrons of men and horses to cross the Jialing River and drive towards the (southern) county seat, while the rest of the men and horses continued to guard the Xinzheng Dam and Beiyuan Temple. Captain Xu said that the southern county town could not be lost, the Beiyuan Temple could not be lost, and the Xinzheng Dam could not be lost. There are few soldiers and many places, and there are local rioters everywhere, who are in a hurry to get on fire. Captain Xu also said that Captain Wang had any plans and sent someone to tell him. As for whether Jia Jiangye will tell him, let Captain Wang choose! ”

Captain Xu is Xu Shoucai, who guards the New Deal Dam. It makes sense that he was in a hurry.

The Southern County Huzhuang Brigade was reorganized from the original 4th Company of the 1st Battalion, Hejia Zhuangding, Xinzheng Dam Li Family, and Zhou Family's Zhuang Ding Zhuanghu, with a total of about 800. Originally, it was stationed at the New Deal Dam and the Beiyuan Temple.

Xinzheng Dam is the logistics base camp of the joint headquarters of the official army and the northern Sichuan team of the Protector Army, with about 70,000 stone of food, as well as a large amount of gunpowder, clothing and weapons. The Xinzheng Dam controls the waterway of the Jialing River and is the only place where Boryeong Province connects Shunqing and Hezhou. Therefore, there is no room for error.

In addition to the military factor, there are also economic factors.

Beiyuan Temple and Yuji Mountain area are the salt industry center of northern Sichuan, not only a large amount of salt is stored in Cangtun, but also more important salt wells. The Xinzheng Dam is close to the water and has become the circulation center of the salt industry in northern Sichuan. If the dam were to be occupied by the local mobs, the monetary loss would be very heavy.

Not long ago, at the end of last year, Hong Qihui, the new vice premier of the royal palace, made a special trip to accompany Fang Yaoxiang, the imperial historian of Sichuan Salt Patrol, to the Beiyuan Temple from the artesian well to inspect the salt well and the boiling salt here in detail.

During the inspection, Hong Qihui clearly told the salt merchants that the Shu Wangfu and the government supported the increase in the excavation of salt wells in the Beiyuan Temple area to produce more salt. All outputs, the Shu Wangfu will be fully harvested according to the price.

Behind the monopoly of the salt industry, there is undoubtedly a huge business opportunity, which makes the blood of the local gentry boil. The local gentry had recently scraped together more than 100,000 taels of silver to form a "chiseling society" specializing in the excavation of salt wells. The top three shareholders with the largest proportion of shares in Chisel Mountain Society are Li Junying, Li Juncheng brothers, Zhou Wenzheng, and He Yongnian, who is also the head of the Baoning Zhuang of the Shu Wangfu and the deputy captain of the Shun Protection Zhuang Corps.

Jiangzuo's Xinzheng dam must not be lost, and the southern counties of Jiangyou must be saved. Xu Shoucai had less than a thousand people in his hands, and he was divided into two halves by the wide Jialing River, so he was naturally in a hurry.

Note 1: This semi-oval stone kiln was once commonly used in the southwestern mountainous areas, and there are still relics until the beginning of the 21st century. Everywhere you drive, it seems that the giant eggs of the Zerg are all over the land, which is extremely interesting.