The business in Dianshan Town is getting better and better, and Ji Qingwen's income is also rising, but after more than half a year's effort, he filled all the silver holes that he had previously issued through Ji's Qianzhuang, and saved more than one million taels of silver.

Emperor Chongzhen, who sat in Beijing, was not completely blind or deaf.

Ji Qingwen has made such a big business in Jiangnan, how can he escape the eyes of this tricky and mean emperor?

Since ancient times, it is not a good thing for the courtiers to be too powerful, especially a figure like Ji Qingwen, who can raise and train troops self-sufficiently, just like a prince. Even after Ji Qingwen opened Ji's money bank, he mastered the right to issue currency that should be monopolized by the imperial court.

It stands to reason that with Emperor Chongzhen's character, he will definitely not be able to tolerate Ji Qingwen. But now that the Ming court is in danger, there are places everywhere that need money, and it is impossible not to leave Ji Qingwen, the god of wealth, to make money for the court to supply financial expenditures.

But Chongzhen did not spare Ji Qingwen lightly, and a holy decree came down, and asked Ji Qingwen to increase the amount of silver that must be paid to the imperial court every year from 300,000 taels to a full 1 million taels.

The amount of one million taels of silver is equivalent to about one-fifth of the annual income of the imperial court. Emperor Chongzhen, who took so much silver, would of course have a lot more money on hand, whether it was disaster relief or the use of soldiers, he would become more comfortable.

But Ji Qingwen was very unhappy.

He himself needs a lot of money - Dianshan Town needs to be expanded, Dianshan Port needs daily maintenance, manual workshops need to add machinery, the shipbuilding industry is still just starting and needs money to smash, and the Ming Wu Army also has a thousand personnel to replenish.

Pick out any one here, and you need to fill it with silver like mountains and seas, but the million taels of silver that Emperor Chongzhen took away are half of Ji Qingwen's annual profits, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is a salary draw from the bottom of the kettle.

What's more, if the money given to the imperial court can be really used on the heads of the common people and on the bitter soldiers, it will be just intercepted and exploited by corrupt officials at all levels.

In this regard, although Ji Qingwen was angry, he was also very helpless.

Although in this great tomorrow now, in terms of property, power, and military strength, except for the high-ranking Emperor Chongzhen, there is no one who can compete with him. But this court is too big, too big, if Ji Qingwen offends enough people, let them gather together to make Ji Qingwen trouble, they can also crush this once-glorious Earl of Fulu into powder.

Now Ji Qingwen still can only choose to endure.

Forbearance is not blindly giving in, but to take out the kung fu of "making a dojo in a snail shell", dancing with shackles, and finally getting rid of shackles and becoming the master of shackles.

In the first dance, Ji Qingwen asked Li Yuanyin to dance.

Under the auspices of Li Yuanyin, a senior spy who also has the identity of the commander of the Jinyi Guard, the forces of the three sects and the nine streams have increasingly taken refuge in Ji Qingwen's name, and even rebelled against many depressed figures in the Jinyi Wei system, so that they can wholeheartedly serve Ji Qingwen, so that a steady stream of intelligence information will flow to Ji Qingwen's ears like the water of a river.

On this basis, plus those members of the Fushe who have passed the imperial examination and become officials in the imperial court, Ji Qingwen has mastered all kinds of information from top to bottom, inside and outside the Ming court.

Although he lived in Dianshan Port, Songjiang Prefecture, the news did not circulate and had a certain slowness, but in the era of the Ming Dynasty, there was no news that was not slow, to talk about reliability and immediacy, Ji Qingwen was far above anyone else, of course, including Emperor Chongzhen.

The second dance is danced on the magnificent sea.

Ji Qingwen invested 300,000 taels of silver to build the big ship, and finally under the construction of Song Yingxing, Tang Ruowang and other skilled craftsmen, it was completed and launched on August 15, the fourth year of Chongzhen!

The length and width of this ship were the largest in the world at that time, and it could be described as an aircraft carrier in the late Ming Dynasty, which was enough to dominate the East China Sea, and even Zheng Zhilong, the current maritime king, couldn't help but cast jealous and envious eyes. What is even more commendable is that this ship has applied the scientific and technological achievements of China and the West, and although the ship is large, it is not slow at all, and it is only faster than Zheng Zhilong's white clipper as his flagship.

With such a speed as a basis, Ji Qingwen was able to refit on an empty ship.

First of all, the outside of the wooden ship's side was covered with copper plates coated with tung oil. The thickness of these copper plates is not high, and they cannot withstand the bombardment of artillery, but they can make the bow and crossbow rockets used in ordinary naval battles useless. In the key parts of the ship, he referred to the experience of the Ming Wujun chariot that he had used many times, and covered it with copper blocks and copper beams, even if he was hit by one or two shells, he could ensure that the ship's structure was not damaged.

Blocking the attack of the opponent's weapons, the firepower of the big ship itself cannot be ignored.

Those bows and crossbows and arrows that are overwhelmed and have lagged behind the development of the times, of course Ji Qingwen is not eye-catching, what he likes is the latest Western artillery. So he took a two-pronged approach, buying more than 40 of Europe's most advanced large-caliber artillery pieces from Zheng Zhilong and at the dock of Dianshan Port respectively.

