Fan Jingwen, Gong Yonggu and other officials chose to die for the Ming Dynasty to be buried, and more officials and nobles chose to forget the court they were loyal to in the past and flattered the new lord. However, what awaits most people is not the trust of the new Lord, but a fate far more tragic than that of the martyrs.

The current policy of the Dashun Army is still a continuation of the policy of not levying taxes in the previous three years, "killing cattle and sheep, preparing wine and pulp, opening the city gate to welcome the king, and not paying grain when the king comes" is its slogan to unite the hearts of the people, and this policy has not changed because of the establishment of the state in Xi'an and even the capture of Beijing.

In other words, the people under the rule of Dashun do not need to pay any taxes, but if the people do not pay taxes, where will the huge army and government expenses come from? Of course, it was taken from the rich. Therefore, wherever the Dashun army passed, the officials and squires and rich families were unlucky, not to mention that they were executed, their family property was often plundered, and the fields were also distributed to the poor.

At present, the scale of the Dashun army has grown to hundreds of thousands, and the food and salary required by the huge army is astronomical, and after entering Beijing, there is very little silver confiscated from the emperor's treasury, so how to support the huge expenses of the army naturally depends on the rich people in Beijing.

In the city of Beijing, there are hundreds of nobles, thousands of officials, and tens of thousands of others such as eunuchs, factory guards, and others. The Dashun Dynasty naturally did not need the nobles of the former Ming Dynasty to be loyal and contributed, and in the eyes of Li Zicheng and other Dashun leaders, there were no officials in the Ming Dynasty who were not greedy, and other eunuchs such as Jinyi Wei were the targets of the cleanup. As long as the wealth is scavenged from these people, even if taxes are levied, it will be enough to cover the expenses of the Dashun army and the court for several years, and after a few years, the world will definitely be unified and stabilized, and then taxes will be levied.

Therefore, after stabilizing the situation in Beijing, Li Zicheng immediately began to recover the stolen goods and salaries, and the general Liu Zongmin was in charge, and raised the butcher's knife to the noble ministers in Beijing.

When Zhu Chunchen, the Duke of Chengguo, attacked the Dashun army, he opened the Qihua Gate and surrendered, and later led a hundred officials to persuade Li Zicheng to ascend the throne as emperor together with Chen Yan, the former first assistant. But on March 22, Li Zicheng ordered Zhu Chunchen to be executed, and his family property was confiscated.

The civil officials are still of some use to the Dashun Dynasty, after all, they need to govern the country and manage the people for the Dashun, but these former Ming clan nobles are completely useless to the Dashun, under the order of Liu Zongmin, the Dashun soldiers rushed into the homes of the nobles, whether it is the prince in power, or the idle earl, all of them are locked on the spot, and the big torturers are waiting to recover the property, and the leather whip is splinted, and the skin and flesh of these former nobles are opened, the bones are broken, and the silver coins hidden in the ground have to be spit out one by one.

Zhou Kui, the abbot of the country, when Chongzhen ordered the ministers to give silver to help him, let him take the lead, and Zhou Kui reluctantly paid 5,000 taels of silver. And now, under the leather whip of the vicious Shun soldiers, Zhou Kui handed over 300,000 taels of silver at once, in order to get the forgiveness of the Shun army. However, Liu Zongmin and the others had no sympathy for these former Ming relatives, and had to squeeze out all their silver. The soldiers of the Shun army tortured Zhou Kui and even his family, Zhou Kui's wife and daughter-in-law could not bear the humiliation and hanged themselves, Zhou Kui's eldest son was killed on the spot, he and his second son were also beaten all over the body, and finally had to hand over all the wealth, only silver amounted to as much as one million taels.

For the emperor of the clan, Qi Xungui used the form of torture to extract confessions to recover stolen goods and salaries, and for civil officials, the methods of the Shun army were much gentler. Those officials who have been hired by the government only need to pay a small amount of silver taels, while for other civil officials, the price is clearly marked. 100,000 Cabinet scholars, 70,000 Ministries and Auditoriums, 50,000 or 30,000 others, and so on, are clearly marked according to the rank of the officials.

Civil officials who can pay the full amount of silver taels are not to blame in the past, and those who resist and do not accept or cannot pay will be punished with sticks. The torture tools of Jinyi Guard, the prison of Wanping County, Shuntian Prefecture, were all taken out and used on the former officials. And these officials, who used to torture the people at every turn, have finally tasted the taste of torture equipment today.

Wei Zaode, who had only been the first assistant for a month, handed over tens of thousands of taels of silver under the threat of being clamped off by a stick, but Liu Zongmin never believed that a cabinet chief assistant only had tens of thousands of taels of silver and continued to be tortured. Wei Zaode shouted in prison, he didn't serve the Lord faithfully before, and today is too late to regret! After five days and five nights of torture, Wei Zaode died of a split brain in prison, and his son was immediately executed.

After the former first assistant Chen Yan was arrested and put in prison, he took the initiative to pay 100,000 taels of silver, and was released by Liu Zongmin, but he did not escape the fate of death in the end, and a few days later, Wu Sangui rebelled, Li Zicheng was afraid that the old ministers of the Ming Dynasty would take the opportunity to make trouble in Beijing before the army, and decided to kill a group of old ministers of the Ming Dynasty, and Chen Yan was killed.

In this atmosphere of wailing among civil officials and nobles, there are also a small number of people who have successfully flattered and won the trust of Liu Zongmin, and Luo Yangxing, the former commander of the Jinyi Guard, is one of them.

The former commander of Jinyiwei made Luo Yangxing announced his release after taking the initiative to hand over 40,000 taels of silver, but Luo Yangxing took the initiative to propose to Liu Zongmin that he was willing to help Liu Zongmin complete the recovery of stolen goods. Jin Yiwei's duty is to supervise hundreds of officials, Luo Yangxing, as a former commander, is naturally very familiar with the situation of officials in Beijing, who is rich and rich, and whose family is generally well-informed.

Liu Zongmin is very happy to have such a person to serve, after all, this will greatly improve the efficiency of recovering stolen goods and helping money, and can greatly save time, after all, Liu Zongmin, as the second person in Dashun, cannot spend all his energy on this matter.

With Luo Yangxing's help, the efficiency of recovering stolen goods and subsidies has been greatly improved, and in just a few days, the recovered wealth is equivalent to as much as 70 million taels of silver! And Luo Yangxing also gained Liu Zongmin's trust through this matter, so he took the opportunity to slander Liu Zongmin, saying that Chen Yue, who was stationed outside the city, was very rich as the governor of Tianjin, and encouraged Liu Zongmin to arrest Chen Yue and recover the stolen goods.

After thinking carefully, Liu Zongmin shook his head and refused. Chen Yue was not an ordinary Ming Dynasty official, but a general who commanded the army, and if he was used, it would inevitably cause panic among other generals who surrendered to the Ming army, and it would inevitably cause turmoil. Now there are nearly 200,000 troops near Beijing, but there are only more than 70,000 old battalion soldiers of the Dashun army, and the rest are the surrendered Ming army.

Luo Yangxing had a grudge against Chen Yue, and when he saw that the frame could not be achieved, he had to fight other ideas, and heard that Chen Yue had fought with the Shun army in Daming Gate, and the north of Daming Gate was the palace, so he sent his men to investigate what happened after Chen Yue entered the inner city.