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The reply from Guangdong was very fast, and fifteen days after Zhang Jiayu's letter was sent, the reply from the King of Chu came, along with five large sea ships from Dongguan.

These sea vessels were used to transport equipment and provisions. At the same time, Zhu Hongsan agreed that Zhang Jiayu would select 5,000 people from the displaced people for training, but at present, the production of firearms cannot keep up, and cold weapons can only be used temporarily.

Of course, the one who was most happy with the equipment supply was Ma Liang, and when the ship docked, this guy rushed up as soon as he got on the dock, and ordered his soldiers to start unloading.

Looking at boxes of muskets, barrels of gunpowder, and artillery pieces, Ma Liang was overjoyed, only with equipment can he win the battle, and only by winning the battle can he make meritorious contributions, and the king of Chu has always rewarded military merits heavily. I heard that the regiment leaders who went to Nanzhili with Zhao Guodong each got hundreds of acres of land.

Maleonn opened a wicker box, in which were five muskets, neatly arranged, and the guns were coated with moisture-proof grease.

Maleonn picked up a musket, huh? The weight is wrong! Ma Liang has used muskets for several years, and each of the previous muskets weighed twenty-eight pounds, but the musket in front of him was only twenty pounds, which was too light.

Zhang Jiayu, who was on the side, saw Ma Liang frowning and asked, "General Ma, what's wrong?" Got a problem with the musket? ”

"It's a bit of a problem, it's a lot lighter than the old muskets!"

"Doesn't it affect the use?"

Ma Liang shook his head and didn't speak, he took the old-fashioned musket from the guards beside him, compared it, and found that the wall of the barrel had become thinner, and the lighter device had been simplified, and the reduced weight should be here.

Ma Liang took out a fixed ammunition, bit off the oiled paper, poured the gunpowder and bullets into the barrel of the gun, then took out the copper bar and compacted, took out the gunpowder pot and poured the gunpowder into the fire pool, pressed the powder board to compact, and a musket ready to be fired. Although Ma Liang's * action is cumbersome, but after training, he can shoot three to four rounds per minute, and Ma Liang, as an excellent musket commander, can do five shots a minute, which is already very awesome.

After loading the ammunition, Ma Liang looked around, and it happened that there was a flagpole on the pier with a lantern on it, less than a hundred meters away from Ma Liang.

After aiming at Ma Liang, he pulled the trigger and fired, and a gunshot rang out on the dock, startling the sailors and merchants around him.

After shooting, Ma Liang nodded and said to Zhang Jiayu: "Lord Zhang, the new musket this time is very good, it is a few catties lighter than the old-fashioned musket, and it is much more powerful, and it can hit fifty meters more than before." ”

Hearing that the musket was fine, Zhang Jiayu was also relieved, he was a literati, as long as the equipment was fine, he didn't care how light and powerful things were.

In fact, the weight reduction of the new musket is the result of the use of the Dongguan steam engine, the previous hydraulic drilling is difficult to grasp the force, and the hydrodynamic transmission is not continuous, sometimes large and sometimes small, so the craftsmen can only increase the thickness of the barrel to ensure the fault tolerance. However, the situation changed greatly after the steam engine was put into use, the power of the steam engine was very strong and stable, and the drill bit could do more work, so the barrel did not need to be so thick.

The laborers on the dock began to unload the ship, and the second ship was loaded with iron sheets, Zhang Jiayu didn't know why, and hurriedly asked the officials of the Ministry of Industry who came with the ship.

Now that the Ministry of Industry has just asked Zhu Hongsan to rectify it, the boss has been demoted, and several other directors of the Ministry of Industry have also been unlucky, so this Ministry of Industry official has changed his previous domineering demeanor, and when he heard Zhang Jiayu ask, he quickly explained with a smile.

"This lord, this is a piece of armor, because the factory in Dongguan is not manpowered, so the fate of the king of Chu is to come to the piece of armor, and the personnel of Nanxiong Mansion will organize personnel to produce it!"

Do you want to produce your own? It seems that there is a big shortage of personnel in Dongguan.

"There is also Lord Zhang, there are twenty-three prisoners detained on the last ship, they are accomplices in this imperial examination case, the king of Chu has the virtue of a good life and did not kill them, but all the fame is gone, and they are sent to Shaonan to be handed over to Lord Zhang, and the order of the king of Chu is to let them join the army!"

It seems that these twenty-three people are those unlucky talents, and they didn't get it, so they were sentenced to confiscate the army.

Zhang Jiayu nodded and ordered his subordinates to go and accept these unlucky eggs.

Watching the laborers unload the weapons on the ship, Zhang Jiayu and the Ministry of Industry official completed the handover, and the five ships turned back to Dongguan.

Zhang Jiayu began to be busy here, organizing personnel to produce, and the weapons transported were all semi-finished products, the spear only had a spear head, the horizontal knife was not equipped with a handle, and the armor was only a piece of armor, all of which had to be produced locally.

Zhang Jiayu's full official title is Guangdong Sentencing Envoy Si Shaonan Bingbei Dao, Bingbei Dao is in charge of the local army, but it is attached to the name of the judicial organ, so there is such a strange thing in the Ming Dynasty. It is precisely because of this that the Nanxiong Mansion under the rule of Bingbeidao and Buzheng Si are two independent departments, and the production of weapons requires the vigorous cooperation of the local government.

