The eastern edge of the eastern foot of the Taihang Yumai in the north of Zhenzhou,

Chen Baoshan, a straggler from Fujian cadastre, carried a firearm and a pouch on his back, and walked on the muddy mountain road after the rain with a deep foot and a shallow foot, but he was proficient in maintaining the balance and stability of his body, and always kept the friction and impact of the objects on his body at a small amplitude and frequency.

This is what he needs to travel back and forth between mountains, forests and ravines from childhood to adulthood, trekking through mountains and rivers, and getting out of thick calluses on the soles of his feet.

Being able to have his current life and treatment is really something he never dreamed of.

His hometown is located between the mountains of Fujian, which is known as "eight mountains, one water and half of the fields, and half of the sea". Life in this Fujian is so difficult and difficult that they, the men who grew up in the local area, can't get their wives and can only take their lives from those Shanha villages to rob them.

And every hole and crevice in the large and small terraced fields that bloom on the mountain is soaked in the sweat of their ancestors and the blood and tears of generations; Because even in the most peaceful years, we still have to fight with people for everything, for water, for land, and for mountains and forests; The limited and barren output, coupled with the constant fighting and scrambling every year, kept the local population low, but also created a strong and stoic local people.

Therefore, when local men become adults, in order to relieve the burden on their families and repay the kindness of their upbringing, they have no choice but to struggle to leave their own lives and familiar hometowns, and go to other places in groups to earn a living.

The most common way out is to go to the seaside towns to look for opportunities, and then most of them will sell themselves to the shipowners or maritime merchants who will make a living, and then pay the cost of their own life to pay for the passage and the debts that their families have formed.

And only a small number of people will be favored by the recruiting officers stationed in the coastal states by the Southern Dynasty Liang, so they will eat military rations and have a relatively stable livelihood, and then after a long period of uprooting, they will die in battle or settle down in a foreign land.

Men in inland areas are more likely to go to various mines and forest farms to make a living; Although the land in Fujian is small and barren and full of ravines, there are many forests on various hills, and at the same time, there are also various mines of all sizes, as well as forest farms that produce shipbuilding timber, precious timber and even charcoal for smelting.

Among them, the best conditions and the highest pay are undoubtedly the mines under the control of the Zongzheng Temple and the Imperial Palace, but not everyone can go in to work, usually only for specific areas and specific groups of people, they prefer to use the feudal slaves bought from overseas as daily consumables in exchange for ore output.

Therefore, the choice of most people is only to settle for the next best thing, choosing the public fields run by the local government and the private fields developed by the powerful clans in various places, and the conditions and environment in these places are harsh enough to turn any able-bodied man into a human dry and walking corpse in a dozen years.

Not to mention that the management is like a slave, a pig and a dog, and under the best possible pursuit of benefits, all kinds of overwork and improper protection caused by frequent deaths and injuries; But there are still people who have to go to the mine and sell themselves, and then fill the ravines and ravines outside the mine with corpses that have died of all kinds of accidents, diseases, and exhaustion.

Therefore, the teachings of the Great Cloud Sect, which is good at demagogic people, were able to develop and spread rapidly under this situation of burning fire, and finally mobilized these desperate and helpless people, and turned them into raging storms and angry tides that swept through the thirteen states of central Fujian and rushed out of the mountains, raging in the southeast land.

And under the torment of this troubled times, if there is no accident, not being a thief is a dead end, and the family fleeing to the coastal place is scattered all the way, sick, and finally there are few people left, and he will become one of them with the breached city; However, the Huai army recruiting generals who came to Fujian led the wind and rolled the flag, but gave them new opportunities and the possibility of a way out.

No longer relying on the hard and unspeakable bud rice residue and bran paste, there is a piece of black rotten cabbage that kills people, and it licks the meal for many days; Every year, there is always a period of green and yellow and everyone relies on digging wild vegetables and root mountain mushrooms, eating vegetables all over the face and puffy years, and the New Year only has a bowl of brown rice saved between the teeth to worship the ancestors. . .

Here, even when there is no war, you can open meat every day when you have enough rice and noodles and food tubes; And the war is a big (salty) fish and big (canned) meat constantly, and every once in a while he also kills pigs and sheep to slaughter the tooth sacrifice, all kinds of miscellaneous and bloody food is eaten so that he is full of mouth;

Far from the mountains in the past, it is easy to fight only thin wild things without much oil and water, and they are half-cooked without even pulling out their hair, and they are half-cooked without salt and oil when they are roasted, and they are bland. Not to mention the endless rations and the editors' various food in the army, which show how rich and abundant Huaizhen was under the rule of Huaizhen.

Therefore, he cannot afford to lose and give up this opportunity. Although he was ridiculed and almost eliminated because of his short stature and lack of strength, he still burst out with a sense of recognizance, endured the scarred qualifications of the crane tail and survived, relying on the foot, eyesight and reaction trained by Luo Di Shanlin to become a member of the recently re-established Huai Army skirmishers.

