Yongning Prefecture and Lishi County are typical states and counties in the same city. Pen % fun % Pavilion www.biquge.info

In other words, Yongning Prefecture City is Lishi County.

This Yongning Prefecture City is about fifty miles north of Ningxiang County.

Although Li Wenyun and Zhong Dewu, who were sent out before, had already found out that the main force of the thief army was concentrated in the direction of Ningxiang, Hong Chengchou, Wang Chengen and others still did not dare to be careless, and did not want to leave Yongning Prefecture City behind them and ignore it.

After all, in the future, it is necessary to transfer grain and grass from Liulinbao to the front line, even if there is a partial division of thieves in Yongning Prefecture, it will be a great threat to the grain route of the official army.

In the past era, the importance of the grain road is self-evident, especially like the current Hong Chengchou department, which can only carry a few days' grain to fight against the thief army, if the rear can not be foolproof, then the battle in front can not be fought at all.

Unless you're engaged in the kind of cavalry groups of the northern nomads fighting without a rear, and your supplies are all dependent on looting anytime and anywhere, in this case, of course, you can bypass the city in front of you.

Otherwise, the cities you encounter before you engage the main enemy army, especially those on the rear grain routes, will have to be taken before you can move on.

This is also a great disadvantage between the Ming army and the Manchu and Mongolian armies in this era.

There are many cavalry, and even most of them are cavalry, who come and go like the wind, have a strong ability to maneuver, and can advance and retreat quickly.

When you encounter a strong city, you can fight if you want to, and bypass it if you don't want to, but it is difficult for the Ming army to do this.

If the Ming army wants to fight a battle, the first thing to consider is the rear and supplies, and it can only move step by step, steadily and steadily, step by step.

Unless you have a large cavalry team, there is no way to solve this problem for a while.

However, Liulinbao is not far from Yongning Prefecture City, and it is almost forty or fifty miles.

Liulinbao is in the lower reaches of the Lishi River, and Yongning Prefecture City is also the county seat of Lishi, where the three rivers of the Lishi River converge.

The reason why Lishi River is also called Sanchuan River is because in addition to Lishi River, near Lishi County, it has two tributaries to join, the north is called Beichuan River, and the south is called Nanchuan River, so it is called Sanchuan River after adding it together.

Hong Chengchou and Wang Chengen and others led the army to carry grain and grass baggage, set off from Qinglongdu in the morning, and arrived outside the west gate of Yongning Prefecture at noon.

When they came to the west gate of Yongning Prefecture City, they found that the city had already been emptied.

Of course, it is not entirely correct to say that a thief went to the city.

Because of the sentinels sent into the city by Hong Chengchou, not long after entering the city, they ran out with their mouths and noses covered.

There were no thieves in the city, but it was not empty. Because the inside is the same as Liulinbao, the city is full of highly decomposed corpses.

This time, Hong Chengchou didn't have time to send troops into the city to clean up.

The army planted pots and cooked by the Lishi River outside the city, resting and resting.

And taking advantage of the time for this army to rest and rest, Zhong Dewu, who has now returned to Hong Chengchou's Fubiao account, asked him to enter the city to collect the corpses of his uncle's family.

Those former Yongning Prefecture city guards who escaped from Yongning Prefecture City also went to collect the corpses of their comrades.

By mid-afternoon, everything that had to be packed was pulled to a mound outside the city gate, and all of them were dug and buried.

Zhong Dewu's uncle Zhong Wanli is, after all, a five-grade Zhizhou, and a civil official of the imperial court who was born as a genuine Jinshi, so Hong Chengchou also went to worship in person at his humble grave.

After the worship, the army turned south and began to march in the direction of Ningxiang, fifty miles away.

Now that Yongning Prefecture City has become a ghost city with rotting corpses on the border, Hong Chengchou is no longer worried that this city will continue to be used by the thief army.

In the afternoon of the same day, at around the hour of Youshi, the army had just entered the Nanchuan River valley leading to Ningxiang from north to south, when it received a sentinel sent back by the forwards Li Wenyun and Zhong Dewu.

The sentinel reported that five miles north of the county seat of Ningxiang, the advance of the official army encountered and routed the sentry of the thief army, and was now continuing to search and advance southward.

Upon learning of this news, Hong Chengchou and Wang Chengen led the main forces under their command, carrying baggage, and quickly went south.

After walking more than 20 miles of mountain roads in one hour, he joined up with the outposts led by Li Wenyun and Zhong Dewu, and set up camp in a place near the mountains and rivers five miles north of Ningxiang County.

Ningxiang County is surrounded by mountains, east and west are high mountains, only to the south and north of the two directions there are roads.

To the south, it leads to the first line of Shanshenyu, Shennanyu and Shikou, and to the north leads to Lishi.

Moreover, the location of Ningxiang County is a basin surrounded by mountains, the closer to the county seat, the more open the terrain is, in general, it is not an easy to defend and difficult terrain like Shikou, and it is also convenient for the army to attack the city.