Zhang Jiayu found Nanxiong's fellow acquaintance Zheng Xian and said: "Lord Zheng, the weapons transported by the King of Chu are all semi-finished products, and I still need the help of Lord Zheng to transfer some craftsmen to me so as to organize production, so as not to delay the training." ”

"No problem, if Lord Zhang is in trouble, he will say that the subordinate will do his best to meet the needs of military training!"

The whole government knew that this soldier was a close confidant of the king of Chu, so Zheng Tongzhi didn't dare to have any embarrassment, and agreed with his mouth.

Seeing that this side is going well, Zhang Jiayu is full of confidence, and the next step is to recruit troops.

Nanxiong Mansion originally had a guard post, and there were 3,600 soldiers during the Hongwu period, and there was a garrison to guard the town. However, after more than 200 years, the guard post has long been dilapidated, and most of the military households have fled. There are only more than 500 people, most of whom are old and weak, and only a thousand households are at the head.

When Zhang Jiayu first arrived, he went to see Nanxiongwei, where did Wang Qianhu still have a little military temperament, he was completely a landlord and old wealth, using the five or six hundred soldiers in his hands to smuggle salt on a large scale.

Zhang Jiayu looked around and didn't say anything, because Zhu Hongsan adopted a shelving policy for the local health center system in Guangdong. Guangdong here is not like the north, the guard system was completely destroyed by the rogue, Guangdong because it did not suffer from military disasters, the guard system is still intact. The reason why Zhu Hongsan didn't want to touch it was because it was a puddle of stinky water, and whoever got it would get wet, so he still didn't touch it before he had absolute authority.

But every year, the guard also receives hundreds of thousands of taels of silver from the Ministry of War, and there is no way, since Zhu Hongsan accepts the allegiance of others, he has to give benefits. Therefore, not moving the current system has become the unspoken rule of Zhu Hongsan's group.

Zhang Jiayu has also been in the center for a while, so he naturally knows this. The Qianhu didn't say anything when he saw that Lord Daotai had come around, thinking that Zhang Jiayu was not satisfied, and sent Zhang Jiayu two thousand taels of silver overnight that night, and Zhang Jiayu accepted it quietly.

Zhang Jiayu is not as high-spirited as Chongzhen for 17 years, and the encounter in Beijing and Nanjing has made him grow a lot, and he realizes that it is not good to be a maverick, so this time he took any money and ate any food, and for a time Zhang Jiayu had a good reputation in Nanxiong officialdom.

After the weapons production is arranged, the next step is to recruit soldiers. There are more than 20,000 displaced people outside Nanxiong City, and a large number of displaced people come from the Meiling Ancient Road every day.

The recruitment was all arranged to Ma Liang, and this guy has now moved all of his regiments to Nanxiong, leaving only one battalion in Shaozhou.

The recruits were quickly recruited, and the treatment was very simple, three dry meals a day, full of money, one or two silver per month, and the actual payment. This is simply the same as the New Year, you must know that ordinary farmers in the Taiping period are two meals a day, or one dry and one thin, whether they can eat enough is another matter.

The King of Chu stipulated that 5,000 people should be recruited, but because of the favorable conditions, there were enough seven or eight thousand people to sign up, and Ma Liang saw that the number was sufficient, so he naturally chose the quality of the soldiers.

Three days later, Zhang Jiayu inspected the prospective soldiers on the large playground of Nanxiongwei, and Zhang Jiayu was also very satisfied. Next is the training of recruits, Ma Liang dispatched a hundred non-commissioned officers in his regiment, each with fifty people, and began to train these recruits.

Ma Liang also had to take care of the training of the new army, and after organizing the people, he handed over the militia training to Ma Rufeng, the deputy commander of the regiment.

Ma Rufeng has been very unhappy in the past few years, after returning to Wuchang from Xinyang, his unlucky brother-in-law Zhu Hongsan asked him what he wanted to do, Ma Rufeng said that he wanted to go to the army, but Zhu Hongsan left him in the army and ignored him.

Fortunately, Ma Rufeng has fought in Xinyang, and he is not a newcomer, so he would have to let these veterans play to death. In this way, Ma Rufeng also followed Zhu Hongsan to Guangdong, watching his brother-in-law marry more and more women, and his sister became more and more unfavored.

In fact, the army is still good, Zhu Hongsan's new army has just been formed, and it is the time when it is full of vitality, there is no need to slap horses here, there is no need to buy and sell officials, as long as you dare to work hard and have military achievements, you can become a big official.

After Ma Rufeng arrived in Guangdong, he participated in all the crackdowns on bandits, and he achieved the position of deputy head of the regiment with all his own skills.

In the past few days, he also knew what had happened in his family, and he was also very helpless, his second uncle was not right first, and the king of Chu dealt with it leniently. However, his father is almost fifty years old and has to travel thousands of miles to Luzon to be the county magistrate, Ma Rufeng is still very distressed, although Ma Jiyuan is not very kind to this son, but after all, the relationship between father and son cannot be separated.

Ma Rufeng received the task to train these recruits, and he was overjoyed, he had just arrived in the army and was tossed by those veterans, so he could try his own methods this time.

Ma Rufeng's means are very simple, that is, the old three, standing in line, running, and sorting out housekeeping. It sounds simple, but it's hard to do.

The battle queue had to stand for three hours, not moving. The run is a ten-mile cross-country, fully armed. Tidying up housekeeping is the most demanding, and even towels should be placed the same length.