According to the messenger, Yang Guozhong's letter was delivered directly to Wangzhou, and it was not conveyed through the hands of Chengdu Xianyu Zhongtong, and Wang Yuan understood Yang Guozhong's intention in making such an arrangement. That is to tell himself that in his mind, Xian Yu Zhongtong is not as important as Wang Yuan. In the case that Xian Yu Zhongtong is still the envoy of Jiannan Jiedu, it is a gesture to contact himself directly without going through Xian Yu Zhongtong.

Of course, Wang Yuan couldn't waste this letter, so he sent someone to send Yang Guozhong's letter to Chengdu for Xian Yuzhong to pass through. First, it is to let Xian Yu Zhongtong also understand the extraneous voice of this letter, and secondly, to urge Xian Yu Zhongtong to hurry up and help him complete the recruitment and mask making with Yang Guozhong's attitude.

Yang Guozhong's letter really had a miraculous effect, and on the afternoon of the 28th day of the first lunar month, Liu Xunzhi finally led people to escort six carts full of special masks to finally arrive in Wangzhou, and the number was 10,000 more than Wang Yuan requested. Liu Xunzhi told Wang Yuan that after receiving the letter from Yang Guozhong forwarded by Wang Yuan, Xian Yu Zhongtong's almost sleepless supervision was by his side for three days and three nights, and he gave a death order to complete the production of these masks. Before that, the progress of mask production was seriously behind, and Liu Xunzhi came to the door several times to ask to see Xian Yu Zhongtong but was turned away. This shows how useful this letter is. After all, Xian Yu Zhongtong was only afraid of Yang Guozhong, and he was actually very perfunctory to Wang Yuan.

The recruitment of troops is also going smoothly, and Wang Yuan has always put Liu Dehai fully responsible for this matter. Wang Yuan understood that the current Jiannan Dao soldiers and horses were already experienced veterans, but they were already under the command of the former Jiannan generals, and they all had their own fixed set of training and leadership methods. Wang Yuan didn't want to change some of their habits to cause unhappiness. But this does not conform to his own vision of the construction of the Jiannan Army.

During this period of time, Wang Yuan spent almost all of his spare time thinking about how to build an efficient new army. When he had an in-depth understanding of the composition of the Tang Dynasty's soldiers and horses, Wang Yuan found a lot of problems. Taking Jiannan Jiedu soldiers and horses as an example, the Jiannan Jiedu soldiers and horses with a system of 30,000 people, of which more than 7,000 are cavalry, and the rest are infantry, which is roughly a ratio of four to one. There is no problem with the proportions, but there is a problem with the allocation of classes in the Horse Cavalry.

For example, most of the cavalry are light cavalry and cavalry archers, which are light and maneuverable, but lack the impact power when they really charge. Wang Yuan hoped to establish a cavalry formation with heavy cavalry as the main charging force, supplemented by light cavalry and cavalry archers, so as to reflect the impact of cavalry.

Moreover, in terms of the armament of the cavalry, Wang Yuan also hoped to achieve the appropriate length and shortness, using the spear as the assault weapon, and then supplemented by the long-handled Mo knife and the long sword and bow and arrow, forming a long-handled Mo knife and long sword and bow and arrow, forming a long-range and near-range weaponry. After charging into enemy lines, the spear can be discarded after the first round of damage, and then the long-handled Moji and sword can be used to kill the enemy. After entering the chase mode, the bow and arrow are the last means of chasing and reaping.

To complete the transformation of this cavalry, it is not only necessary to change the armor and weapons, but also to build the coordination of the troops, the offensive formation, the order of attack, and all aspects including psychology. This is completely impossible to form in veterans who have long been accustomed to it. The recruited recruits obviously have no problem in this regard, they are a blank slate for Wang Yuan, Wang Yuan can let Liu Dehai train them completely according to his own ideas in the training, and form a new combat style.

Moreover, in terms of the selection of soldiers, even if Wang Yuan can transform the composition of the original cavalry, it is necessary to completely break up the restrictions on the types of troops between the original infantry cavalry, otherwise the physical physique and other requirements of the existing cavalry will not meet the needs of the new system. Take, for example, heavy cavalry. Cavalrymen who can afford four types of weapons and heavy armor need to be physically strong, and have the spare strength to fight when they rush into enemy lines. Most of the original light cavalry were thin and small, which was to be more excited and flexible to maneuver the horses, but in Wang Yuan's idea of heavy cavalry, these were completely useless. These people were not up to the job of heavy cavalry, and the only solution was to select from all the soldiers. Infantry will become cavalry, and cavalry will become infantry. In this way, it will inevitably cause a great chaos, and the combat effectiveness will also be sharply reduced, and it will summon the dissatisfaction of many generals and soldiers.

