Thinking of this, Zhang Yaochen suddenly felt nervous, sat up from the bed with a bang, still holding the short knife in his hand, the beads of sweat on his forehead were already flowing down, and hurriedly asked, "Rulong, what's the matter?" What is it that is going to be mysterious? ”

Ma Rulong took another step forward, still mysteriously lowering his voice and said, "My lord, there is someone who wants to see you." ”

Zhang Yaochen found out that Ma Rulong was followed by a person, this person had a very raw face, and he was definitely not from their mission, and a trace of suspicion rose in his heart, and he said with a little vigilance: "Who is Your Excellency?" What's the point of visiting late at night? ”

After the person behind Ma Rulong heard Zhang Rulong's words, he immediately took two steps forward, stood in front of Ma Rulong, knelt on the ground with a "plop", kowtowed, and said, "See your lord." The villain's name is Li Tiezhu, who was originally a soldier under the account of Xu Da, the Duke of Wei, and was unfortunately injured and captured during the Battle of Lingbei with the Duke of Wei against Wang Baobao, so that he ended up here. For more than 20 years, I have not missed my homeland and the moon, but fortunately, the sky has eyes, so that adults can send envoys here, and the villain is willing to serve the adults to repay the country's kindness, and only ask the adults to bring the villain back to their hometown. ”

Zhang Yaochen looked at this fresh face with an expression of disbelief, this person's accent is from Huguang, but is there really such a good thing in the world? As soon as I came here, I was talking about trade, and suddenly one of Warat's insiders came to join me for allegiance, which was unbelievable.

As a person in the early Ming Dynasty, Zhang Yaochen knew that he naturally knew about the Battle of Lingbei, but this Battle of Lingbei was fought by Xu Da and Wang Baobao, who was subordinate to Tatar, even if this Li Tiezhu was injured and captured at that time, he was also captured by Tatar, how did he run to Warat?

Besides, he led the mission alone, more than a thousand miles away from his homeland, and there was no rear support, if there was fraud in it, then he and the people who did the mission would all have to be explained here.

Zhang Yaochen glanced at his chief guard Ma Rulong, there was a trace of resentment in his eyes, he thought that this chief guard should not bring such a sensitive person here, in case something happened, he couldn't tell even if he had ten mouths, he looked at the person named Li Tiezhu coldly, and said lightly: "Your Excellency has found the wrong person, it is true that this official is an envoy of the Ming Dynasty, but he was only ordered by my king to negotiate trade with your ministry, as for other things, it is inconvenient for the official to participate, and he does not want to participate." ”

This is the legendary euphemistic refusal, Li Tiezhu was anxious when he heard this, his life experience is very bizarre, first in the battle of Lingbei was captured by the Tatars, and later in the battle between the Varat and the Tartars was captured by the Varat, after several major battles, although he did not die, but also lived a life as cheap as grass, and he had long wanted to return to the Ming Dynasty to live a life that could see the light of day.

What's more, when he set out on the expedition, there was an old lady and a child daughter-in-law at home, for more than 20 years, I don't know what happened to them, Li Tiezhu will miss them very much every night in the dead of night, and his biggest wish is to go back to see them in his lifetime.

Seeing that there was no hope of returning to his hometown, Li Tiezhu was anxious, knelt on the ground and kowtowed to Zhang Yaochen a few times, and begged: "Please adults must believe in the villain, the villain still has an old mother and wife at home, if you can't see them in this life, the villain will not be blind." ”

Zhang Yaochen still looked at Li Tiezhu with a cold look, he is an old fritter who has been immersed in officialdom for many years, and he has long been trained like a stone, and he will definitely not be moved by his emotional card, and then he will share life and death with this person who has never met before. These days, there are too many actors, what if you lie to me? looked at Li Tiezhu coldly, and said lightly: "You don't have to say it, the official has already said that the official is here to engage in trade this time, and he will not interfere in other matters." Go back. Drop-off. ”