It's just that Hong Chengchou doesn't have a large army to speak of, and his command is full of more than 3,000 people.

At this time, there were 12,000 thieves in the city, and soon there would be another group of thousands of thieves, under the leadership of Bai Wenbo, the "Heavenly Dragon", carrying a batch of grain, grass and baggage and the families of the thieves.

That night, Hong Chengchou continued to let Li Wenyun and Zhong Dewu camp three miles away from the city in the south to stand guard, and the rest of the army hurried to rest.

Early the next morning, Hong Chengchou sent Wang Chengen to command some men and horses to cut down trees on the nearby hillside and step up the construction of assembly catapults.

The process of the catapult is very simple, it is just a large seesaw, but the support frame in the middle is more than a foot high.

One end is tied to a boulder weighing hundreds of pounds, and the other end is a rope for firing stone projectiles.

Before launching, rely on manpower to pull down and fix the end of the rope, and then install the stone, and when the launch, as long as the rope that fixes the end of the rope is pulled apart, the other end of the boulder is tied to fall quickly, it will be like a seesaw, the stone on the rope will be thrown towards the sky ahead.

This is the principle of catapults.

For Wang Chengen and his generals, there was no technical difficulty in building a catapult.

Thousands of people worked together, felling logs, making production, and debugging, and six simple catapults were built in one morning.

At noon, the whole army had a full meal and rested for a while, and Hong Chengchou ordered Wang Chengen to command the main force under his command to advance to the north gate of Ningxiang County.

At this time, the leader of the thief army sitting in the county seat of Ningxiang was the "King of Liang" Wang Zuohang.

At the same time, together with Wang Zuohang, he was in Ningxiang County, as well as Wu Yangui, the "King of the Whole World", as well as the low-level thief head What big red wolf, Guotianxing, Mantianxing, a gust of wind and others, each thief leader has more than 3,000 people and horses, and as little as 2,000, all obeying the orders of the "King of Great Liang" Wang Zuohang at this time.

As for the "king of the whole world" Wu Yangui, he was originally one of Wang Jiayin's henchmen, at this time, because he lost Huangluling, and almost lost all the nearly 20,000 thieves handed over to him by Wang Jiayin, so he didn't dare to return to Shennanyu.

At this time, Wu Yangui, the king of the whole world, lost his people and horses, and under the command of Wang Zuohang, of course, he was not as good as an ordinary thief.

For people like them who have become thieves, your status depends entirely on the strength of the men and horses under your command.

Without men and horses, without strength, who cares what kind of "king of the whole world" or this king and that king you are.

After Wang Zuohang learned that the official army of the imperial court came to the north of Ningxiang County, he also thought of sending people to rush to see the scale of the official army and the strength of the official army.

It's a pity that the men and horses sent out are not the opponents of the official army vanguard at all, and they were charged by someone, and they were beaten back with a burst of random shots, and they couldn't get close to the front at all, and naturally they didn't find out the bottom of the official army.

Early this morning, Wang Zuo took the thief head in the city, climbed the north gate tower of Ningxiang County, and saw the officials and soldiers cutting down trees and building siege equipment from a distance, and his heart was gloomy.

Because in the second half of the night yesterday, Wang Zuojiao received a military order from the King of Hengtian from Shennanyu: "King Hengtian" Wang Jiayin and "Prime Minister Zuo" Wang Er are going to be transferred from Shennanyu, and the direction of transfer is Ningxiang County.

Ningxiang is located in the depths of Luliang, firstly, the place is poor, and secondly, it is not a strategic place for the imperial court, so the scale of the city is not large, and the city wall is not high.

There weren't many people in the city, and when the thieves passed by, most of them were dragged into the mountains, and those who weren't taken away were naturally slaughtered long ago.

Originally, the thousands of people stationed in the two brothers of the big red wolf and the little red wolf were nervous enough, but later the mountain god valley was on fire, and Wang Zuojiao brought the whole king, the stars in the sky, the stars in the sky, and a gust of wind and other people and horses to move in, and the whole city became a thief city.

And without the common people, the food and drink of these thieves and their minions have slowly become a problem.

Wang Zuojiao had thought about continuing to retreat north, withdraw from Ningxiang, and return to Yongning Prefecture.

However, the men and horses sent to the north encountered the official army one after another, and were repeatedly defeated by the official army, and he did not know whose hands Yongning Prefecture City was in now, and how many officers and soldiers were stationed near Yongning Prefecture City.

At the same time, the wildfire that spread from the direction of Huangluling was extinguished by a continuous heavy rain.

Shen Nanyu was saved, and if he evacuated the garrison without authorization, I am afraid that Wang Jiayin and Wang Er will be even more dissatisfied with themselves.

Therefore, after thinking about it, Wang Zuohang and the thieves couldn't make up their minds to evacuate for many days.

However, now, I can't go if I want to.