Of course, the skirmishers that have been rebuilt in the major main battle orders are no longer the miscellaneous auxiliary roles of the past, where there are only rations and no salaries, but in addition to the traditional white soldiers, gunners, and grenadiers, the lightly armed long-range troops specially arranged to emphasize battlefield mobility and flexibility;

Based on the original mountain infantry from Fujian and the children of the mountains and forests from Anton Orion, the new organization was formed to adapt to the complex terrain such as mountains and ruggedness. In peacetime, battalions are used as units for training and management, while in frontal combat, regiments are assigned to each formation.

They wore little armor or only tight-fitting silk armor vests, equipped with their own long guns and hats, and arranged in loose formations to advance beyond the regular battle line to contain and weaken the enemy.

or after the march encounters the enemy, for the large army to occupy the commanding heights and terrain victories, block and delay the appearance of the enemy, and even carry out corresponding fire reconnaissance according to the terrain;

Or it is convenient and flexible to cross obstacles such as mountains and forests, enter the preset positions to fight ambushes and harassment and lead battles, so although the equipment is light and the weight is small, it is a new class of troops with high physical and endurance requirements.

This was the first time that this newly formed skirmish team had acted independently and carried out its mission, and they had to face the steep mountains at the foot of Taihang. Because of the ruggedness of the mountains, all the rations and ammunition and the blankets had to be carried on the shoulders of the individuals.

In order to strengthen their firepower suppression and limited ability to attack fortifications, on the backs of the few mountain pack horses were disassembled mountain gun barrels and brackets, as well as rattan box mats and barrel-loaded ammunition.

With very few vehicles to pay, each person was given a very limited amount of supplies, and a long period of thirst and sweat had to be endured before the local guide led him to the next hidden water source in the mountains.

Therefore, each of them carried two iron kettles, large and small, the larger for water with salt and sugar, and the smaller for a specially configured refreshing drink, which was only allowed to take a sip to quench some thirst when ordered to do so. Therefore, the hardest part here is not hunger and exhaustion, but lack of water.

The terrain in the mountains also gets narrower and narrower, and in the end, the so-called mountain roads and trails almost disappear into the endless piles of rocks and crevices between the cliffs, and the equipment and robes on people are covered with mud and sand.

Suddenly, in the monotonous mountain rocks and bushes that made people a little numb, the sudden reflection of the helmet made Chen Baoshan tremble and tense up, the enemy would actually be the enemy, and suddenly he encountered the enemy in this remote mountain road that was inaccessible.

However, the negligent other party apparently had not yet noticed them, and as the sporadic accented speech drew closer, he hurriedly removed the fire gun from his back, opened the breech and stuffed the wrapped sub-medicine, buckled the fire cap and pulled the hammer away, and held it diagonally to a stone on his chest facing forward.

Then he saw clearly that this was a patrol party in the mountains, and he saw them casually carrying short spears, carrying short-handed knives and swords that were about to fall out of patent leather, and two of them were holding horned bows with falling strings and hanging mostly half-filled quivers, and they were walking slowly along a barely visible path under the mountain wall.

There was no time to form an array and order, and the vanguard stragglers, who had hastily occupied the gaps between the rocks and the bushes, had already raised their long and short firearms in the muffled sound of birdsong.

The enemies of these patrol squads also seemed to notice the movement of the sand rolling down and the branches breaking off the trees above the slope, and began to stop and gather closer, and took off their bows and arrows and began to wind them.

Suddenly, the sound of ping pong and the dense sound of fried beans, they seemed to be whipped by an invisible whipping, and suddenly in this patrol team of only a dozen people, seven or eight figures fell down with blood flowers, and they rolled down the mountain almost without any delay and struggle.

The rest of the people scattered as if they had blown up their nests, but they were confined to the narrow mountain roads and steep slopes, unable to run at all and unable to go fast, and were soon overtaken by the stragglers who slid and jumped down from the opposite side.

A moment later, with the last of the unscrupulous figures, the flesh and blood that rolled and scraped among the rocks and sparse bushes, could no longer get up, and the short battle of this sudden encounter came to an end.

In the end, there was actually a guy who came in a hurry, obviously a lagging one, flashed under the mountain wall not far away, and then turned his head and ran away with a pale face; was chased by Chen Baoshan, who was in charge of guarding, desperately chased after him, and quickly hit a gun on the thigh, and threw himself on the ground to make the only live mouth that could be tortured.

Immediately, near the sentry post and camp temporarily set up by the other party, the pioneer skirmisher once again found a mountain spring water rushing down, immediately pounced into it and drank it half-full, and then filled the large kettle with the sugar and salt they brought, and then took out the strips of compressed military rations, and chewed vigorously on the water.

After more than half an hour, the guide who led the way with a weathered face exhaled a sigh of relief, raised his cane slightly and pointed to the road.

"The place has arrived.

In the distance, I saw a low plateau in the mountains, and a city or a large market town was located in the middle. All kinds of irregular buildings and flags, almost during the distribution of Lin Litzby.

The so-called part of the city wall, only a large section with the gatehouse on the northwest side, which just cuts off the road leading to the valley in the mountains; Most of the rest of the place is surrounded by steep walls of mountains or craggy cliffs.

Only a low slope in the southwest corner can be seen, with a faint gray-mottled rolling hills and plains hidden in the skyline in the distance.

(End of chapter)