"Your Excellency. Adults, and slowly. Seeing that the plan to return to his hometown was about to come to naught, Zhang Yaochen was suddenly anxious like an ant on a hot pot, there would be no second chance for this, and now he couldn't take care of anything, so he could only bring out his old bottom, and said: "Adult, the villain will tell you the truth." After the villain was captured by the Bald Polo Department, because he was well-behaved and knew Chinese, he was accepted as a personal soldier, and after a long time by his side, he had a relationship with one of his concubines, and this bracelet was a token of love she gave me. The bracelet was given to her by Polo, and she told her that she had lost it. Now the villain will give this bracelet to the adult, if the villain deceives the adult, the adult only needs to take out the bracelet, and the villain will die without a place to bury. ”

Zhang Yaochen looked at the bracelet in his hand, and began to believe a little in his heart, thinking about it carefully, the biggest purpose of Bald Polo is to obtain huge benefits from the Ming Dynasty, why do you set up such a bureau to kill yourself? How much is your head worth? He didn't have any deep hatred with him, so he took the bracelet in his hand, gently checked it, frowned and began to groan.

When Li Tiezhu saw this scene, he knew that the envoy was tempted, so he immediately struck while the iron was hot and said: "Lord Qiyu, the villain still has a few good brothers in the caravan of the vulture, if the vulture Polo makes any moves in the future, the villain can inform His Royal Highness King Su through them." In addition, the villain also has brothers in Mahamu's camp, they are all Ming soldiers who were captured with the villain during the Battle of Lingbei, and their feelings are all handed over with their lives, and they are also thinking about their homeland, if Mahamu has any actions in the future, they can also provide news to His Royal Highness King Su. ”

Zhang Yaochen's eyelids raised slightly, and a fine light shot out of his eyes, this information is too important, he has been working with Zhu Ao for several years, so he naturally knows the ambition of this prince, and knows that although he is now showing goodwill with Warat, and wants to Huairou Warat through the policy of Fenggong and mutual market, but in the future, he will definitely want to go north to the desert like Li Shimin.

Man, there is no one who is not eager to make meritorious contributions, Zhang Yaochen is no exception, if this opportunity is missed, return to Suguo to climb up step by step, I don't know when to climb, he doesn't want to live a lifetime without a name, that ambition to make meritorious contributions was instantly stimulated by Li Tiezhu's words, with a calm face, and said seriously: "Okay, this official promises you, if you can make a contribution, this official will definitely protect you to the king, not to mention that you will return to your hometown with honor in the future, it is not impossible to add an official to the knighthood." ”

"Thank you for your grace, the villain will definitely do the work of dogs and horses." Li Tiezhu kowtowed to Zhang Yaochen a few times again, and said gratefully.

Naturally, the shorter the time, the better. After Zhang Yaochen and Li Tiezhu agreed on the joint code, they didn't keep him longer, and let Ma Rulong quietly send him away.

In the early morning of the next day, Zhang Yaochen and the others were like resigning from the bald Polo, and the other party did not do too much to keep them, so they sent them back to the south.

Returning to his heart like an arrow, coupled with a big secret in his heart, Zhang Yaochen walked very fast, shortening the time to Hami by several days. After returning to Suguo, Zhang Yaochen's house did not return, and he ran to Zhu Ao for the first time, and he was in a very happy mood when he went, because he not only completed the task assigned to him by Zhu Ao, but also brought back a spy by the way, which can be said to have overfulfilled the task, even if he didn't get any heavy reward, at least a praise was indispensable.

