The grand ceremony of the Tang Empire in Chang'an spread rapidly to various places in the following time, and the people in the area under the jurisdiction of the Tiance Army naturally cheered and celebrated the birth of the new empire. But elsewhere there is a cloud of gloom. The feudal towns on the south bank of the Yangtze River are scattered at the moment, and the separatist forces are planning their own way out. Some people tried to make contact with the new empire in the north, and more often thought about how to get rid of the threat.

However, the top echelons of the empire apparently did not pay attention to these changes, but instead focused on the economic development of the Central Plains, and after the meeting of political envoys in Chang'an, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, the Ministry of Finance, and several departments of Datang Qianzhuang began to transfer a large number of people to these provinces soon after to assist in the reform. The Ministry of Agriculture, the head of everything, and even Minister Wang Jingyu went to Luoyang in person to take command of the land reform, and the garrisons of the Central Plains provinces also began to receive instructions from the Tiance Government to assist the provinces and regions in carrying out land reform. The newly renamed Datang Land Law began to be rapidly distributed to all provinces and states, and the imperial land policy was read out.

After forming their own teams, the political envoys who arrived one after another also began to use agriculture and farmland as a breakthrough point and issued orders to prepare for reform. Although the Central Plains has experienced wars, but because it is mostly a plain area, the land is vast, and the number of landlords is large, even if Xuanyingwei has arranged countless in the era of the Xuanwu Army, but it is still not the majority for the vast number of landowners, and after the new land policy was issued, there was an uproar, and many people concentrated in the yamen of the state capital overnight to try to persuade the local officials to resist the change. This struggle, which lasted for more than half a month, also showed the difficulty of implementing the land policy and the complexity of the reform in the Central Plains.

If it was before, Cen Tianshi might have considered whether to advance gradually, but at this time, the Tang Empire already controlled half of the entire north, and its power was in full swing. In response to this phenomenon of direct confrontation with the national policy, the new prime minister was furious and directly issued the first order of the cabinet, ordering all districts in the Central Plains to start activating the land law by the end of the month. Subsequently, the Law Court also began to transfer personnel from other districts into the provinces to form provisional law courts. After all the preparations were in place, the Tiance army received a joint order from the Tiance government and the provincial political envoys, asking the garrison to all parts of the country to suppress the resistance in the land reform by force, and the leaders were sent to the law court for trial, and those who dared to disobey would be killed.

After the murderous order was passed to the garrisons, these troops, who seemed harmless to humans and animals in the past, began to show their bloody side, and directly began to arrest people according to the list of the yamen in each district, and some began to cooperate with the local civil affairs officials to measure the land on the spot, and then distributed it to the local people, and the people who received the land were immediately registered as citizens and reissued their household registrations. This change unfolded almost simultaneously in all parts of the Central Plains, and thousands of landlords, large and small, who were unwilling to hand over their land, were arrested and subsequently sent to provincial magistrates to be tried by the courts. In this vigorous land reform, all the landlords who were arrested had their homes confiscated, their property confiscated, and they themselves faced punishments ranging from months to years of hard labor. It can be said that almost overnight, the Central Plains region was full of mourning, and the landlords and their families who had lost their land were unwilling to fail, and began to storm the yamen in various places, obstructing the normal office order, and were arrested again.

Although the number of those big landlords is the smallest, but the land in their hands is the most concentrated, only in Bianzhou alone, the old land advocate clan and the Wei family in the main vein of the Central Plains have hundreds of thousands of hectares of high-quality fertile land, in the face of the Central Plains political envoy Yamen announced that it turned a deaf ear, trying to rely on the private soldiers in their hands to fight against the government, but did not expect to encounter the encirclement and suppression of the National Guard in Yang Yi himself. In the face of this rare opportunity for actual combat, Yang Yi almost without any thought directly mobilized three battalions of the National Guard concentrated in Bianzhou and other places for training to participate in the battle, and immediately transferred the regular army of the nearby Tiance Army, and the two parties worked together to break Zhangjiawu Fort in one day, and killed all 27 people, including the head of the Zhang family, who was the first to make a rebellion, and the Zhang family was directly executed if they were involved in the rebellion, and all the remaining branch personnel were handed over to the law court, and the captured private soldiers were immediately ordered to join the prisoner of war team and be pulled to the Yellow River to repair the embankment.