After these artillery equipment were completed, Ji Qingwen deliberately drove the sea ship to the outside of Dianshan Port, chose an empty island floating alone on the sea, and first conducted a military exercise for him.

If you want to talk about the money spent, you can really hear it - when these cannons fire in a volley, it is like a thunderbolt of nine days, blasting the stone walls of this isolated island into craters and flying stone chips. The firepower of this battleship is already the only crushing combat power at sea.

Zheng Zhilong, who was invited to watch the battle, met him on the side, and also praised him: "A warship like Lord Ji can run rampant on the sea from now on, and no one dares to touch Lord Ji's tiger whiskers anymore!" ”

Although Zheng Zhilong said this in his mouth, he was afraid and jealous in his heart-

The sea is different from the land, it is a place that only recognizes strength and does not pay attention to morality, and if you want to gain power, you can only rely on how many ships, how many people, how many cannons, and how much money you have. And now, Ji Qingwen has such a weapon of naval warfare in his hand, so he can use violence to seize the dominance of the sea at any time, and this kind of dominance based on absolute strength cannot be easily taken away by anyone (including Zheng Zhilong, of course). If you want to regain this dominance, you can only get a stronger strength than Ji Qingwen.

However, is this possible for Zheng Zhilong?

However, Ji Qingwen only has this ship in his hand now, and it has been used as a warship by himself, which is full of guns and ammunition, and there is not much space to carry goods, so it is inevitable that he will be a little overstretched when he uses it.

According to Ji Qingwen's plan, this warship was used to show his muscles, and it was to be used to deter other maritime forces. In order to engage in international trade and open up overseas markets, a large number of lightly armed merchant ships are still needed - of course, this so-called "light armament" is an out-and-out overwhelming force in the eyes of most other maritime merchants.

However, shipbuilding is not an overnight thing, and even with the successful experience of building this warship, it still takes three and a half years to build a fleet, and a lot of money needs to be invested. This is not a trivial matter, but it is also a good thing with great benefits, Ji Qingwen can only take one step and watch one step at a time, and slowly handle this matter well.

It's just that even Ji Qingwen didn't expect that by the time he had completely built the fleet, he would no longer be in Dianshan Port......

This dance on the sea has just started, and when Ji Qingwen was about to make a big show and choreograph this solo dance into a magnificent and gorgeous dance drama, bad news came-

It has been reported that in the summer of the fourth year of Chongzhen, there was a severe drought in the north, and Shaanxi, Shanxi, Gansu, Henan, Hebei, and Shandong had no harvest. The imperial court opened a warehouse to release grain, but those black-hearted landlords and wealthy households, colluded with corrupt officials and corrupt officials, privately bought disaster relief grain at a low price, and then sold it at a high price.

These victims were already so hungry that they only had one breath left, and they couldn't survive anymore after being tossed like this. Starving to death is also death, killing is also death, horizontal and vertical are one death, then it can only be reversed!

Anti-fucking!

So on a piece of thousands of miles of red land, one, two, three, countless peasants raised the last breath of strength left in their bodies, raised their arms, lifted the rod, and stirred up the peasant uprisings that had been gradually quelled by the imperial court.

Gao Yingxiang, Li Zicheng, Zhang Xianzhong and other peasant leaders who had been beaten by Ji Qingwen and fled into the mountains and did not dare to rise up, saw the wolf smoke all over the ground, and also came out of the mountains, re-branded the banner of "Juntian free grain", and launched one impact after another towards the crumbling Ming court.

On the front lines of Shaanxi and Shanxi, the one who resisted the popular rebellion for the imperial court was Hong Chengchou, who had some dealings with Ji Qingwen.

At this moment, Hong Chengchou is no longer the Hong Chengchou who is submissive under Yuzhong County, he has changed from the Shaanxi Governor of Shaanxi from the fourth grade to the trilateral general system of the second grade!

It's not that Hong Chengchou showed much military and political talent at this moment, it's just that his immediate bosses, Liu Guangsheng, the governor of Shaanxi, and Yang He, the general system of the three sides, were too useless, and in less than a year, he was imprisoned by the impatient Emperor Chongzhen for failing to quell the rebellion. And every time a boss is unlucky, it is Hong Chengchou's turn to be lucky, and he is promoted to three levels in a year, and this kind of promotion speed is probably only comparable to Ji Qingwen......

However, Hong Chengchou did have some talent in both military and political aspects, and after he succeeded to the trilateral general system, he raised troops to fight again, extinguishing the peasant uprising that had been like a prairie fire, and temporarily maintained the stability of the Ming court.

However, this disaster that led to the peasant uprising was not only for the Ming court, but also for the Mongols and Jurchens.

Mongolia is vast and sparsely populated, and in the face of such a serious disaster, there is still room for maneuver, so it is enough to pack up the yurt, catch up with the thin horses and hungry sheep, greet the wives and children, and go further west to herd.

But the Jurchens were confined to the northeast corner, and there was no other way out in the bitter cold land, so they could only go south to plunder the people of the Ming Dynasty.

But when Chongzhen changed in the second year, the situation changed again. At the beginning, the Guanning defense line, which had an obvious weak link in Yuan Chonghuan's hands, had become impregnable and impermeable under the command of the old superintendent Sun Chengzong, and he was waiting for the elite soldiers of the Eight Banners to come and attack.