After listening to Zhang Yaochen's return, Zhu Ao was very happy, to be honest, it was expected that he would promise Bald Polo to pay tribute to Su Guo, this matter alone would only satisfy him, but that Li Tiezhu's matter was unexpected, this matter was enough to make him happy, and said: "You did a good job, you can make decisions on the spot, and you are a person who can entrust big things." Don't make a noise about this matter first, and then your masako after you go back, and when you have the opportunity, the widow will reward you again. ”

For Zhu Ao's decision, Zhang Yaochen can understand very well, Zhao Shun has also returned, he did not encounter any twists and turns this time, successfully completed the task, and of course did not catch any spies, so the reward of the two of them should be the same, if Zhang Yaochen gets more rewards, it will arouse the suspicion of others, and when he encounters a master of secret work, Li Tiezhu's line is likely to be dug up, so in this way, the loss of Su Guo will be heavy.

Because at a critical moment, an important piece of information is even more effective than an army of 100,000.

Warat's side is on a certain track, and the next thing is to create secret weapons while doing business with them to divide and disintegrate them. The charm of money is huge, and I believe that when the time comes, the Warat people of the Vultures and Taiping tribes will turn their guns and help them fight Mahamu.

Isn't the old Chiang of later generations good at using the method of throwing money to solve the hostile warlords?

The summer of the twenty-eighth year of Hongwu has arrived, the wheat planted by Zhu Ao has been harvested again, and the farms around the country are busy, Lan Youcheng and the palace maid and eunuch bookkeeping team led by her have also been busy enough these days, because after a new round of large-scale development, the farms in Suguo are another bumper harvest, and the accounts from all over the country are being reported, and they will summarize this year's grain production in the next few days and report it to the king for review.

It should be noted that the accounts of these farms that Lan Youcheng is responsible for are all from Zhu Cao's private farms, and they are not under the jurisdiction of Hu Cao, and Hu Cao's judgment has no right to intervene, he is only responsible for the tax income collected from the households, which is the state's financial revenue, and the disposable income that belongs to Hu Cao's judgment, of course, must be approved by Zhu Cao.

Due to Zhu Ao's reforms, most of the military households in Su were attached to his private farms, and they were like hired laborers in peacetime to get wages for Zhu Ao's farming, and they were organized to fight wars in wartime, which was very efficient.

Zhu Ao mainly considered two factors in doing this, the first is the big farm plan he said before, if the military households still cultivate the land one by one as Zhu Yuanzhang envisioned, the production efficiency is very low, because no military household can make a large water wheel, and no military household can use a double horse-drawn cart to farm.

The big waterwheel is a little better, the average cost of making a piece is three or five taels of silver, that is, the price of a cow, these military households are not bad, and the set of equipment required for the production method of cultivating with a two-horse-drawn cart is worth more than a dozen taels, or even more than twenty taels of silver, which an ordinary military household cannot afford. These people are scattered, inefficient, and do not have a strong ability to resist risks, and if there is a natural disaster, it is very likely to cause poor harvests or even lack of food. However, if we adopt this set of large farm management methods designed by Zhu Ao, not only can we concentrate the strength of the whole country to carry out high investment, and spend a lot of money to create large water wheels, hand presses, double horse cocoon carts and other sharp weapons, which greatly improve production efficiency, but also its ability to resist risks is much stronger than that of a small peasant economy of one household, if nothing else, let's just say that there is a drought, these large water trucks can completely take care of the irrigation of the fields, so that military households do not have to watch the crops in the fields die of thirst.

Moreover, this set of military household system designed by Zhu Yuanzhang, although it looks very good, is that the soldiers are for the people in peacetime and soldiers in wartime, which greatly saves the country's cost of raising soldiers, so much so that he boasts that "it costs the people a grain of rice to raise a million army", but this system also has great drawbacks, and the drawback is people, specifically officers. At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the discipline was strict, the emperor's control over the country was very strong, and the local military officers had just taken root, and had not yet formed an intertwined force, so they respected the laws of the country very much, and it can be said that they obeyed the emperor's orders.

However, in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, due to the lax discipline, the emperor who succeeded to the throne was not particularly powerful, and the officers of those military households took root in a local era, forming a very strong and complex force in the local area, and colluding with successive local officials, so they began to take the country's laws and regulations seriously, and began to encroach on the land of ordinary military households in various names, and deducted the salary and rice of military households, so that those military households became their slaves, unable to eat, clothed, and their livelihood became a problem, let alone fighting.