The Zhang clan was cleanly cut off the horse, giving these large and small landlords a great shock, at the end of October, when the reform entered the end of October, finally ushered in a turning point, the most difficult to gnaw the Central Plains, Xuzhou two provinces have come to the good news one after another, after getting the land, the bottom of the people spontaneously took to the streets, in solidarity with the Tiance Army and the imperial official moves, to join the reform, countless attempts to hide the obscure landlords were re-arrested, by the way, also implicated more than a dozen assassins-level officials, more lower-level officials. The subsequent law court tried these officials as soon as possible, and everyone trembled under severe punishment, and no longer dared to speculate under the bloody butcher's knife, and the reform entered the final stage.

Since the imperial land law stipulated that the per capita cultivated land should not exceed 15 acres, the densely populated villages and towns in some parts of the Central Plains also began to migrate, moving part of the population to Youzhou and other places for redistribution. And for the first time, the movement separated the urban and rural populations, with the rural population allocating land and the urban population beginning to be transformed into professional workers and merchants. The Ministry of Industry and Commerce selected hundreds of enlightened landlords from the list provided by Xuan Yingwei in the early stage, persuaded them to start an industrial and commercial development movement together with wealthy merchants from other regions, and began to lay out the specific steps in the outline of the development plan for the Central Plains.

The Cabinet's method of raising peasants and workers at the same time also shows that the Cabinet has gradually matured its means in governing the country, and has begun to rationally distribute the ratio of the agricultural population to the industrial and commercial population, so as to provide sufficient labor resources for the next step of industrial and commercial development.

However, the Central Plains reform movement with agriculture and land reform as the starting point lasted longer than the estimation of the top head of the empire, and it took two full months to basically end, and it was not until the end of November that the newspapers of the Central Plains provinces reached Chang'an, showing that the land reform had been completed, and industry and commerce had begun to open up the situation. However, due to the extension of time, it also slowed down the pace of the Tiance Army, and the Central Plains Theater, which was originally scheduled to start planning for the coming year at the end of the year, simply put the plan on the end of the year to ensure that the local government completed the reform task and suppressed the resistance forces.

Li Xuanqing, who was at the Hezhong weapons test site, nodded after seeing the political report, put aside his thoughts, and began to seriously inspect the equipment tests of the military's new weapons.

The two units of the Guards Battalion and the Battalion directly under the Guard, totaling more than 100,000 people, have been in the river for several months, in order to prepare for the whole army to change its outfit and to test and implement tactics by the way.

"Your Majesty, has this weapon not yet been named? Do you want to add a name? "Qin Yao from the Equipment Department has rushed here directly with technicians since the end of the enthronement ceremony, guiding the troops to change their outfits while improving. At this time, what he was holding in his hand was the musket pirated by Li Xuanqing.

It's just that this musket is not like the first arquebus and other front boring guns that appeared in later history, but is similar to the first standard musket equipped by the British Army at that time - Burke musket. It adopts a front-loading and flint-firing design, and the body of the gun is about three feet one inch long with the butt, and weighs about ten catties, which can be equipped with a special bayonet. Each gun was equipped with fifty rounds of leaded mini rounds.

"Let's call it the Apocalypse Rifle." Li Xuanqing actually saw this kind of front-loading rifle pirated by himself for the first time, tried it in his hand, and felt that the weight was still a bit heavy, and the caliber did not meet his own requirements, which was almost the caliber of ten centimeters in later generations, plus the weight, the recoil brought by the impact of the projectile would definitely not be small. And the most terrible thing is that with the forging skills of the current equipment, it is not possible to depict rifling, which means that this Apocalypse One rifle is actually a smoothbore gun.

"Blizzard, how far have you tested this rifle? How much recoil is there? Li Xuanqing asked with a deep groan.

"The range is not good, only about 40 zhang of the killing distance, more than 40 zhang is basically not enough lethality. However, this projectile is very powerful. The recoil is also very large, and many soldiers die in the shoulder after firing ten bullets, and some soldiers are injured. Li Feixue also held a rifle in his hand, shook it with a wry smile, and said: "There are many people who are not used to this way of fighting, and they think that it is better to rush forward and kill with real knives and guns, and the most important thing is that they can't fight on horses." ”

Li Feixue's words embarrassed Qin Yao and the others around him, in fact, Li Xuanqing told him about rifling and depiction, but the equipment department and the Qiaoxi industrial group spent a year still not completing the task, so they could only use these smoothbore guns to experiment with soldiers.