Then recruiting new recruits is completely free of this problem. Those who are physically suitable for heavy cavalry will be trained directly as heavy cavalry, and those who are suitable for infantry will be trained as infantry, without involving any problems, and will not let the original combat establishment of soldiers and horses be confused.

More importantly, the newly recruited soldiers and horses will be a soldier and horse under the command of Wang Yuanru's arm. Compared with the original Jiannan, the soldiers and horses belonged to the command of a certain general for many years, and he had long been accustomed to someone's orders and only listened to the general's orders and did not listen to the commander's orders. The newly recruited recruits completely eliminated this problem. To a certain extent, the recruits are Wang Yuan's soldiers, and they will only obey the orders of Wang Yuan and the generals assigned by Wang Yuan, and it can even be said that this is a private soldier.

All in all, Wang Yuan thought a lot about the construction of the army, but he could not complete such a huge project for a while. Even if it is an idea to establish a reorganized heavy cavalry regiment, it will be restricted by various factors such as the shortage of heavy armor and the shortage of healthy horses. In the short term, this is just an assumption.

However, the number of newly recruited soldiers and horses has been quite objective, as far as Maozhou, Zizhou, Chengdu, and Rongzhou, Netzhou, and Quzhou in the south, and the recruitment operation has been vigorously carried out in the whole territory of Jiannan Road. By the time the gas masks were delivered to the city on the 28th of the first month, there were more than 30,000 new recruits in the city. Although this did not reach the level of 50,000 or 60,000 people that Wang Yuan thought, it was related to Wang Yuan's strict requirements for Liu Dehai to be strict about the quality of soldiers. And because of the long distance, the soldiers recruited by the state capital in the north are still coming one after another, and they are not included in the statistics.

But Wang Yuan couldn't wait any longer, and he couldn't give these recruits enough time to train, and the plan set in advance to go on the expedition after the first month could not be changed, and there were only two months before the final deadline, so Wang Yuan had to immediately wave his army and attack Yaozhou.

After three days of intense preparations, in the early morning of the first day of February, Song Jianquan sent 18,000 soldiers and horses from Quzhou to the southwest. Wang Yuan of the West Road led 35,000 soldiers and horses from the East Road to Huichuan.

On the third day of the first month, the two armies gathered in Huichuan, compiled into an army of 53,000 people, rested for a day, and after completing the mixed formation of the old and the new, the army went south from Huichuan to the direction of Yaozhou on the fourth day of the first month.

To the south of Huichuan, the mountains are steep, the mountains are deep, the ravines are crisscrossed, the roads are narrow and difficult to travel, and the march is extremely difficult. What is even more worrying is that after 60 miles to the south of the river, there is a long and narrow ancient road with more than 40 miles on both sides, and all sides are continuous mountain peaks, which is the place where the defeat of Lushui was carried out in the past.

On the evening of the fifth day of the first lunar month, the army set up camp outside the narrow ancient road on the north bank of Lushui, and was about to enter the dangerous territory, and Wang Yuan needed to hold a meeting to discuss how to pass through the forty-mile valley and cross the Lushui smoothly. After twenty miles of Lushui, although it is still mountainous, the terrain is relatively open, and Wang Yuan is actually not afraid of fighting there.

At night, miles of large camps were encamped on the undulating slopes and foothills. Within a radius of more than ten miles around the camp, the Jiannan Army set up numerous warning points to prevent the surprise attack of the barbarians in the mountains and forests. Entering this area, everyone's state entered an extremely tense state, and many generals and soldiers who had experienced the Battle of Lushui even breathed a lot faster.

Located at the bottom of the hillside, Wang Yuan's big tent had a high fever, and Wang Yuan summoned a senior general in the army to discuss here. There were twenty or thirty generals standing high and low in the big tent, but everyone's expressions were serious, because they had to be nervous, because just before camping, a squad of thirty scout cavalry guarding in front of them was attacked by the brutes, and only two escaped and ran back. This showed that Ge Luofeng had already ambushed men and horses in the mountains and forests on both sides of the front, and it was obvious that he wanted to make the Battle of Lushui a few months ago repeat here again.