Therefore, since the middle of the Ming Dynasty, military households that could not survive began to flee one after another, and in the late Ming Dynasty, there were even less than 100 people left in some 1000 households, and only one 100 households were left in some 100 households struggling to support. has caused a serious shrinkage of the country's military resources, so that a robber like Nurhachi can't even take out 100,000 people, the quality is still uneven, and the helmet of the main general Juniper was actually pierced by an arrow from the other side, how can he fight? The resources of the Ming Dynasty were hollowed out by those who were officials.

Some Manchu boasters on the Internet in later generations often said that the Manchus defeated the million-strong army of the Ming Dynasty with an army of 100,000 people, which proved how great the leaders of the Manchu Qing Dynasty were, how good the Manchu army was, and even had such a strange theory that "the Manchus are less than 10,000 people, and the Manchus are invincible". A well-known history teacher often spreads such remarks on the Internet, brainlessly weakening the Han nationality and touting foreign races, I really don't know how he is famous for his temperament and IQ, but fortunately, his Weibo account has been blocked, and he can no longer say this kind of insulting words that insult the national IQ.

In fact, the million army at the end of the Ming Dynasty was actually a number on the books, but in fact it was far from so much, just like a thousand households should have 1,120 people on the books, but in fact, there were not even 100 people who could fight. For example, in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, when Li Zicheng attacked Beijing, Chongzhen was very anxious and asked Wu Xiangdao, the commander of the Beijing battalion: "How many troops do you still have?" Wu Xiang patted his chest and said, "There are still 80,000 troops on the minister's account. ”

"And what about actually?"

"In fact, there are only 3,000 people who can fight, and these 3,000 people are all the family members of the ministers, and if they want to give up their family business to fight thieves, they need at least one million taels of silver as compensation."

Chongzhen, who had less than 70,000 taels of silver left in all his belongings, went to hang himself when he heard this.

Starting from Qi Jiguang, the Ming Dynasty began to recruit soldiers, because the military household has been unbearable, and the cost of spending money to hire people as soldiers is very huge, not only to buy and build armor, equipment, but also to pay salaries, according to historical records, according to Qi Jiguang's standard recruitment, recruiting 3,000 people a year to spend at least 180,000 taels of silver, which was definitely a heavy burden for the Ming Dynasty at that time.

This is still the price of the Jiajing period, and by the end of the Ming Dynasty, the cost of recruiting soldiers has doubled upward, especially in the eastern Liaodong region, because the danger factor of being a soldier is too great.

According to Xiong Tingbi's record of the recital to the imperial court, it only took seven or eight coins of silver to recruit a person as a soldier in Liaodong before, but since the rise of Houjin, no one is willing to do two or three taels of silver, because the coefficient of death is too high, and no one wants to die.

In Zhu Ao's view, the military household system formulated by Zhu Yuanzhang was the lowest cost of national recruitment, and he must resolutely let this system continue to operate effectively, so he changed the military household self-sufficiency system formulated by Zhu Yuanzhang, gathered them together, incorporated them into his own large farm, and paid them wages in the form of wages and performance rewards, and no longer granted land.

In this way, we can concentrate the strength of the state to carry out large-scale operations, high input, high output, improve the ability of agriculture to resist risks, and ensure that agriculture has high and increased output every year.

Second, how much salary each person pays is specified, which is linked to the actual work performance and length of service, and the price is clearly marked, and no one is allowed to deduct it. Therefore, although Zhu Hao's military households had no land, they became employees of large state-owned farms, and they received a fixed salary every month. Moreover, because the production methods of the big farms are very efficient, Zhu Ao also gives them rich rewards, as long as they work hard, they are better than the few acres of thin fields they plant.

Therefore, these military households also accepted this production method, even if some people had opinions at the beginning, after tasting the sweetness, they were still glad that they stayed and began to follow Zhu Ao well.