"Do you have any solutions to the rifling problem in your armament?" Li Xuanqing nodded, if it was just a smoothbore gun, then there would be no need for a large-scale reload. Even if it is a front boring gun, it must be a rifled gun to have the value of equipment, otherwise it will be directly equipped with the personal guards of the commanders of each unit, the effect of large-scale refitting is too poor, and the range of forty zhang is really not the opponent of the bow and arrow.

"The emperor will give Weichen another three months to ensure that the rifling problem will be solved." Qin Yao gritted his teeth and said.

"Okay, Feixue, don't care about this, musket tactics are the foundation of our army's operations in the future, you have to use these thousands of muskets to practice tactics well, and besides, isn't the artillery battalion already here? It is necessary to practice well the tactics of coordinated infantry and artillery, and give full play to the advantages of artillery on the battlefield. Li Xuanqing looked at Li Feixue and Lu Yi, the wooden man on the side.

In fact, if the new weapons can meet the requirements of changing equipment, then there is no need for the Tiance Army to continue to expand the army, the total strength of more than 600,000 people, plus weapons beyond the times, not to mention the world, even if it is enough to fight the world. The heavy industry, which he had painstakingly built up today, is finally about to blossom in the military field.

After sending Li Feixue and Lu Yi away, Li Xuanqing took Qin Yao and said, "Where are you stuck now?" Didn't the steam engine already equip you with the maximum power? Still can't drive it? ”

"No, Your Majesty, the steam engine is enough, the main thing is the material." Qin Yao shook his head and said: "Because the quality of the steel required for the barrel of the musket is very good, there is no way to use ordinary materials as a carving knife to depict rifling, and the equipment department and the industrial group have tested several kinds of alloy steels but they have not been able to meet the requirements, and the rifling carved out cannot meet the requirements of the emperor, so it has not been completed." ”

Qin Yao's words made Li Xuanqing suddenly discover a problem, he has always emphasized the development of practical steel, and ignored the development of this special steel. Or that other metals, including industrial conglomerates, have not achieved much so far.

"It's a problem, but there is a remedy. In this way, you immediately send people to Taihang Mountain, Wutai Mountain and other places to find a diamond called kimberlite, and it should be enough to use it as the head of the carving knife. Li Xuanqing described to Qin Yao in detail the appearance of the diamond and the several places where the diamond was stored in his memory, and asked him to immediately take someone to find it and then mine it. As soon as Qin Yao heard that there was a way to do this, he hurriedly pulled a few technicians behind him to get on the horse and rush out, this problem had been bothering him for a long time, and when he heard that there was a way to solve it, how could he take care of it so much?

"Big brother stumped? Regarding the tungsten carbide steel has not been developed or because of the problem of formula, in fact, the laboratory of the industrial group has developed a little clue about tungsten manganese alloy steel, but the specific formula still needs to be tested again and again. Our basic chemistry has not been established, and it is a bit difficult. Qiaoxi also came over this time, so when he heard the conversation between the two, he came out to comfort Li Xuanqing.

"Qiaoxi, let's go back tomorrow, first, to see how to come up with ideas for the industrial group to manufacture tungsten manganese alloy steel as soon as possible, and the other is to find a way to compile basic chemical knowledge, and then distribute it to cultivate professional chemical talents." Li Xuanqing said as he walked: "I think I will have to do this kind of thing every day for the rest of my life." It is indeed not an easy task to pull out the seedlings and help them grow. ”

"Okay, it just so happens that this time it's been a long time, and I'm also a little bit missing the baby, let's go back tomorrow, I'll clean up." Qiaoxi didn't have so many worries, but she was a little worried about the little apocalypse.

"Huanjiu, go and inform Lu Yi and Feixue, let them hurry up and train, at the latest three months, the pro-guard battalion and the directly subordinate battalion will participate in the mission of recovering Jiangnan as the main force going south."

"Chemistry knowledge? Isn't this a reinvention of chemical laboratory equipment? Damn, I seem to have almost forgotten all about chemistry. After sending away Huanjiu, Li Xuanqing scratched his head in distress and muttered to himself. Seeing that he is really ready to directly graft the chemical knowledge of his previous life, but it seems that the couple has already done a lot of this kind of thing.

"It looks like the Apocalypse I rifle won't be equipped until a little later." Li Xuanqing nodded as he heard the endless gunshots in his ears.