Just like what Zhu Ao said to Zhu Yuanzhang before, it is always grain rather than land that can stabilize people's hearts, as long as there is food, someone will work hard for you, and no matter how much land you have, what is the use of not being able to produce food? In the last years of the Ming Dynasty, there was not a lot of land, but it was all thousands of miles of red land, and not a single grain of grain could be beaten, which caused thousands of hungry people, and then caused endless civil uprisings.

Zhu Ao decided to continue this system, and bound all the military households in Su to their own big farms, farming in peacetime, and directly pulling them out to serve as soldiers in wartime, which was very convenient. In addition, the food and salary of the big farms are distributed to each person, so that no one can deduct it, and the enthusiasm of military households to work and fight wars is increased. It also lets them know whose food they eat, whose clothes they wear, and who they should give their lives.

Of course, not everyone in the military household goes to the battlefield in a war, and there must always be someone who stays to guard the family and take care of the grain and grass. The most important thing in Zhu Ao's recruitment is that he must be an honest and willing person to fight, and the battlefield is full of real swords and guns, if the recruited soldiers are unwilling to die and fight hard, then the strategic policy formulated by the generals is in vain.

Qi Jiguang and Zeng Guofan have suffered such losses, when Qi Jiguang fought the Japanese in his early years, the soldiers ran out at the beginning, and he was left with a bare commander, which made Qi Jiguang's enthusiasm all come to naught, in view of this, he persuaded Hu Zongxian to select 4,000 people from the honest and willing to fight Yiwu to train the new army.

The same is true for Zeng Guofan, when the Hunan army had just trained to fight with the Taiping army, it suffered a fiasco in Jinggang, but although Zeng Guofan strictly ordered not to retreat, some cunning people still fled one after another regardless of the general's order, and Zeng Guofan was so angry that he had to dive.

Because of this incident, Zeng Guofan hated these veterans very much, and some of the soldiers who escaped afterwards said that they wanted to come back to serve again, Zeng Guofan was stunned and resolutely resisted, did not accept any of them, and laid them all home.

This is the basic law of the ancient battlefield, the so-called tricks and tricks are only auxiliary, and the decisive role is still the strength of the army, and whether the soldiers are willing to fight to the death.

Zhu Yuanzhang grasped this law to gradually win the world, although he claimed to love the people like a son, but at the beginning of the fight against the world, in order to engage in food to feed the army, or implemented the "village grain" policy, to put it bluntly, it is to grab grain, only allow the people in his occupation area to leave enough food for life, and all the others are requisitioned to support the army, which has caused the hardship of the people in his occupation area, but Lao Zhu is also more interesting, after winning the world, he reduced or exempted the taxes of the people near Yingtian who had given him strong support.

Later, as his army snowballed and the grain could no longer meet his needs, he ordered his subordinates to build tuntian, some to fight, and the other to farm to solve the military needs, so that his troops were exempted from the food crisis. Kang Maocai's department was also praised by Zhu Yuanzhang for Tuntian's ability. This is the so-called "extensive accumulation of grain".

It is with sufficient grain and grass that he can feed a huge army to conquer the Quartet, throughout Zhu Yuanzhang's countless battles in his life, except for the battle against Chen Youliang at Poyang Lake, the others are to fight more and beat each other with less, and the author believes that Chen Youliang's 600,000 army is also empty, otherwise the number is three times that of yours, and he is still driving an aircraft carrier, how to win? Are you Lao Zhu's subordinates all Iron Man who can't be killed?

This is the foundation of Zhu Yuanzhang's success.

The second is the strict military law, such as the iron law that if you lose land, you must cut it down, forcing your subordinates to fight to the death, stimulate the maximum potential of the soldiers, squeeze out all their value, and let them shed blood and sweat for their own country.

Therefore, the secret of Zhu Yuanzhang's success is his excellent logistics management ability, strict discipline in administering the army, excellent command, and good luck.